my old house

my old house

Image by petit hiboux
In West Houston. Kickerillo Street, to be precise. This neighborhood was one of the many designed by ____ Kickerillo (Houstonians? What's that guy's first name?). He was like our very own Donald Trump but with more of a naming mania. All the streets in his various subdivisions had names like Candywood and Cindywood and Marywood and Kellywood after the various women/offspring in his family.

Also, he had some weird obsession with England because some of the subdivisions had names like Nottingham Forest (ours) or Sherwood Forest or Wilcrest Forest. Then there was that one called Gaywood. Not sure what was up with that.

Aside from all that, they were actually really beautiful neighborhoods in that soullessly comfortable Houston way. This one was one of the oldest (maybe 20 years old) so it had big old trees covered in Spanish Moss. No sidewalks though because who walks? No one is who.

Boston Housing Prices Showing Signs of Life

Image by Matthew Simoneau
I'm planning to buy my first house soon. Since I'm not yet invested in real estate, I've been looking for the right time to enter the market. I know that trying to time the market is a fool's game, but I am that fool.

The most relevant data I've been able to locate is the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices. It is calculated by comparing the selling price of homes in a given metro area in a given month against previous selling prices for the same property. There are lots of other numbers you could track (housing starts, current inventory levels, asking prices, etc.), but this is where the rubber meets the road. It reflects what prices homes are actually fetching in a given area at a given time.

Home prices have a natural seasonality in Boston, rising in the spring and falling in the fall, so I've been focusing on year-on-year changes. I designed this plot to make it easy to compare this change. Each year is a line. If you cut the plot out of the page and glued the left to the right edge, the cylinder would be a continuous line changing color at the start of each year.

The most interesting events for me are when the lines cross. They represent points in time where house prices are the same from one year to the next. That happened in Boston in April 2006, as the market began to cool. For nearly four years after that, the average home in Boston was worth less than it was a year before. This free fall came to an end in December 2009, when finally the lines crossed again and the market held its value.

January's numbers came in today and again the year-on-year values are in the black. The index is down compared to December, though. We're not out of the woods yet, but we may be at the beginning of the recovery.

Crossposted to Matthew J. Simoneau's Weblog, Facebook, and Twitter.

Origami house archetypal night lamp

Image by Mammaoca2008
These days for reasons related to one of my jobs, I'm working hard about the concept of archetypes... and this is obviously reflecting on my origami. The question is if alphabetized cultures are going back (or not) to pictograms... having a look to our desktops it seems they are, and, not knowing a thing about Mr. Jung, this... for a graphic designer leads to another question... which is the best icon for anything? It should be the one icon that better express the concept using the minimum number of elements: a circle for the sun, a triangle for a mountain and so on. At AIGA the complete set of 50 passenger/pedestrian symbols they developed is available for all to use free of charge and in addition they suggest to visit very interesting Noun Project and this should make origamists think about the links between pictograms and simple origami and of course diagrams... anyway... I'm thinking these days to the noun for house... and working about it I understood the archetype for house must have a roof... so we have a rectangle and a triangle. And if, until now I worked out the idea only in paper... architect Aires Mateus did it for real. The idea of roof is quite interesting at least in italian... we have for house the word casa... which come from latin... greek... and finally from ancient sanskrit "ska" (to cover)... that's why in english there's the word sky... Anyway... I designed this other archetypal house to fold... I looked in the web if there was something similar before publish it... it's very simple you know. I did not find the same house but a very similar concept as far as I can understand from the picture is here. Also I found a place where for 5€ (!) they sell 50 A4 sheets of elephant hide in 3 different shade of brown... I learnt it is called "pergamino" in italian ... and this discover I hope will be very useful for me in the future. I tested my model in my pergamino paper and one of my kids added a light... and finally I added the umbrella took from Nounproject.... raindrops are my design ;-) ... that's the function of the house... to cover... and also this will be very useful to explain the concept of maximum slope... the lamp could be a solar led light ... so it is also sustainable... and this will make a great night lamp... I wish you this week to find the noun :-)

Free standing

Image by phill.d
The grand Gothic Hafodunos Hall in Llangernyw was gutted by an arson attack in October 2004.
Two men pleaded guilty to arson at the 140-year-old, Grade 1 listed building near Abergele.
One was jailed for three years, the other was sent to a young offenders institution.

Hafodunos Hall was designed by Sir George Gilbert Scott between 1861 and 1866 for Henry Robertson Sandbach, who’s family had bought the estate in 1830.

It is a Venetian-inspired Gothic style house built in soft red brick with diaper work and extensive stone dressings to windows and doors.
The architect's other works include London's St Pancras Hotel, and the Albert Memorial, in Kensington Gardens.

© phill.d
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