Reviews for Oriental Patterns and Palettes

The average rating for Oriental Patterns and Palettes based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-03-28 00:00:00 Adrian Hill Three stars doesn't quite do justice to this book. Its ideas merit five stars, but the text sags a bit and tends to repeat itself a lot, thereby losing some power. What the text lacks in eloquence, however, it makes up for in tactility. I couldn't stop petting this book. Its "synthetic paper" pages felt so resilient and smooth and sleek. The authors chose to make a recyclable, "treeless" book from from plastic resins and inorganic fillers. It is waterproof and with a certain treatment its pages can be wiped clean and reprinted with a new text. It has the capacity to be recycled as a book many times over or it could be reincarnated as another plastic item... ....To my experience only vellum and leather beats the overall sensory experience this text offers. I first learned of McDonough--an architect with an amazing, cavernous mind--when I read a sermon he delievered at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City entitled "Design, Ecology, Ethics and the Making of Things." The piece is brilliant and beautiful and I wish everyone would read it. It contains many of the ideas presented in Cradle to Cradle in a much more compelling, succinct way. Here is a link to an awkardly formated, but well-proofed pdf of the piece: Design, Ecology, Ethics and the Making of Things by William McDonough This is an HTML version that might be easier to look at in some ways but is sloppy with lots of typos: Design, Ecology, Ethics and the Making of Things by William McDonough In Cradle to Cradle, McDonough (an American architect) and Braungart (a German chemist) uncover the way that bio-destructive practices permeate every aspect of our lives. They describe how toxic materials are hidden in almost everything around us: our fabrics and textiles, our machines, our food containers, our food!, our toiletries, our technology, our furniture, our buildings, etc, etc. It's truly staggering. Their section on water was also particularly memorable. I learned that households are responsible for much more water pollution than I had previously thought. (I formerly saw water pollution as primarily an industrial transgression.) But no, we flush loads of chemicals down the drain in the form of household cleaners/soaps, other home maintenance materials, art supplies, etc. Additionally, we flush chemo, hormones, and other medicated effluents into our waterways from our homes and hospitals. And now, with our culture's obsession with "antibacterial" cleansers, we're suffusing our waste water with bacteria-killing elements that prevent the breakdown of our sewage and slop. ***After reading this section, I went out and bought all non-toxic, biodegreadable (this is key!) soaps and household cleaners: I'm particularly in love with Mrs. Meyers and Method products. For antibacterial action, I've heard it's best to stick with good old fashioned alchohol (applied with friction), which does the job and then becomes inactive in 15 minutes.**** Though McDonough and Braungart expertly outline the disastrous, bio-destructive systems we have created, their book is only about these problems insofar as it seeks to understand them--because it believes we can fix them all through good design. Good design (in an environmental sense) has been nearly dead for over one hundred years and McDonough and Braungart are trying to revive it. Because the industrial revolution furnished us with the fossil fuel power to override natural systems and natural energy flows, design has paid little attention to natural systems and natural energy flows for the past century. For example, architects no longer situate buildings, their windows, and surrounding trees with regard to the patterns of the sun, instead they disregard this free and powerful energy source and design our buildings with artificial systems--electric lights, AC, central heat, etc.--to regulate light and temperature indoors. And this is how we design most things and most products... But, we pay through the nose to live this way--to live within poor, unintelligently designed infrastructure that is ignorant of the natural systems and energy flows in which it exists (like a foreign body or alien cancer)--sacrificing huge financial resources, large swaths of land, our health and the health of other living things....even (I believe) sacrificing the peace of nations. In a grand metaphorical sense, this book wants to take us back to the old New England saltbox house. One that was intelligently built of natural, local materials, with south facing windows and nearby stand of deciduous trees that allow copious sunlight in during the winter months (when the sun is low and the trees are bare) and then alternatively blocks the sunlight during the hot summer months (when the sun is high and reflects off the deep eaves of the roof and is absorbed by the fully maned trees). And I for one want to go there.

Review # 2 was written on 2019-01-10 00:00:00 Summer Brown The central issue in this book is the notion that we can manufacture products and infrastructure that are really, actually good for the environment instead of simply being "less bad". Here's an example of what on Earth that could possibly mean. In making paper, you have two options. (1) You can cut down a tree to make clean, high-quality paper, but on a large scale this involves massive deforestation and the annihilation of ecosystems. (2) You can recycle old paper. However, paper fibers get shorter and shorter the more they're recycled, requiring more and more environmentally-questionable chemicals (bleaches, stabilizers, etc.) to produce a product of less quality than the original. The authors call this "downcycling", which means just what it sounds like it means. Finally, the chemicals involved in the creation of either kind of paper remain in the environment long after the paper fibers themselves decompose. So option (1) above is clearly bad, and option (2) is what they call "less bad". As an actually "good" alternative, they made their book out of some sort of inert plastic polymer that can be indefinitely recycled. The pages are as papery as plastic can be, and overall the book feels the way a book should. Maybe a little heavier than your typical 180-page book, but sturdier and waterproof. (I got hoisin sauce all over mine and it wiped right off.) Apparently, if you send this book back to the manufacturer it can be recycled into other books with close to zero loss in overall quality. (I want to stress that this argument hasn't changed my overall view of recycling. In the absence of "good" options it still makes sense to pick the option which is least bad. I'll continue to downcycle my junk until it's possible to, uh, upcycle, even if that merely postpones the apocalypse instead of preventing it.) This is a microcosm of what this book is actually about. Right now, we as a society are locked into a false choice between the standard capitalist notion of "progress" and the standard environmentalist notion of "sustainability". This book presents a third option that goes a long way towards reconciling the two. Rather than choose between progress and sustainability, why not design/engineer sustainability into products, buildings, and infrasrtucture? The authors argue that this extra design effort can be economical for businesses when you consider the overall cost of manufacturing. They give the example of a manufacturing facility they designed in which the effluent water from the factory was actually cleaner than the influent. It took some extra money to design, but now the business doesn't have to pay regulatory fees or worry about how to dispose of its liquid wastes. Overall, that initial design effort saved them money. I guess this review is getting a little long. Here is the punchline. Environmentalism and industry don't necessarily have to be arch-enemies. (I guess Captain Planet brainwashed me a little...) Intelligent systems design can create an industrial environment which is actually beneficial to local ecology. This book gets four stars rather than five because I wish it was longer. I wanted more details about specific things that have been/can be done in the service of this idea. Instead, the book is short and talks in broad strokes for a more skeptical audience than me. I would love to loan this book to you.