Essays and Articles

Ancient Maya civilization

Ancient Maya civilization has a remarkable appeal to the general public, partly because of the exotic contrast of their world with our industrialized society. Also, the popular press usually can be counted on to characterize Maya civilization as mysterious, unknowable, unique, as well as bizarre, weird, and awe-inspiring. The exotic, tropical setting of most ancient Maya ruins adds to the appeal for those who do not have to live there.

The environmental realities are quite different. The jungles offer maximum heat and insects, alternating deluge and drought and a milieu in which bacteria, viruses and other disease-causing organisms flourish. And cultural realities can be just as different as some romanticized perceptions. Sadly, the exotic image has often masked the truth. The real Maya are truly one of the most interesting and important early civilizations to evolve in place from simple beginnings.

Lawn Mores

Only in America, with its 50-million households participating in lawn care and its 16,000 golf courses, is turf an estimated $40-billion-a-year industry. That is roughly equivalent to the gross domestic product of Vietnam. The United States is far and away the world
Read more...

Pink Salt

We have some salt of our youth in us.
William Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor

I was born a freshwater child.

Growing up in Buffalo, with a father whose fascination was Niagara Falls, I couldn't help but be intimately linked with this wonder of the world. Not the Falls in themselves, although I've seen and loved them in every season; but the Falls as the passage point of one-fifth of the world's fresh water. There was always fresh water in abundance when I was young: for watering my grandfather's vegetable gardens, for filling the swimming pool (where my sister and I pretended to be mermaids; the irony never struck us), for washing clothes and dishes and cultivating tadpoles. (My mom wasn't as keen on this last one...) Fresh water surrounded the young me, falling from the sky in various forms, running under my feet in creeks and pipes, and hanging in the air on humid August days.

Under the Stars

As a child I remember seeing a mano and a metate, a dark metamorphic rock quern (grind stone), near the back door of my grandfather’s home. When he replaced the dirt-floored cabin where my mother was born with a more solid brick house, he was still on the fringes of the American West. I remember hearing stories of how my mother, as a young girl, interrupted transient Navajo laborers as they attempted to casually “share” the goods of a neighbor who was not home. My mother’s presence scared off the would-be thieves before they were able to steal anything. Of course, during the Depression, the only thing there was to steal was food. These stories were always made more real when I saw the grind stone by my grandparents’ backdoor.

Later in life when I lived in Italy, people used to ask me about my native country. I began to realize how very little I really understood about the pre-Columbian times in America and how one-sided many of the black-and-white Saturday morning television programs I had seen as a child had been. For example, the John Wayne hero movie, Fort Apache, was filmed around the Kayenta area (with the great standing mittens of Monument Valley). Today this area is part of the Navajo Reservation near the Four Corners, the common boundary between Arizona, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico. Except for the scenes in this movie, I have never heard of Apaches living this far north.

Fumane

Our first Architectural Salad historical essay of the built environment examines a specific building and ponders some of the reasons for its design and existence. We hope such essays may launch discussions and become a part of a larger corpus during years yet to come. The oft-used quotation of Hegel’s that “…governments and people never have learned from history” could be examined in the life of a villa in the rising hills above Verona, Italy in the village of Fumane, the Villa Della Torre a Fumane.

Villa Della Torre a Fumane: Part One

Italian history is complex, convoluted and interwoven by both forces of nature and forces outside the sphere of Italian peninsular influence. Our final destination in this paper bears the marks of deep psychological scarring, fear, rivalry, competition, and fleeting alliances. It is a period that is barely credible, when compared with modern standards. During the sixteenth century, in the Italy of Machiavelli, there was one rule to follow: that of each man for himself.

Main Menu