Hello friendly computer. Let's talk to the world.

Four weeks of graduate architectural studies has left me all but incapable of producing meaningful speech, so I'll just talk with this picture. These red cords of fabric are pieces being prepared for a braided rug. This project, which I started last winter, is both the most functional and the most time-intensive art-work I have ever had the pleasure of practicing.

Somehow we distinguish art from craft. I can never quite get my head around all the arguments that promote this differentiation. The artists say one thing, the anthropologists say another, and the consumers another.

One thing is for certain, however: architecture school has given me a completely different understanding of the intersection of function and beauty. Art, as I understand it, is not demoted by functionality but rather made somehow more real, more connected—to humans and human life. And on the basis of need, which all organisms share, it is connected to the rest of our fellow Earthlings, both animal and vegetable. Spending hours agonizing over cantilevered barns and Shaker architecture may have something to do with this newfound emphasis on art-craft. But I think perhaps it has always been there inside me, especially considering the lifelong trail of craftiness I have traversed (i.e. braided rugs).

Doing something tedious and doing it well is, I think, truly admirable. Thus I make a wish and a hope that this conceptual place and all else be an illustration of care and concern for each tiny human step and its rightness and goodness. Let all our actions be art-craft. Let all our thoughts be delicately directed.