Sustainable Living Audio Book – Learn From Looking – Chapter 1: Part 2

GREENandSAVE Staff

Posted on Thursday 16th July 2020
Sustainable Living Audio Book – Learn From Looking – Chapter 1: Part 2

Sustainable Living Audio Book – Learn From Looking – Chapter 1: Part 2

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The author of Learn from Looking, Charlie Szoradi, has given us authorization to share the written content and drawings from his book with our readers. This is one of many segments that focuses on the overall theme of sustainable design and overall sustainable living.

Book Topic: Sustainable Living

Learn from Looking is about critical thinking and reaching a sustainable future more cost-effectively than ever imagined. The book's subtitle "How Observation Inspires Innovation" speaks to the core aspect of the content, given that the author, Charlie Szoradi, is an architect and inventor who has traveled extensively around the world over multiple decades and built businesses that range from energy saving lighting to indoor agriculture systems. Mr. Szoradi shares insights on "green" clean-technology that are increasingly key for sustainability, profitable businesses, healthy living, and raising intellectually curious children in a pre and post Covid-19 world. We give Learn from Looking five out of five green stars! Note that the audio book comes with the E-book for only $15 together. Click here to Order the Audio Book on Sustainable Living

Sample content from Learn from Looking: 

The Origin of the Drawings in This Book

 

As an architect, inventor, and entrepreneur in the energy-saving marketplace, I am one of many foot soldiers in the trenches of a global sustainability and energy revolution. This collection is about taking the time to draw some details in the field and make some observations. The drawings are made in ink on paper with accordion-style foldout sketchbooks. The books are ideal for onsite illustrations, because the foldout structure allows me to continue drawings across multiple pages and also easily carry the books in my back pocket or backpack.

In the 1980s and early 1990s, I was trained as an architect right at the bridge of analog and digital design. Hand drawing was still the key foundation of expression. I was one of the very last groups of architects to take the comprehensive multiday registration examination on a drafting board versus a screen. Drawing was not an option but simply a requirement.

In the middle of the second decade of the twenty-first century, digital photography on our smartphones provides an unprecedented ease of documentation. However, the act of capturing information from our eyes through our brain to hand illustration encourages what I have started calling “observational pause.” The change in tempo lets us look closer at certain things that we may otherwise have taken for granted. In my case, I have also found that the act of drawing inspires thinking about what we can learn and apply for our lives today. I love the ease of taking photos and videos with my phone and sharing them with friends and family, so this observational pause is certainly in addition to using technology and not by any means a nostalgic attempt to revert to a simpler time. 

Technology is outstanding when used in balance. With grade-school children, my wife and I have had to find ways to manage their love of screens that range in size from TVs, desktops, laptops, and touchpads, to the smartphones. My brother and I were limited as kids to a certain amount of TV time each week, but now for our kids we need to limit the ubiquitous screens and balance “screen time” with “sneaker time.” So we encourage outdoor activities as much as possible, from playing with the neighborhood kids to hiking and biking. 

At so many age and social economic levels, we love to watch versus look. The number of cable channels and online videos is overwhelming to say the least. Watching is largely passive, while looking is more active.The physical act of engagement in an interactive three-dimensional world rather than a two-dimensional screen world will most likely create a stronger body and brain, as well as create a few moments of observational pause along the way. What is old is often new again, and some of the documentation in this book covers design and innovation dating back hundreds of years. Hopefully this work inspires some critical thinking to rethink and provide perspective on how we can thrive in the twenty-first century with the technology that has shaped our communications.

The foldout Stretch-A-Sketch books, as I call them, in this collection are the result of a simple multicultural phenomenon. As a graduate architecture student at the University of Pennsylvania in the early 1990s, one of my professors, Kinya Maruyama, inspired me to look at the world with fresh perspective. Kinya is a Japanese architect that has dedicated his career to innovation and sustainable design. He expanded on what I had learned from my parents about how to look more closely at details and natural structure and study the habitat and process of how people live, work, and play together. 

One of the fist assignments that Kinya gave us was to crack open a walnut shell and look closely at the inside to envision what it would be like to inhabit the space. He wanted us to explore the possibilities of turning traditional architecture inside out and taking clues from natural structure to advance design. He taught me to learn from looking and how looking closer inspires innovation.

Kinya was a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and he gave me, and each of my fellow classmates, very unique Japanese books of blank paper that he had brought over from Tokyo. The books measured 11 1/2” tall by about 3 3/4” wide. The special aspect of these books was that the paper was not bound on a single edge but linked through a zigzag accordion form that unfolded to almost eight feet long. Historically, the Japanese used these books to write vertically and tell stories that would unfold across the length of more than two-dozen panels. 

 

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Kinya also gave us each a unique writing tool. The brush pen had ink in the handle and a brush tip so that you could squeeze the handle to release the ink and actually paint the surface with varying degrees of pinpoint and sweeping strokes.

 

 

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Kinya encouraged us to sketch in the books. Without any training to write vertically in Japanese, sketching became the obvious highest and best use of our architectural skills at that time. More than two decades later with travel around the world, I have filled a massive collection of books and used hundreds of brush pens. 

 

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I needed so many books that I found a Philadelphia book bindery to make custom-sized folded paper and the book cover structure for me, rather than buying the books from Japan. This was my earliest foray into American manufacturing in the middle of the 1990s, and it gave me some foundational experience when we moved our light-emitting diode (LED) manufacturing from China to Pennsylvania about fifteen years later in 2010.

Support Info:

Kinya Maruyama - 

This celebrated architect, author, and educator was born in Tokyo, Japan, in 1939. He earned his master’s degree in architecture in 1964 from the Waseda University. He travels to share his insights and conducts lectures at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Texas, the University of Utah, the University of Washington, and the Kuwasawa Design School. Maruyama also develops his workshops in many other countries such as France, Uganda, and Morocco.

 

 

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