Change of plans - speech #6 redux

And, here's the speech I actually gave. I made the mistake of listening to the top seven speeches on American Rhetoric here, and I had to re-write it the night before to add a little more meat. I won another ribbon! (To be fair, I had no competitors.)


Project 6
Vocal Variety

“Stairs”
July 26, 2006


Intro:
Stairs have been on my mind lately. I’m drawing a seven story condominium with two levels of parking beneath. There are a lot of stairs.

I. But this is a luxury condominium with 4 elevators. The stairs are strictly utilitarian. They’re a product of the building codes. A building this tall needs at least two fire rated exits, and these are them. The dimensions in every direction are exact to the thousandth of an inch. They’re made to be functional. They’re so complicated to draw, with the handrails and guardrails at certain heights, criss-crossing the balusters as they go up and down, that there’s not enough time to make them beautiful or dramatic. And that’s not the point. They’re not meant to be seen. They’re not meant to be used. They’re only an escape.

II. Eight miles away, in a small church near the ground in downtown Raleigh, I meet with a pastor and a table full of leaders in his community. We’re also trying to design an escape. We look for an escape from poverty, from generations of need, from a lack of ambition, and a lack of ideas good enough to change people’s hearts.

III. Some might say that they need a stair. They need a fire escape up from the pit they’re in. And that’s not a bad metaphor.

IV. We can give them steps to take. We can show them the direction out. One step might be financial assistance for their needs at hand. One step might be jobs training and a connection to an employer. Another step might be after school programs to pick up where their integrated schools have still failed to inspire.

V. But how far will that get them? Three steps in the air? Four?
a. And why would they take that first step? Is there any incentive at the first landing?
b. And if they got to the second floor, where would they be? Who would they know? What reason would they have to stay?

VI. Stairs might be a strange metaphor, but it’s not a new one. You’ve heard Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” in all its contorted forms. But, do you remember the source? In Genesis, Jacob went to sleep in the Promised Land and he had a dream. He saw angels ascending and descending the stairs between earth and heaven. God has come down to man. Man doesn’t have to climb the stairs on his own.

VII. So, in some ways, poverty is a pit. It’s an impossible hole to scale. To get out takes a miracle. It takes an elevator! Or better, it takes a rocket ship to jump higher than anyone can climb.

VIII. However, we must not confuse the community of this tiny church on the ground with the poverty that surrounds it. Just as we must not confuse my luxury condo in the sky with any height of perfection or attainment. We must not confuse the altitude with the metaphor. Both spiritual poverty and wealth may be present at the same time, just as both poverty and spiritual wealth may be present at the same time.

IX. If we build new stairs for the poor, they should be stairs of family, rebuilding so many broken homes. Stairs of a just education, above the betrayal of the system. They should be stairs of new local business and enterprise to bring funds into the community instead of frittering funds constantly outside the community.

X. When I visit my friends in the small church on the ground, the only stairs I use are the few steps going up to their church door. We sit around the same table in the same room. We're on the same level. We build the stairs together, but more importantly, we all watch for the stairs that have come down to us.

Stairs - Speach #6

I'm returning to my roots for speach number 6. Again, thankfully, I've got a couple days to clean this up:

Project 6
Vocal Variety

“Stairs”
July 26, 2006

Stairs have been on my mind a lot lately. Designing a seven-story condominium with two levels of parking beneath, there are lots of stairs. In architecture, stairs are arguably one of the most significant elements. They’re dramatic and elegant, they’re metaphorical, they’re necessary and very code sensitive.

I. My stairs right now:
a. The stairs I’m drawing now are only utilitarian – this building has four elevators, we don’t expect the tenants to take the stairs except in an emergency.
b. Stairs are the most code sensitive parts of a building
i. They’re required exits – you can’t rely on the elevators in an emergency.
ii. Walls around stairs have to hold up to fire for two hours.
iii. They have to be a minimum width – at least 44 inches.
iv. Treads have to be at least 11 inches, the risers can’t be more than 7”, and they have to be consistent. The nose of a tread has to be 1”.
v. The handrails have to be at 36” above the nose of the tread and have to extend 12” beyond the top step and one tread plus 12” beyond the bottom step. An open stair has to have guardrails at 42”
vi. Balusters can’t be more than 4” apart.
vii. Landings have to be at every 12’ of rise, and have to match the width of the stair.
c. Stairs are a pain to draw!
i. Have to draw at exactly the right dimensions so you know how many steps you need and make sure you meet code.
ii. Have to think in three dimensions –
1. Draw in plan and in section.
2. Is there enough room in the plan?
3. Is there enough headroom underneath?
4. Do all the stairs line up vertically?
iii. Despite our best Computer Aided Drafting software, we still have to draw stairs line by line – the handrails and the guardrails crossing each other, turning, going up the next flight beyond.
iv. If anything changes (and things always change), you have to start all over with new calculations!

