Digging and Demolition

The tree inspection passed, although our contractor had to replace a lot of the mulch after a giant rainstorm washed a bunch of it down our gravel driveway, which also eroded into the street! Luckily he got it fixed just in time for the inspector's visit. The next phase was to dig holes around the existing piers to add footings, and holes for the new piers for the addition.

Digging New Footings

New pier holes

These holes were dug for the piers that will support the Living Room addition.

The next step was to add reinforcing steel in the holes before the concrete pour. We had our crack structural engineer Staci come inspect the steel before the concrete pour, and she made sure everything was in place according to the drawings. Also, the tree inspector had to come out to inspect the holes to make sure we didn't cut any major roots of our pecan tree.  Sometimes I feel like the tree is getting more attention from the City than the house itself, but there you go... After the steel was fixed, we had to wait a few days for the inspector to show up, so the contractor used the time to demo some of the interior spaces that are being altered. It was great to see the house opening up once some of the interior walls came down.

Interior Demo

This is from what used to be the Living Room looking into what will be the Kitchen.

Preparing for concrete

The contractors leveled out the tops of each pier to make sure the concrete will be poured to the correct height for the addition framing.

After waiting for a few days, it was finally time for the concrete pour. An army of workers and a concrete truck descended on the house for a day, and the concrete was done! The house is still being supported on concrete blocks until the new footings cure, then it will be lowered down onto the reinforced piers. I think we may have overdesigned the foundation a bit, but at least we'll know we're on a solid foundation as we go up!

New piers!

These guys are going to be taking the weight of the new addition. Now for the framing...

So now that we have a foundation, the framing of the addition and the second floor can begin in earnest. The lumber is supposed to be delivered tomorrow, and we should see the house taking shape over the next couple of weeks. Exciting!!!

GoodHood: Austin Neighborhood Rides

Not long ago as I was doing some design research on what makes good urban signage, I found an image that had the word "GoodHood" put into the sidewalk. I love the idea of claiming your hood as good! In an effort to do my due diligence in trying to experience my neighborhood by bike, car, walking and riding (transportation), I met up with my colleague Jacob to do a neighborhood ride-about. My goal was to show him the biking infrastructure that was newly put in place on Justin Lane, grab a coffee and chat and complete our circle. I figure I would want to do little rides like this that are rides I would take on a regular basis when running errands etc... Here is graphic of our ride and a detailed list of the experience:

May 29: Sunny 90 deg

10:15 am: Jacob arrives by bike at my house on Denson

Notes: We went up Denson to Lamar and jogged over on Romeria. At the Lamar intersection we observed walkers, people at the bus station, and a woman going down the Lamar sidewalk in a wheelchair. 

We rode up Denson along with the car traffic and waited at the light, not knowing if it was going to change. We had to turn left onto Lamar, so we used the car left turn lane. It felt fine, but we are both used to biking with traffic. We did a really quick jog onto Romeria, as I led the way since Jacob doesn't know the area. Romeria does not currently have any bike or walking infrastructure but I think is slated for some this fall. 

When we got to Arroyo Seco we turned onto the protected bike lane and rode up to Justin Lane. The new bike lanes are great and the markings on the street are very bold. At that point we grabbed some coffee at Dia's Market which looked really appealing from the street. It has a great front patio for dining but needs bike racks out front. While at Dia's we observed 5-6 cyclists going down the new bike lane on Justin, one couple with a baby on the back. Most of the people we saw were in 2's biking together. Most were in regular clothes; one man was wearing biking clothes. 

Arroyo Seco bike lane

Extremely comfortable and shaded, no problem even in the summer heat. Note the lack of other cyclists on the path - maybe too early in the day?

Justin Lane bike lane

Brand spankin' new and easy to navigate. Hopefully this will be a part of a more comprehensive network through the City.

11:20 am: We left Dia's and headed toward Airport Blvd to complete the circle. Crossing Lamar was hairy and really confusing but we made it over riding on parts of the sidewalk. This intersection is kind of a mess and there were loads of pedestrians walking around because of the bus stops on Lamar. We used the pedestrian crosswalk to get across Lamar and it felt completely safe but probably not the ideal way to cross. 

