Even though the Berkeley Pit in Butte Montana may pose a problem it has some beauty about it. It will be decades to clean it up as well as the rest of Butte. But life in Butte isn’t so bad just go to Http://Booksnotsonew.blogspot.com and take a look at some photos of Butte Montana.

You Have a nice site!

Curlew

Re knitting, as you say simply reusing materials is interesting but not really our focus but I got all excited about knitting a few months back because I’d come across mentions of it being used to generate mathematical forms. However boingboing or a few others discovered them too and gave them a run so I thought I didn’t have much to add. But what I found in the process were a heap of fantastic knitting sites (that you have no doubt already discovered) as well as the men’s knitting movement (”Are you man enough to knit?”). I sympathise entirely, having been taught to knit by my grandmother at an early age.

You’ve probably already heard the story about Niels Bohr (I think, memory unreliable) watching his wife knitting then asking for a pair of needles and some wool, going into another room and coming back some time later to announce he had invented a different way to knit - his wife looked at it then said “yes dear it’s called perl.” Probably apocryphal but it’s one of those stories that should be true even if it isn’t.

One interesting thing about the web is that I think it’s helping activities like knitting rise in the cultural hierarchy, although for quite a while it has been appearing in modified forms in the conventional art world (have you seen the work of my friend Fiona Hall? ) but I think of knitting as being as much like music as visual art because of the sequential and reiterative pattern construction. Since there is a link between musical and mathematical abilities I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that musicians are great knitters.

The reuse of wool is a good example of something else I’ve been researching, however, which is manufacturing processes that mimic nature by endlessly rebirthing the same materials - as a product ages it is deconstructed and the materials are reprocessed back into a new version of the original product. This reuse of wool is a simple and homely version of that.

And I hope you’ve noticed that I’ve taken your advice and I’m using more flickr creative commons photos. And I’ve found some great ones like yewenyi’s very evocative Homebush mangrove photos. Thank you for the suggestion.

heligangardens, I didn’t tell Emil but I hope he’s pleased.

Anyway, I stopped by here because I’ve been thinking about another subject. My blog is on hiatus for several months because my house renovation (see blog) is making things a mess, and I have a paying job I’m doing, which is a book about knitting (you know how knitting-mad the world is nowadays). In particular I’m working on a section about recycling yarn… i.e. the sport that some knitters have of going into thrift stores (or even their own troves of finished objects) and finding garments that are made of good yarn but do not satisfy in terms of looks. These are then unraveled to get the yarn and re-knitted into something they desire more.

So it’s adaptive reuse. Not architecture, of course, which is the focus of your site, but the absolute aplomb with which some of these knitters rip things that they might have spent a hundred hours on a year or two ago — you might find it really interesting. They’re not worshipping the past or trying to “preserve” it in glass… they’re transforming materials in an environmentally sensitive way.

Their motivations mostly aren’t environmental. Basically, it’s that they’re addicted to knitting and are always on the lookout for high quality material, and this is a cheap and fun/resourceful way to get it. But still it has a positive environmental effect in the sense of not producing any new demand for yarn production. And every time they do it it makes them more aware of their ability to transform things. Which can’t be bad.

Cheers, bottleman

SJ xx