II. But while I’m drawing these, I’m thinking about everything a stair could be:
a. Memories –
i. Sesame Street: Cookie Monster as Alistair Cookie for Monsterpiece Theater presents “Upstairs, Downstairs,” starring Grover.
ii. House growing up – Mom did laundry downstairs.
1. Scar on my forehead from falling down the stairs as a baby, wanting to show her something.
iii. Sitting on the South Carolina statehouse stairs after prom with my friends and a couple bottles of Sparkling Cider.
iv. Climbing the stairs up the Eiffel Tower in Paris, all the way up, not wanting to look down.

b. Stairs can be extremely grand and dramatic
i. Think of beautiful Victorian houses with a grand staircase in the foyer, with a woman in a beautiful dress descending.
ii. Remember the Fiddler on the Roof? “If I Were a Rich Man”:
1. There would be one long staircase just going up,
And one even longer coming down,
And one more leading nowhere, just for show.
iii. Think of all the steps on the national capital building.
iv. Or a stadium surrounded by stairs and seats
v. Or, in the “Lord of the Rings,” stairs cut into the rock on a treacherous mountain pass

c. Stairs can be inventive and creative.
i. Look at stairs in modern home magazines – metals, glass, cable rails
ii. Thomas Jefferson brought from European monasteries: alternating tread / monk’s stairs, to save floor space

d. Stairs can be a metaphor for something much bigger
i. Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven”
1. Reference to Jacob’s dream in Genesis of a ladder or stair (depending on the translation) with angels ascending and descending between Heaven and Earth
ii. Madeline L’Engle (children’s author of “A Wrinkle in Time” and lecturer on art and faith) talks her memories of going down stairs without touching them, and wanting to reclaim that freedom of childhood.
1. I used to have dreams about flying down those stairs to our basement and flying around the family room. (What did that mean?)
iii. For someone disabled or in a wheelchair, stairs can be a barrier and a reminder of an insensitive world.
1. Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, requiring access ramps at any change of level.
iv. Or for someone in a fire in a tall building, this is the only safe place and the only way out.
1. Brings us back to the code and my utilitarian stair sections.

So, remember me next time you climb the stairs to your office building or home. Remember what a stair can be. By now, my stairs had better be done. I have a presentation on Friday, even if the condominium tenants will probably almost always take the elevator.

World's Best Way to End a Chapter

These are the last few short paragraphs of chapter 3 of "If on a winter's night a traveler" by Italo Calvino:

In that moment of harmony and fullness, a creak made me look down. Huddled between the steps of the platform and the supporting poles of the shed was a bearded man, dressed in a rough, striped tunic, soaked with rain. He was looking at me with pale, steady eyes.

"I have escaped," he said. "Do not betray me. You must go and inform someone. Will you? This person is at the Hotel of the Sea Lily."

I sensed at once that in the perfect order of the universe a breach had opened, an irreparable rent.

Borrowing from a blog

A friend's blog posted what turned out to be a quite existential article on interstates. I was proud of him, so I posted this response: (reprinted here because I liked my response too and I'm not entirely sure that my post went through . . .)

In response to The Last Homely House: Interstate Memories

Thanks Pastor. Excellent essay. Thanks for sharing.

Where to start a reaction to this? (But, of course, to leave it alone would be inappropriate.)
Reading through the second time, seeing the photos now, the first thing I notice is Philip Johnson's PPG (Pittsburgh Plate Glass) building - a psuedo-gothic cathedral tower of glass, play-acting the part of something ancient with its spires in a modern setting for a modern corporation, with all glass, overlooking the river(s), overlooking the interstate.

Maybe what struck me first was how many memories you have of interstates and how you were able to form such significant opinions about them. It's this rush of emotions and opinions, spurred by a hundred voices of critics and cynics, all contradicting each other into the fact of your memories. For example - "So much spent on fossil fuels!" or "If only he had lived and worked in the city." Or the preservationist - "If it wasn't for interstates, we wouldn't have the problems with sprawl that we have today." Or the historical allegorist - "The interstates of today are what the railroads were to the settlers of yesteryear." Or the phlebotimist - "They're the veins and arteries of our standard of living." Or the college grad "I want to see the country before I have to get a real job." Or the salesman - "My territory stretches from Virginia to Georgia and most of Tennessee." Or the realist - "How much time WASTED inside an automobile." Or the automotive manufacturer - "God bless America!" Or Kevin Costner - "This here is a time machine: in the rear is the past, in the front window, why, that's the future."

