American conflict

Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Tennessee 40 years ago today. We owe a great debt of gratitude in this country for his extraordinary commitment to the healing of a crippled public conscience, still on-going, and for the personal sacrifice it came to.

In the last few weeks The Baltimore Sun has been running a number of articles about the events of urban upheaval that followed King's killing. Stories, photos, & video looking back at the destruction in Baltimore and at societal & individual change that accompanied are collected here.

Also in the Sun a couple of weeks ago, one account of the very different scene that week in the state capital, Annapolis, twenty miles south of Baltimore. The article covers the first showing of a film about the consequences of the unusual friendship between Roger Moyer, mayor of Annapolis in '68, and Joseph Simms, a black man with whom Moyer had had a basketball rivalry during high school, in prison for theft in April of '68. Take a look at the film's site: Pip & Zastrow, An American Friendship.

Fisher news!

Congratulations are due to several-times-previously-mentioned artist friend Jeff Fisher and his wife Jenn, on the birth last week of their son Rowan, the small reddish person pictured at right. See photos and a brief light-hearted account of the events of Rowan's delivery, successfully managed in Jeff & Jenn's home, here. (Just received permission to post the link today.)
 
Jeff & Jenn are a remarkable couple, alike & together gifted & enterprising, and it's delightful to imagine what new effort & accomplishment this little guy will call forth in their lives, as also to imagine what wonderful things we may hope to see, transmitted & transmuted from them, someday in his.

Recommended reading for the building lover

Sharon C. Park, an architect three decades in the preservation field and recently appointed to a directorial post in historic architecture at the Smithsonian, reports on her current reading at the end of a good interview (the "Doer Profile" feature) in the AIA online weekly's current issue:

I’m actually reading Hodding Carter’s Flushed: How the Plumber Saved Civilization, about the history of the toilet. When I was working on the dig with the University of Southampton, I was excavating Norman ruins in Southampton and was fascinated by the internal plumbing systems that they had in tenth to twelfth century called garderobes, stone-lined shafts in buildings that emptied out into stone sluits that worked with the tidal waters at Southampton. They had these little guillotine reservoirs where the tidal waters came up the stone sluits and was stopped and trapped by a little closure device, and then excrement was flushed out to sea, which I thought was pretty sophisticated. So, I’ve always been interested in early plumbing systems and how they work. Working in Southampton on early drainage systems piqued my interest in how all of that was incorporated into buildings.
    But the last book I read, the one that is my favorite book, is Witold Rybczynski’s One Good Turn: A Natural History of the Screwdriver and the Screw. He wrote the book out of an article that he had done for The New York Times Magazine at the millennium. They asked him to write an article on a single tool or apparatus from 1000 to 2000 that had been critical and he realized that it was the screw and the screwdriver. The screwdriver [to a lesser degree], but the screw had been an amazing and very sophisticated tool to bring items together. He took it back to about 1400 and looked at armament, weaponry, and clocks, [etc.]. It has absolutely changed the way I look at museum artifacts.

Mr. Jones, add those titles to this month's order.