Thanks for the Christmas display

When we moved to Columbus in 1967, the area we live in now was farm woods and pasture—ravine, woods, and creek.  There was a 19th century farm house and old barn (now gone) on the property.  We had actually watched this area being built  and the firm Bob worked for, Urban Calabretta (now Brown Calabretta)  in the 1970s designed this very attractive 30 unit condominium community, a concept still rather new to Columbus 50 years ago. We had never driven back here until 2001 when we noticed several listings in the paper, and we fell in love with the setting.  So we have a lovely view north out our living room window of our neighbors on the next street “over the river and through the woods.”  They are close on this side, but about 1/2 mile to drive there.
 
We’ve been enjoying their Christmas lights in their back yard this season.  The colors change and rotate through the lights through a large tree. The other night Bob asked for a piece of stationery so he could write them a Thank You note for the enjoyment we’ve had every evening.  I thought it was a nice idea, but we don’t know their names, and the back of the house is 3 stories, yet the front appears to be a ranch—I’m not sure on that street if I could even identify it. Ten years ago when I was still walking in nice weather I’d noticed how difficult it was to identify the front of the homes I could only see from the rear.

No problem.  He wrote the note and then drove there, knocked on their door, and introduced himself.  They had a brief visit, and he told them how much we had enjoyed their lights.  Bob thought they were very nice, and they were quite surprised to get a personal and written thank you.

Residential Knowledge Community

As a librarian, I've been called a lot of things (never over-paid, though)--information specialist, database architect, knowledge manager, associate professor, department head, etc. So I'm used to odd titles. Architects? Not so much. So "residential knowledge community" was new to me. Apparently means those careers and professions that design and build homes suitable for living and lasting longer than a generation.

Here's the assessment of David Andreozzi of Rhode Island, and interestingly enough, this was exactly how I've felt about architecture the last 40 years--especially Frank Lloyd Wright in the early 20th century and the 80s guy who designed the Wexner Center on the OSU campus, Peter Eisenman:

"A century long love affair with modernity combined with a desire to create star architects have morphed our profession into celebrating architecture, that at times goes so for to the extreme that it begins to ignore building codes, fails to adequately satisfy program requirements, and encourages state of the art experimentation over proven technology, in order to proclaim invention over creating architecture. We live in a time of starchitects that design sculpture with secondary program placed upon it, and we all celebrate this as good. It can be argued that our current paradigm actually discriminates against history, environmental scale, and individual culture in architecture in whole."

To say nothing of on-going costs! Eisenman's design won out in a competition and has locked Ohio into a perpetual repair program due to the design which has cost us millions more. The building is dysfunctional and disorienting to the senses. Entire foundations exist to do nothing but restore Wright's buildings which ignored everything then known about environmental damage and we're paying for it now as buildings fall apart and anyone over 5'5" feels squashed walking through one of his homes.