We rode up the Airport bike lane which was really sunny because there are no trees, but it felt fine, maybe because of the wildflowers on both sides. We wove around several walkers but all were happy to be on the urban trail. 

We turned right on Guadalupe into the bike lane after the traffic went past the intersection. The lane was a bit narrow and hot because of the black pavement but became wider as we approached Denson. There was little or no traffic on Guadalupe as we rode down, we were able to continue our conversation. 

All in all, I gave the ride 4 stars because it was enjoyable, easy and mostly protected even on a hot summer day. The worst part of the ride was easily the Lamar/Airport intersection. 

Airport Boulevard Red Line Trail

Beautiful wildflowers line the path, making for an easy and safe ride. Could use some shade trees, however...

Living Out Front

The sidewalk is an essential element to any great city that is designed for people. The very nature of walking out of your house and feeling comfortable is contingent on your  surroundings. People love to feel protected and in control of their  environment.

 

In my life I have lived in a lot of places. I was born in Ohio and lived there until I was 5. One of the memories I have as a child was that of all of the neighborhood kids playing in the street in front of our houses. The street was the meeting place where all neighborhood activities took place. After Ohio, we moved to Columbia, South Carolina where our house was much larger and on a very large piece of land in the woods. It was suburban but also very wooded, backing up to a lake. We spent every day outside playing in the woods and in the neighborhood. We didn't play on the street as much, but rather in the park behind our house. When I turned 10 we moved to El Paso, Texas. Our house there was up in the mountains and on a street where we once again returned to playing in the front yard, riding bikes and playing games with the neighborhood kids. Three years later, we moved to Laredo, Texas. This experience was a bit different because I was older and our neighborhoods were very isolated from each other, lacking any sort of community. Granted, the weather was much hotter and this neighborhood, unlike the others, was newly developed. All of the houses were built brand new and the streets were wide, lacking sidewalks. I don't have any memories of being in the front of my house for any length of time. 

Rather than make this post about the "good old days", I am doing it for another reason. I have recently been working on photo books for my kids and came to realize that much of their lives were spent on the street in front of our houses in Chicago. Their first walking photos of them are on the front sidewalk, and that is where we spent a lot of our time. We valued the space out front where we could sit and watch the neighborhood, but mostly because our kids ONLY wanted to be out front. Our instincts were to stay inside or in the backyard, having grown up in mostly suburban places. Our kids and all of the neighborhood kids loved being in front. All of our houses also had transparent fences that separated us from the sidewalk. Contrary to what most people believe about fences, they actually brought us outside. In what would seem a more hostile place, the front of a house in the city can make you feel vulnerable to strangers and such. With our fence, we would sit for hours, working in the yard, with our dog joining us, greeting other dogs through the fence, and our kids generally outside the fence looking for other kids or making chalk art on the sidewalk. 

The sidewalk is an essential element to any great city that is designed for people. The very nature of walking out of your house and feeling comfortable is contingent on your surroundings. People love to feel protected and in control of their environment. Streets that are wide with fast moving traffic make people feel unsafe and they will always opt to drive rather than walk, if even a short distance. If this part of the city cannot thrive, people and communities will not thrive. In Texas, we need to understand that by making room for people to walk, we are not eliminating room for people to drive; there just needs to be a balance. If I could take anything away from our time living in the city and raising our kids, it was that people love to be a part of something greater than themselves. People love to feel like they have a community that supports them and that they are a part of. 

The street trees, the medians between the sidewalk and the street, and the parked cars were a protection from fast moving traffic and it made this outdoor space an extension of our home. Over the years I took great pride in the garden I was growing in the front yard and how my little garden transformed the street. The front of our house became the place where we wanted to be, and we were proud of the house we were making. We were creating a home and space not just for ourselves, but for our neighborhood. Living in Austin, we are missing that part of life. We currently live in a place where there are no sidewalks and are moving to a place where the sidewalks are confronted with energy poles, no trees and a very wide street. All over Austin, I see chairs in the front yards of peoples houses, but I never see people sitting in them. I am not sure if they are a symbol or if they are where people sit but I have to wonder if the simple move of better streets and a few trees would transform our city from car based to walking? 

