I find the relation of the architect to the client in America today wonderfully eccentric, bordering on the perverse. In the past, those who commissioned and paid for palazzi, cathedrals, opera houses, libraries, universities, museums, ministries, pillared terraces, and winged villas didn’t hesitate to turn them into visions of their own glory. Napoleon wanted to turn Paris into Rome under the Caesars, only with louder music and more marble. And it was done. His architects gave him the arc de Triomphe and the Madeleine.
Tom Wolfe, From Bauhaus to Our House

Now, we’re all for a healthy amount of recycling, redecorating, and re-purposing, and well aware of the (slightly muffled) ticking environmental time bomb that is disposable diapers. Indeed, we ourselves used nothing but cloth diapers when we were ourselves toilet training and later nannying and also when we were wrapping the horses’ legs for shipping to the hunt meet, for lo, we used to work for Greenpeace and are wise in the ways of reducing our trash loads and hate low-grade guilt.

But we are not sure A) why we routinely use the first-person plural, B) exactly how we feel about shopping at a Walmart that has been adorned with decorations made from the cast-off bits of disposable diapers.

From the Consumerist:

…the store features “decorative floor boards and moldings are made from the material leftover from making the leg holes in disposable diapers.”

Yes, really. We weren’t aware that producing “leg holes” resulted in a lot of waste, but we sure are happy to hear that it’s being put to good use. Here are some other features of a “green” Walmart:

• The exposed concrete floor made of waste left over from coal operations
• A new system for keeping refrigerated food cold that lowers the use of refrigerant by 90 percent and in turn reduces greenhouse gas emissions
• Motion-sensitive light-emitting diodes (LED) in refrigerator and freezer cases
• Doors in the meat and dairy refrigerated sections instead of open refrigerator shelves
• 200 skylights that allow electric lights to go down when the sun comes out.

But what do they do when the sun goes down on Architecture?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 16th, 2008 at 6:51 pm by raincoaster and is filed under Art, Baby Gear, Diversions, Shopping, That's Just Wrong. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.