Monday, February 21, 2011
Saturday, January 22, 2011
Gulangyu :: China
Gulangyu (Piano Island) is quiet because no cars are allowed on the island. Called Piano Island because of its shape and for the music academy on the island, it lies east of Xiamen -- like a small fish just beyond of the larger island. Students at the music school practice all day and in that vicinity you can hear their scales, harmonies and rare screeches.
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Mansion on Gulangyu©2007 L. Peat O'Neil
Entry gate to an abandoned estate, Gulangyu
On the beach when the tide was out I found pottery bits and sea glass. Paths on the waterfront promenade are fitted with speakers for recorded music of a better quality than Muzak drifts on the salty air.
©2007 L. Peat O'Neil
©2007 L. Peat O'Neil
Xiamen in the background. Supply Boats anchored at Gulangyu©2007 L. Peat O'Neil
Gulangyu's main attraction would be the amazing mansions built by rich merchants in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Gulangyu has always attracted smugglers and drug dealers. Former U.S. and British consulates dating back to 19th c. are now hotels. The Spanish consulate next to the Catholic Church was converted to rest home for senior citizens.
Former Spanish Consulate, Gulangyu©2007 L. Peat O'Neil
Saturday, January 15, 2011
Business of Taxpayer Financed Buildings:: Why Buy Ugly?
Why spend money acquired from taxpaying citizens on a building that is ugly and an eyesore on the earth?
People would become more visually oriented and creative if they could see beautiful structures that open their eyes to intense interrelations of beauty and nature. If systems thinking was applied to design then there would be more opportunity to cultivate and nurture the seeds of creativity.
Especially when the construction project is a taxpayer-funded project, it should be designed and built to the highest standards of architectural and engineering felicity. Let federal and state sponsored building be the very best examples of American architecture.
Think of the massive structures that we travel the globe to see -- the cathedrals of France, Potala palace in Lhasa, castles on the Rhine, Angkor Wat, Borobudur, the Pantheon in Rome, Teotihuacan and countless other ancient cities in Mexico, the temples of Athens, the pyramid tombs of Egypt, the Taj Mahal, the Great Wall of China. These were public works projects or symbols of private enterprise in their day. If visionary builders and paymasters centuries ago hadn’t constructed pleasing and durable buildings, there would be no residual evidence of their creative effort and social systems.
Architecture -- that which remains after the floods, hurricanes, tornados, wars and fire. It provides specific and concrete evidence of how a society functioned, what it valued, how the humans prospered or failed, what was valuable to them.
Would you describe any of these taxpayer financed buildings as lasting esthetic monuments to freedom and creative enterprise?
Maybe the ugly building penalty tax has a place in our culture?
http://www.wazobiareport.com/reports/Lagos-state-introduces-Ugly-Building-tax
Sunday, September 26, 2010
National Park Seminary
Once upon a time the region was forested, then a posh boarding school was built. The buildings were converted to a military installation, home for soldiers in the post Viet-Nam war era. Now the buildings at National Park Seminary are offered for sale as spiffy condominium apartments. 
Resources on the history of National Park Seminary
Video: Fire at the Odeon, Forest Glen Seminary
Photographs displayed on this blog by L. Peat O'Neil © 2009
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Video: Fire at the Odeon, Forest Glen Seminary 
Photographs displayed on this blog by L. Peat O'Neil © 2009
Sunday, March 21, 2010
Cross Creek, Florida
I ate Miz' Rawlings grapefruit this morning. Sweet and juicy, a far cry from the thick skin commercial varieties sold in Northern grocery stores. The best tasting Florida citrus are thin skinned and crack open when they hit the sandy turf. The fruit from Cross Creek was chock full of seeds too, obviously not bred for travel.
"Nutmeg grapefruit is the breed," says Lee, a tour guide at Cross Creek, author Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings' farm in north central Florida. He wandered barefoot through the writer's house and citrus grove, leading a dozen tourists through the historic property. "Sand sticks in running shoe crevices, not to bare feet," he says, dusting his soles against his tattered pants legs. Lee's aw-shucks, gee-willikers style brings to life Rawlings' backwoods characters in popular books like The Yearling and Cross Creek.
Rawlings won the Pulitzer Prize in 1939 for The Yearling. Beloved by many young readers, the novel tells of local boy Jody Baxter's coming of age in Florida's hard scrapple northern pine country near Ocala Forest. Her novel displayed contemporary realities in realistic voice and bridged subject and stylistic antipodes. The 1938 Pulitzer book, John P. Marquand's The Late George Apley, hewed closer to 19th century novel forms and subject matter, while John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, the Pulitzer winner in 1940, was a thoroughly modern novel rooted in vernacular voice and character.
When she came here in 1928 with first husband Charles Rawlins, both journalism graduates from the University of Wisconsin, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings was a neophyte Floridian who thought she could live off the orange grove. The farm was planted with pecan trees, which she ordered cut down to plant citrus.
Sunday, May 3, 2009
Geothermal Electricity Launch on Nevis
Geothermal Launch on Nevis
Caribbean Island Transforming Hot Water
According to St. Kitts and Nevis Democrat newspaper on “Tuesday 28th April, in Nevis, West Indies Power (Nevis) Ltd. was issued a Geothermal Resource Concession by the Nevis Island Administration (NIA) and signed a 25 year Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) with the Nevis Electricity Company Ltd. (NEVLEC). The Geothermal Resource Concession is for a renewable 25 year term and grants West Indies Power (Nevis) Ltd. (WIPN) the right to develop and produce electricity from the geothermal resources on Nevis.”
Kerry McDonald, CEO of West Indies Power (Nevis) Ltd, said, “West Indies Power will now be able to start building the geothermal power plants that will supply Nevis and the other islands in the northern Caribbean with low cost, reliable, renewable, clean energy for the foreseeable future.”
Hot Water :: Cool Air
People have been tapping into geothermal energy for cooking and heating forever. Settlements near geyser fields made good sense to our stone age ancestors. Think of geothermal as a steam power source coming from Earth's interior. The thermal energy is drawn from beneath Earth's crust, at various distances below the surface. Jules Verne’s novel “Journey to the Center of the Earth” spins a story about traveling on the hot rivers of the surface deep into the earth’s molten rivers called magma.
Volcanic areas produce reservoirs of steam and hot water. In Iceland, steam is tapped for residential heat and hot water. Steam geysers are left for visitors to enjoy in remote areas of Iceland, as at Yellowstone National Park in the USA and the Valley of the Geysers north of Zhupanovo on the east coast of the Kamchatka peninsula in Siberia.
Nevis plans to use its geothermal resources to generate electricity which ultimately may be used to power air conditioners. Hot water makes cool air.
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