Sometimes the Right Thing Happens

RBJ Groundbreaking

Luci Baines Johnson, Mayor Adler, Pio Renteria and others celebrating a good thing.

There are pages and pages on the Internet dedicated to what is wrong with Austin: traffic, uncontrolled sprawl, affordability, gentrification, Californians :).... All of those things have their place in the puzzle, and they are all microcosms of larger issues at play in all of our cities here in the U.S. But sometimes diverse groups of people come together to create something truly good, and these efforts don't seem to get as much attention.

In my job at Nelsen Partners, I've had the opportunity to be involved with the redevelopment of the RBJ Senior Apartments, a 1970's residential tower on the east side that was built by LBJ and named after his mother, Rebecca Baines Johnson. After years of planning, it seems that the project is finally moving forward, and the official groundbreaking was held on Tuesday. Luci Baines Johnson, LBJ's daughter and well-known Austin resident, gave an inspiring speech about the legacy of LBJ's vision to take care of America's most vulnerable citizens, and praised the amount of collaboration between many different City constituents to make the project happen. 

Councilman Pio Renteria and State Representative Eddie Rodriguez took that point further in their speeches, and it was a point that needed to be heard. I won't bore you with the details of how this project is going to be funded and built, but this effort involves private developers, government officials at the City and State levels, neighborhood activists, bankers, real estate lawyers, design professionals, and most importantly the senior residents of RBJ themselves. All of this to create what will become a mixed-income, mixed-use, multi-generational neighborhood out of what is currently an isolated tower in a park. 

There is a growing amount of research to support the idea that seniors benefit from living in close proximity to other generations of people, with access to activities in their immediate neighborhood. I suspect this is true for all of us. There are many problems in the City to solve, to be sure, but projects like this give me hope that the various residents of this City - whatever age, income bracket, or ethnicity - will be able to live together and benefit from each others' company. Let's stay hopeful..

Building Permits

As in most cities, Austin requires a building permit before you can begin construction. The permit process can be very daunting, but we found out that the City currently offers an expedited process for a little extra money. The process is billed as being incredibly fast and geared at getting home owners into construction as fast as possible. We prepared the required drawings, I stamped them and we submitted for a Completeness Check, which involved some full-size drawing sets and a pile of paperwork. About two weeks later, we got a response letting us know that we had to prepare a Tree Protection Plan showing how we were going to protect the Heritage Pecan tree that is in the backyard.

The pecan tree. 

At 24.5" diameter, this tree is considered a Heritage Tree in the City of Austin, and must be protected.

We drew up the Protection Plan and scheduled a review meeting for the following week. First we met with the arborist to review the tree plan, which passed. Then we sat for about 20 minutes with the building reviewer, and we were good to go. I guess it helps to have done our homework beforehand! One catch is that we didn't have a printed half-size set, so I had to run to the office to print one out and Alyson ran it back to the permit office. Within the next few hours, we were called back to the office to pick up the building permit, and that was that. 

Or so we thought...

Building Permit Review!

Since we had a full set of stamped drawings and opted for the expedited review, the process was relatively quick and painless.

The tree was protected and the site was prepared for construction, and it was time to schedule the first inspection. It turns out that we didn't receive the stamped, approved drawings with the permit, so when the inspector showed up for the preconstruction review at the site, he wouldn't sign off without them. Alyson had to run down to the permit office (again) to request the official approved drawings, which they kindly and quickly produced. Now to reschedule the inspector! 

The tree has been protected.

Tree protection requires fencing and mulch in the critical root zone. Also, spring has sprung! 

What will Austin Become?

Too often I find myself using my time in Chicago in conversations to compare life: how life in a big city worked, how biking worked, how public transportation worked, how neighborhoods worked. I feel like I am that annoying person in the room who can't shut up about living somewhere else. I just can't help myself. My husband and I made such a conscious decision to stay in the city to have our kids and raise them in an urban environment, despite all of the reasons not to. We became intertwined with people and community and depended on each other so much. The closeness of people brought us together, in ideals, actions, and how to conquer life in the city. You get this sense that you are part of a group and those people will be there for you no matter what. I have to admit, in all of my years in Texas, I have only felt that way in college, and then post college, it all disappeared. My close knit circle spread out to achieve design greatness all over the country. 