You mention the mostly ugly landscape, in contrast to the "commercially devloped." But isn't this what the interstates really show us? Isn't this what the first locomotive passengers saw or the first astronauts who orbitted the earth? In all our moments of land planning and consumption and enterprise, we're just developing dots of land on an unimaginably long line. This is as much as we can do, and we all know that the developers are trying as hard as they can. (I pull the conversation this direction in lieu of the obvious reaction that many may consider flat pastoral land more lovely than the Wilco's and cigarette emporiums that also flower interstate exits.)

But you tried. You gave a flat run of land 3 years of your life and made no connection. Thoreau ached to have come to that kind of a disagreement with the landscape.

I confess I am a little sad that you had to drive so much to get where you are today. I also confess that I can't entirely relate. I've also been across the country, more than once, in an automobile, but I wasn't driving most of the way. And, I wasn't doing it for work. And I think commuting is a violent thing, in LA. But I also know that not much time in life feels more "real" than the time in a car, on an interstate. It's freedom at its most contemporarily literal. It's you and your thoughts and your prayers and your reaction time, committed to a machine for your destination and your best guess at a plan for the moment. Sometimes it's shared with company, and what an intimate relationship that is - one that's not easily forgotten. Oh, I'm slipping into my own memories, and this is your blog, so I'd better quit before I get to the story of the Indians I met on the ride-share board, "Turn on the indicator . . ."

Diversity, Freedom, and Evergreen Avenue

Another fortnight is upon us. Here's speech #5. Why do I pick such complicated subjects?! If you're in the neighborhood, feel free to stop by around lunch time. My wife says this is running long - still have a half hour before bedtime to trim it down.


Project #5 Your Body Speaks

Diversity, Freedom, and Evergreen Avenue
July 5, 2006


I. Intro
a. I’ve been thinking about freedom lately. We all have; it’s July 5th. Holidays remind us of the important things we might otherwise forget. I like Christmas because it makes me remember my family that lives far away when I have to go buy their presents. The 4th reminds us of our freedom.
b. But I’ve also been thinking about freedom because I’m president of our neighborhood association. When I try to remember why we decided to live on our street and why we like it, it’s not always an easy question. Our street reminds me of freedom, and I want to help keep it that way.

II. The declaration of independence
a. All men are created equal – what’s implied here is that not all men are the same – definitely true on our street
i. Look at the people
1. White, black, Latino, Russian with her head covered
2. Ages – kids, young families, grown families, elderly
3. Listen to the languages and music – late night battle of the subwoofers
ii. Look at the houses – I read a lot into what houses say about people
1. Top of the street - Browns – perfect lawn
2. Mexican house with mysterious shrine in their garage.
3. Fence house with bushes – extreme privacy
4. Safewrights – cinderblock house, hasn’t even changed paint color in 50 years
5. Pittmans – cinderblock house – all kinds of additions
6. New, eccentric houses – ours and the doctor’s
7. Small houses far away from the street, natural wild lawns
8. Developer houses – small, maintenance free, affordable
b. Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable
i. Theme of live and let live
c. Form a new government – not for light and transient causes – we had some causes
i. Started this neighborhood association
ii. Causes
1. Crime
2. Danger
a. Worry about violence, a safe place for kids
b. Break-ins
c. Traffic – a perfect quarter mile drag strip
3. Property values
a. Bad development – old houses brought in, broken back rooflines, landlords who don’t care, tenants who don’t care.
d. Provide new Guards for their future security
i. The neighborhood association
1. Reminds all of us that all of us do care about our neighborhood
2. Neighborhood watch, communicating with police to combat crime
3. Communicating with developers, meeting them in city counsel when they try to bend the rules
ii. Considering covenants for better property value
1. Some way of tying our property to a commitment to see our community improve
2. A challenge in such a diverse neighborhood

III. So, the colonists declared independence against their tyrants.
a. They knew the risks
b. The imagined the benefits – could they have guessed their declaration would go so far?
c. Living on our street, I have a good idea of why they did it. It might have been easier to move to Cary, drive a minivan, and own a home only distinguishable by its number. But I’m thankful to be able to celebrate our inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.