Essay
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Home Smart Home
Energy-monitoring and smart technologies have set up shop in the home, transforming machines for living into veritable living things—with all the bells, whistles, frills, and failures.
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Your House, Your Sandwich
An Architectural Drama in Five Parts
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Stuck Inside of Somerville
In the late winter of 2003, I watched out my window as a fuel truck idled below, belching black smoke. A hose, snaking through the frozen grass, stretched from the back of the truck to the side of…
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When We Talk About Good Design
Many architects and designers, when talked down from the theoretical towers of “sculptural forms” and “floating volumes” and made to speak of their craft in humbler terms…
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Surrogate Cities
So this is what city life boils down to: flat roofs, right angles, and steel-mesh awnings for industrial spice.
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Learnings from Nantucket
I am looking at my favorite photograph of my summer house in Nantucket. It is not a particularly pretty picture. It was taken on a cloudy and gray day. You cannot see the beach, or the moors, or…
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Home Sweat Home
The land we purchased—a little less than 40 acres in the Floyd County foothills of southwestern Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains—is the hilly, unfarmable center of several large…
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All Roads Lead to Home
Davy Rothbart is the editor of Found magazine, a frequent contributor to public radio’s This American Life, and author of the story collection The Lone Surfer of Montana, Kansas. His…