Upon moving back to Texas, and settling in Austin, not Dallas or Houston, we made the decision to become a part of this community. Austin, is what we see, a city of the future. It is a city that gets to make decisions that work, based off of role models around the globe. We get to study other places and steal what might work for us and really affect how our city will grow. I grew up in south Texas, and understand what it means to live here, to be from here. I also left Texas to see what it is like in other places. I find that being back, I am once again being judged, but this time, I am an insider. I get to speak for "Texans" because I am one. We are a new generation of Texan that want urban spaces, we were trained to love our local ecologies in undergrad at Texas A&M and to nurture our landscape and build with respect to the place where we are building. I just constantly find myself asking, what will Austin become? What does Austin want to be? What will my and the other generations of Texans bringing back to this state and how will we become the leaders of change? 

Embracing the Future of the City

I have been thinking a lot about cities and urbanism and technology. This time it is a bit different because I am finishing up teaching a graduate design course at the University of Texas at Austin. During the course, I learned a lot, not only about my students but about the world. When I read the news, all of it is bad, pretty much every day there is more bad news. From a disastrous President to a crumbling world reeling in the midst of climate change. It is no wonder everyone is obsessed with AR and tech to save us (or better yet allow us to escape), but on the other side I hear people who want the real world to continue. This new vision for our future world is one that embraces human experiences, values our humanness and in turn makes being human in the world better. The best thing about this world is that it isn't pretend. I actually can't think of anything worse than living in a world where you fly around having fake experiences with either a screen on your face or somehow projected in front of it, or even worse a physical world controlled by Google (like the one they are working on in Toronto) where every action is monitored by a machine and in turn controlling your actions. making us, essentially the AI we are so afraid of. 

I think the thing I wonder about the most is why people aren't clamoring to be better humans? I wonder why they don't see any real hope for the world we live in. I am endlessly curious and in a world that has the limitations of a computer algorithm, I can't see anything interesting at all. If we lived in a world where every action was predictable we would cease to exist as a human race. People are always talking about an apocalypse where we all die and the world ends. I have to wonder if that is simply giving into tech and a world controlled by Facebook and Google. 

My previous business, Lille Huset, was launched as a "modern business." I started my idea on kickstarter, I used facebook for fans and marketing, I had an e-commerce site, I had google ads, and a blog. For seven years, I worked the use of all of these platforms to gain credibility of my ideas and bring something to the world that I really believed in. The problem was, my digital identity was wrapped up in my ability to continue one idea, and to continue to get deeper into the digital web. My days were spent online, filling orders, making posts, taking the "perfect" photos for instagram, emailing bloggers, doing all the "work" that continued the narrative. When I decided I was done with the project, I didn't know which way was up. I had believed that the inter-web would continue to reward me. I had a digital crisis, I didn't know who I was, who people expected me to be and where I was going. I was living in a world that did not actually exist and no one cared if I was there or not. 

I gave up social media about 8 months ago and retain an instagram account just to search for things occasionally, and check in on my 14 year old daughter. Each time I open it, my heart races and I have a mini panic attack. I loathe the idea of "likes" and "comments". I started to notice how I was being controlled by the overly styled and the sheer quantity of images my friends were posting that made their life look better than mine or just that they loved their kids more because they took pictures of their every action, making me insecure and feeling like a target of a sort of mind control that made me either feel competitive, question myself or simply depressed because I could not keep up. From there I began to compare myself to other makers, how many sales, how many posts, how many likes, how good their photos were, using the right kind of hashtags all for no real gain, so I stopped... I think I have a sort of social media PTSD that causes my physical nervousness every time I open it, but since quitting my life has been so much better. I would highly recommend to everyone to quit social media, it just may make you a little bit more human. You'll find that you've been controlled the whole time and that the things you were striving for were manufactured by other humans (the perfect photos) and you may just find that you yourself have a life to live in the real world. 

