The recently released book by Guy Horton and Sherin Wing, regular contributors to this blog, peaked my interest enough to ask Guy some questions about The Real Architect’s Handbook: Things I Didn’t Learn in Architecture School. We ended up talking about everything from starchitecture, to arch-speak, the recession, and unemployment.

Susan S. Szenasy: I think I can guess, but tell me in your own words why you decided to write and illustrate this book, especially why now.

Guy Horton: Sherin is in the humanities and trained to have a critical eye. I’m originally from the humanities myself and have always been able to look at architecture from a critical distance even though I’m in the middle of it. We also saw a lot of similarities between the two concerns in terms of professional culture and ideology, what’s acceptable and not. We also saw books on architecture that were more boosterism and of the “Isn’t architecture great!” variety and wanted to add a sense of reality to it. To humanize it with all it’s faults and vulnerabilities that are usually hidden behind a heroic veneer. We also wanted to write something for the demographic in the profession that is unemployed or underemployed. No one ever talks about them. I know because Sherin and I wrote it when I was unemployed and trying to get back into architecture. You get a lot of clarity when you are suddenly back in the outside. Sherin did the illustrations. I had some little stick figures in my mind; sort of anti-architectural graphics. She took the idea and created all these characters based on our experiences. It turned out to be quite funny and worked perfectly with the sometimes serious issues we raise like exploitation, low pay, hero worship and other points.

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Depressing news from Kansas City: USA Today reported on Friday that Dan Rockhill’s celebrated Studio 804 design-build program has been unable to find buyers for its last two houses. As we reported in a feature story last February, Studio 804’s previous houses had attracted waiting lists of potential buyers. Unfortunately, the program moved into more expensive cutting-edge sustainable design—its 2009 house (pictured) earned Platinum LEED certification, and its new passive house is expected to do the same—just as the housing market imploded. Now, according to the USA Today article, Studio 804 is “essentially bankrupt,” with only $25 in its checking account.

Click here for information on how to donate money to Studio 804; to learn more about the program, read Daniel Akst’s feature story, “Platinum at a Price.”

In her monthly “Letter from Baltimore,” Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson writes about architecture, culture, and urbanism in a city more often associated with violent crime than with good design. Click here to read her previous posts. For more by Dickinson, visit her blog, Urban Palimpsest.

The ripple effect of the stalled housing market has impacted countless industries—including the purveyors of those storage pods that pop up on the curb when someone needs to move. A few months back, Charley MacKenzie, the owner of the Maryland-based SmartBox USA, told his friend Gregory Pitts about his company’s overstock of plywood storage boxes, each about the size of a walk-in closet. Pitts, a designer with the furniture company David Edward, had an idea. What if the pods could themselves become home? Read more…

“Trumbull” (left) and “Gilman,” two of the canned magazine templates now sold by Ready Media

How should publication designers greet the news yesterday that Roger Black—the magazine design (and redesign) guru who’s had his hands on Rolling Stone, Newsweek, New York, Popular Mechanics, Esquire, and about a zillion other titles over the years—has launched a new venture called Ready-Media to provide “outstanding media templates for both print and web-based formats” to publishers “at a fraction of the cost”? Several commenters on the Society of Publication Designers’ Grids blog were understandably displeased by what they saw as yet another nail in the pub-design coffin:

What a huge setback for designers and magazine makers.

You’ve got to be kidding. Paint by numbers for magazine design?

Working at a city/regional magazine and seeing the ever reducing budget & staff, this sends a shiver down my spine.

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On Saturday morning, Tom Dixon sat down with us in one of the three booths that his team occupies at the front of the ICFF hall. A few feet away, American students dressed as factory workers were busy assembling a pair of limited-edition Dixon designs that could be purchased on site—part of his Flash Factory project, which debuted in Milan last month. Also fresh from Milan: the Industry collection of seating and lighting, on display in the Dixon booth proper. Click the play button for the designer’s thoughts on his new collection, the problems with the furniture business, and the benefits of the global recession.

Video shot and edited by Eve Dilworth; interview and text by Mason Currey.

Photos: Cristina Naccarato/Broken City Lab

Just across the river from Detroit sits a city forgotten. Battered by the fall of the auto industry and struggling to keep its economy running, Windsor, Ontario, has seen some tough times in recent years, and things aren’t likely to improve any time soon. It has the highest unemployment rate in Canada, a plummeting population, and the empty storefronts and foreclosed homes that have come to define this generation’s Great Recession.

Though geographically south, Windsor’s been called the Detroit of the North. For some locals, it’s simply a broken city. But there’s a growing movement that believes Windsor is a city that can be fixed.

A group of artists, activists, and urbanists has come together in Windsor with the straightforward-yet-complex goal of repairing the city. Their group is called the Broken City Lab, and it meets weekly to collaboratively dream up ways of engaging the community in a conversation about Windsor’s future. Read more…

A teaser for the upcoming film Archiculture. The official trailer, which debuted in New York last night, will be available at a later date. (Teaser from arbuckle industries on Vimeo.)

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Last night, in the double-height space of the Center for Architecture’s basement, six panelists gathered to discuss the present and future of the profession in a conversation titled “Architecture Education vs. Professional Practice.” The roundtable discussion was inspired by the film Archiculture—a feature-length documentary by Ian Harris, who also moderated the discussion, and David Krantz—and it concluded with its trailer. (A catered party, with a DJ and live band followed.) Read more…

1. If you’ve got it, flaunt it.

What recession? As usual, ICFF was full of bizarre, bank-breaking booths, from Bernhardt Design’s cheesy, trip-inducing, scuff-marked white plastic flooring (below left) to Amuneal’s aluminum-tubing bunker (below right), complete with bent iron (looking) butterflies. It apparently took only four days to build, and, no, they don’t know how much it weighs (if you build something like that, you’d better). Nearby, brandishing an axe, Shimna woodworker Timothy Aaron Huston (above) explained his booth’s accessories, which, besides the hatchet, include a double-take-inducing stuffed rabbit. “I told my boss I needed a $100 eBay budget,” he said. Huston predicts the axe will replace the antler as this year’s pointless-in-an-urban-setting design accessory. We’ll see.

2. If you can’t have the better booth, have the better business card.

Shimna had a cupboard full of wooden blocks stamped with its website (bummer about the logo coincidence though). Panelite had bubbly little clear plastic bricks of their paneling. Both are sitting on my desk now, while the rest of the cards I got are…somewhere.

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On the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer last night, I caught a riveting segment by KCET Los Angeles about a company called Western Security Realty Preservation, which specializes in rapidly removing belongings from foreclosed homes. A few years ago, the company employed three people. Now it has 73 employees, who empty out an average of 15 homes a day. It’s staggering to see the things that people leave behind—in one house, we glimpse a flat-screen television, two computers, children’s toys, and a pile of family photos—and nearly all of it goes to the landfill. Watch the six-minute video here.