I was cruising right along, hitting all the mile markers of adulthood — finished school, landed a real job, bought a used car, got hitched, knocked up, the works. But no one makes it out of childhood without facing something that makes them say, “Whoa! Am I really an adult?” For most people, that moment […]
Jennifer Loviglio
Posted inSpecial Sections
Home Sweet Dome
Buckminster Fuller first envisioned geodesic domes as sturdy, easy-to-construct, low-cost housing for the masses in the late 1940s. His idea took hold in the decades following, and today the geodesic dome — part engineering triumph, part philosophy-in-action — is a symbol of an era when world peace was a goal, not just a logo. […]
Posted inSpecial Sections
The Floating House
“This is not a ‘Hi honey, I’m home!’ house,” artist Annie Dunsky-Kälnitz says of her Pittsford residence. Pod-shaped and perched on 100-foot pylons on the side of a hill — like a long-legged bug — the house was dubbed the Floating House by its first owners. It was designed and built in the late 1970s […]
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Breaking the mold
Anyone who has shopped for a house knows the process can be fraught with anxiety. The commitment. The responsibility. The mortgage payments. With worries like these, no wonder we become timid, risk-averse. We flock like lemmings to tract neighborhoods, where boxy houses stretch in rows to the horizon. The bravest among us march to […]
Posted inSpecial Sections
The straw-bale house
If you tell Sharon Kissack her house smells like a barn, she won’t be insulted. She’s in the final stages of installing straw-bale walls inside, and the scent of sweet, dry hay is just one of the advantages of her unusual choice of materials. Another is the cozy feeling the two-foot-deep walls impart to the […]
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Coursus interruptus
In a world where everyone is an expert at something, my lack of expertise in any one area is a problem. I’m surrounded by professionals: doctors, educators, curators, software gurus. In lieu of grad school, which seems really hard and expensive, continuing education is my only hope. When the two-color continuing-ed brochures arrive in […]
Posted inNews & Opinion
Hidden and forbidden
The best way to get to know a city is to explore the off-limit areas. Riding on the back of subway trains in Boston, leaping across townhouse rooftops in Washington, DC, and poking around boarded-up hospitals and vacant office buildings in Philadelphia in my reckless youth taught me more than any Chamber brochure ever could. […]