In the years following the end of Lille Huset, which is currently 1 year, and having given up social media, I have been able to find my next project. Matt and I have been working on the future of the city. We are allowing ourselves to dream. We are not worrying about the insanity of social media or if other people "heart" every idea we have and working on thinking and talking about how our city will evolve. The work we are doing now on our new house in central Austin, is to establish a hybrid of sorts. A circumvention of the system and using the system to help grow the city in a positive way, not necessarily blocking out a useful inter-web, just wielding it for us. I know that the internet is never going to go away. It will only become an apocalyptic beast if we let it. I think we can develop our cities as humans and use technology to make them better, as a tool not a control mechanism. 

The house we are designing is centered around urban life, affordability, and to change the way we work and shop. As long as we are still physical, I believe we will continue to eat food, walk around, breathe air, commune with other, and... live. 

Austin, A Small Town or City?

We have been living in Austin for going on 3 years. We landed here in the city limits but in a somewhat suburban feeling area that is about 13 miles from the downtown core. We have certainly felt isolated after living in the city of Chicago for 13 years prior. Chicago has been on an upward urban trend for all of the time that we lived there. Our lives depended on transportation systems, our neighborhood with our friends and places to eat and go for fun. We did have a car, but did not have to depend on it to get anywhere. We came to love the streets of our neighborhood where people gathered at the farmers market and for festivals. Our decision to move was brought on my our jobs and opportunities back in our home state. Our transition to this town was not easy. It was probably one of the toughest transitions I have had as an adult. Although my husband and I grew up in here, we came to think of Texas, and all cities in it, as individualistic places where community was not what inspired city life. Transit has been a point of contention in Austin for as long as I can remember, and people drive everywhere. We chose to live where we do because it seemed as good as anywhere else in the city. When we drove around we saw neighborhoods that lacked a town center or gathering places and didn't even have sidewalks. 

Now that we are returning, we landed in a place that is truly at a crossroads. Having lived in Dallas, we experienced some "return to the city" ideas but the city remained truly a car town. Austin, is in a different place and at a different time. Being a very millennial town as well, it has the opportunity to develop in a different way than its peers. Being urban nerds, we researched plans that are in place to make Austin more neighborhood centric and that value walking and biking as alternate modes of transportation, and most excitingly, transit plans that will make this a place where you can ditch your car altogether. The disappointing things still remain that PUD's are the developer route of choice. These developments tend to ignore what is already in place in a neighborhood and create a little enclave of homogenous housing. We are huge fans of great urban infill as housing, live work and as mixed use buildings. We also know that to be a great city you also need great civic places for people to gather and play. We are hopeful that we can identify some of those places around central Austin. 

Austin is a place that has all of the ingredients to be a truly walkable, bikable, transit oriented city of neighborhoods. As designers, we are passionate about cities that are places for diversity of people, with co-mingling and love of place expressed by care of home and neighborhood. We see our current role as simply living in the city and being a part of the fabric, and as designers to observe and react to what we see. We are moving to a home in the central Austin neighborhood, Highland. We are anxious to know what people love about that part of Austin, and how we can influence positive change in that area. We are thinking about how great cities like Chicago came to be and how the voices of designers and architect shaped that. Having a vision at the micro level but also seeing how those small changes affect the whole. 

Amsterdam + Suburbs

Here at URBS we look at regions and believe that our cities and suburbs are co-dependent. Many of our older suburbs were really small towns with a downtown and communities of people who lived and worked right there in their town. Over the years as our cities declined and our suburbs grew so did our design of houses in them. The houses became larger and the suburbs became car based. These car based suburbs in many cases have re-created car based cities. Both acting independently only accessible by car or car based transit (busses). The new move to create walkable/bikeable communities and towns is a refreshing change. Although you can't change the car based suburbs of America, mainly because the houses are too spread out, in in many cases code just won't allow it, we were inspired by what we saw in the Netherlands. 

We ventured with the kids out to Utrecht a small town outside of Amsterdam. We even ventured out of Utrecht and out into the suburban neighborhoods. We found some very surprising things, among them, these small communities being connected to the city by light rail, bike lanes and very little car traffic. You could flow between the downtown and the outer neighborhoods into the country seamlessly and effortlessly. The neighborhoods are designed to be dense and connected, walkable and bikeable. 

