Homesteading in America

2019-07-16T19:40:00-04:00

It’s also not hard to picture oneself as a homesteader. The land is not free but it is cheap—some of the cheapest in the United States. In many respects, a person could live here in this vast, empty space like the pioneers did on the Great Plains—except you’d have a truck instead of a mule, and some solar panels, possibly even a cell-phone signal. And legal weed.

"The San Luis Valley, with its cheap land, was a sort of magnet for these off-gridders," writes Ted Conover in his fascinating long read for Harper's Magazine about homesteaders on the margins of America. "There were a few hundred of them in total. Nationwide there are probably several thousand people living off the grid. No authoritative numbers exist, but off-grid life seems to be growing, often in states with cheap land (Tennessee, Kentucky, Missouri), sunshine and cheap land (Nevada, Arizona, Texas), and/or frontier appeal (Alaska, Idaho)."

Twitter installs 19th century log cabins in San Francisco HQ

2014-03-03T15:12:00-05:00

In keeping with the designer's forest-themed interior motif, a pair of homesteader cabins from the late 1800s are being installed in Twitter's new digs in the historic Western Furniture Exchange and Merchandise Mart building, a 1937 art deco landmark on Market Street. [...] In this spirit of reuse and reclamation, Lundberg saw the cabins as a novel way of breaking up the wide open spaces of a gutted floor in the old furniture mart that will become a casual dining area.

Taking architectural anachronism to a whole new level, Twitter turns the open-plan office on its head by installing original one-room wood cabins from Montana as lunching spaces. Designers for Twitter's offices feel the choice is coherent with the company values of reuse and reclamation, while also strengthening the brand's bird imagery as related to the forest/nature.

What's left behind is the sour sense of irony coating such a move. In a city fuming with affordable housing and gentrification disputes, it's a bit hilarious for Twitter to insert original homesteading-iconography into its own HQ.

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Homesteading in America

Twitter installs 19th century log cabins in San Francisco HQ