Word: woode
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...there's one thing wood knows how to do, it's rot. Expose lumber to the elements, and within as few as five years, sun, rain, termites and fungus can reduce it to pulp. That's why builders were so enthusiastic in the 1970s when the lumber industry introduced pressure-treated boards--ordinary planks and posts injected with an extraordinary preservative known as CCA that can extend the life of wood fivefold, eliminating repairs and saving millions of trees annually. What got less attention at the time is the fact that CCA stands for chromated copper arsenate--a form...
Though CCA is infused deep into the fibers of wood under very high pressure, the poison--which keeps the insects away--now seems to be leaching out. It's bad enough if decks, docks and maybe even a few picnic tables begin sweating arsenic, but the toxin was also widely used in children's playgrounds, where over the past couple of decades thousands of whimsical wooden forts and castles have been built on sites that once housed metal swings and cagelike jungle gyms...
America's culinary taste is going through its neo-neolithic phase: burned flesh is more popular than ever. The apron-and-tong brigade snapped up 15.4 million outdoor grills in 2000, up 32% from 1997, according to Barbecue Industry Association figures. And while most were gas fired, sales of wood chips and chunks are up almost 50% too. About 75% of American households own a barbecue, and more than half of them are used all year. The best-selling cookbook in America at the moment is How to Grill by Steven Raichlen, who has started a Barbecue Boot Camp after...
...best sculptors, of course, have always valued craft: good making, consummate skill. Quite often in America, those responsibilities were delegated to fabricators, as in most Minimalism. But the special intensity of Puryear's work comes from doing everything himself, mainly in wood (though tar, mud and wire also figure in his repertoire). Through the action of the shaping hand on wood, he brings forth a poetry of material substance that's unique in today's America. Puryear has always been troubled by the art/craft division in American culture. "At bottom it's a class issue really," he says. "'Art' means...
Most people see buildings as things made of steel and glass, wood and stone. Steven Holl sees them first as things made of space and light. Just as the Moors cultivated the trickle of water everywhere in their desert palaces, Holl, who grew up in the cloudy Pacific Northwest, designs buildings that cherish and supervise every sunbeam. Light gathers in the alcoves of his Bellevue Art Museum in Washington State. It sweeps across the arcs of his Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki. It pulses through colored glass in his Chapel of St. Ignatius in Seattle, a building he once...