The Beginning of A New Journey

I am starting this blog in the wake of yet another environmental crisis, hurricane Harvey. I have always been an eco conscious person, and I care, a lot, but I become overwhelmed with crisis articles rather than how we can all help. I recycle, I turn off the lights like a crazy person and try to eat locally whenever possible. I am absolutely NOT a saint, and lead a very normal life. Over the past 8 years, I have been on a mission to spread the word about simple ways that we can actually help our planet. Since we can not depend on government (which is always my fall back excuse, that we just need regulation) and we can not depend on our American ways to change anything, I figure I may as well just start at home, no more excuses and no more waiting for our government to care. I read a great article that exemplified the point, that we need to have grass roots change, or there will be no change. 

Ten years ago, I started my journey as a designer/maker/solopreneur, I wrote a book with a friend to teach young children simple meaningful ways to lead an eco-friendly life, you can see the project here. After reading the book cradle to cradle, I felt the responsibility as a designer to so my part by being 100% responsible for the books we created. We had the books printed locally in Chicago using eco inks and recycled papers. We hand bound over 800 books using volunteers and lots of man hours with simple water based glue. *Consumer market issue: we could not meet the demand of the books with hand binding them. After learning that all board books were manufactured in China we had to end the project. 

After that project I embarked on a 100% compostable loose leaf activity book that would take kids thorough the systems that lead to a cleaner planet, you can view it here. Hoping that by creating the piece kids would learn how they can help. As a designer, my goal is always to understand the entire process from start to finish and the impact each project will have. The end life of that project was to compost it, leaving zero waste. *Consumer market issue: the consumer could not understand the book because it was not bound and retailers were not willing to commit to something different causing the book to go out of print. 

Once I finished those two books, I explored creating an eco-friendly dollhouse made of recycled paperboard that was made in Indiana, USA, you can view it here. Committed to my mission this series of dollhouses were designed to be recycled at the end of the life of the project. I did not sell stickers with it but it was designed to be drawn on and fully played with leaving no trace if recycled properly. I created a blog with free downloads so kids could have everything to make their home, you can see it here. *Consumer market issues: Retailers required elaborate packaging for the product with shrink wrap causing non recyclable material to be used. Issue #2, in order to sell lots of something, you need to attend trade shows which produce more garbage than one person can stomach. The amount of IKEA that went into landfills from this sort of show is mind numbing. Issue #3, consumers won't pay enough for USA produced goods, leaving me in debt. 

My latest project is my textiles line, you can view it here, and this is perhaps my favorite, possibly because it completes me as a maker. Over the years of trying desperately to throw myself into a mass marketplace, I had an awakening. I spent a year struggling with my role in our society as a maker. I didn't see the value in my hand and I didn't see why someone else's hand is undervalued. I struggled as a maker with why I had the desire to compete with things made in third world countries. As a result of reading, writing, talking with people, I have come to realize that the consumer marketplace I believe in is committed to micro-businesses and the independent marketplace, having learned a lot from the above projects, I am committed to making in the smallest way possible. I am exploring my own patterns and designs that celebrate the cities I love bringing together the urban with the natural. All of my textiles are produced solely by me.,as my art, and I use eco-friendly inks and am loving screen printing at a local co-op maker space. I sell my wares at local shows, online and with select retailers. I have no desire to grow and am writing and exploring how I believe micro-economies will drive us into the future. I will also share some of the books that I am reading with you for inspiration. 

Ok, so that is my resume and my eco-work as a designer, as a family we have also tried to grow our own food (not super successfully but would love to improve or just support my local farmers), I LOVE the plastic ban (we need that everywhere), we recycle what we can, but I could be much better about not buying packaged foods, and we compost. We have 2 kids, a large dog, 2 gas powered cars, a lawn mower, energy efficient appliances, and a normal amount of stuff. Being designers, we do however have a lot of "stuff" guilt, having been addicted to IKEA for all of our kids furniture etc.. over the years. Matt my Urbs partner and husband is a LEED, Architect and I am a designer with my bachelors in architecture and MFA in visual communications, having managed our interior renovations over the years. URBS is our new endeavor to create a great company with a simple value: creating: beautiful, sustainable, honest, affordable, housing for people, that in turn makes great places.

-Alyson