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Sustainable Living Audio Book – Learn From Looking – Chapter 2: 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:
3. Find It
Cities are excellent landscapes to hone active observation skills. Hunting and gathering are not just about survival in the wild. For my brother and me, the regular Smithsonian visits, hiking, and sailing were part of a broader set of weekend activities. Stickball in the street and cops and robbers with our bikes in the neighborhood were par for the course. In the 1970s, there was nothing remotely close to the level of travel sports for kids, let alone the sophistication and appeal of video games that exist now. We were often left to our own unscheduled devices. As part of the Atari “Pong” generation, we were amazed when Space Invaders came out. Since there were only a few TV channels in a precable universe and very few of us on the block had video games, we were outside in the small backyard or in the back alley behind our row house much more than in front of any screen.
We became highly skilled urban hunters and gathers. We were trained to see opportunity and then pounce. I remember one weekend in grade school playing with friends in the back alley when a neighbor threw out a vacuum cleaner. The trash pickup on our street was behind the houses in the alley that ran as a spine between the two rows of town houses on either street. This was a protected zone with very little car traffic, and it was largely out of sight of any of our parents. The prize was the vacuum motor. We took to the busted old vacuum cleaner like hyenas take to the carcass of a slain gazelle on the African Maasai Mara in Kenya. More than a decade later at age twenty-one, I would get to see in person the cycle of life on the African savannah. Back in the alley, the heart of the vacuum cleaner was the coveted engine, and we had screwdrivers and wrenches on hand, taken from our parents’ toolboxes. Over multiple years of weekend alley hunting and gathering, Steve and I amassed a sizeable collection of motors and mechanical parts, and the act of taking things apart instilled in us a love of discovery and invention. This expanded into a love of building. We both studied architecture, and decades later we purchased and renovated multiple properties in different cities. Steve’s work focused on residential properties ranging from Chicago to Zurich and most recently Aspen. My real estate development focus included a narrower geographical range from Washington, DC, to Philadelphia but a broader property mix that included transforming homes, warehouses, churches, and even a squirt gun factory into mixed-use properties.
For both of us, the real estate transformations incorporated found objects, local materials, and an underlying sense of energy efficiency and sustainability that was not yet as defined in the mainstream as it is today. I wrote my 1993 architecture master’s thesis on energy intelligence, titled “Eco Humanism,” and it set the stage for a career centered on advancing American energy independence.
The sustainability and the hunter-gathering instinct came from our parents. We would have field trips and collect railroad spikes along abandoned track lines or go to marinas and find old chipped propellers. My grandparents on my mom’s side lived in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and they bought a beach house on the New Jersey Shore in the 1960s. Our family summerhouse is in Stone Harbor, and just south of the town on the end of the seven-mile island is the nature reserve at the point. Growing up, we called it the “Wild Beach.” I remember that on one summer weekend, we walked down to the end of the Wild Beach and found a skate, which looks like a manta ray, washed up on the sand. In addition to sea life and shells, we would also collect debris that had washed up on the beach. We called the man-made finds “trash treasures,” and they ranged from deep blue beach glass to bright orange strings and floats from commercial fishing nets.
On the home front, my mother was particularly dexterous as well as creative. I remember Christmas wreathes that were made from the pinecones either collected from the lot with our sailboat in Ocean City or from one of many hikes. She made baskets out of wooden slats but took it up to a high art with woven pine needle baskets. This simple idea of using resources at hand has carried with me. She would go to nearby farms in Virginia to have wool sheared from the sheep, card it, dye it in huge boiling caldrons in our kitchen, dry it, spin it on two different sized colonial spinning wheels, and weave it on a loom wider than a dining table into “groovy” 1960s and ’70s wall hangings.
She would take some of our drawings as kids and turn the designs into these wall hangings with terrific vibrant colors. I was only flattered years later when I saw the crayon drawings manifested in artwork up on our wall. Her work became popular enough to sell as fine art, but we were happy to have a good portion of it at our home gallery. In the spirit of finding and applying materials, my mom also dug into the art of quilting. My three favorite works of hers are a quilt made from my brother’s old flannel shirts, a coverlet from my grandfather’s old neck ties, and a bedspread made from the indigo dye and other fabric scraps that I specifically found in Japan for her to use back at home.
Both of our parents instilled in my brother and me a curiosity in finding and making things from the objects that other people may discard. The remnants of a disposable society can become assets in a new form. My brother’s early sculpture included found objects, and his photography focused as well on industrial castoffs. One of my favorite photographic series from Steve’s work was entitled “Blue Collar Cathedral” and it focused on documenting steel mines. The epic scale of the structures with the long and high framework shares the feeling of a nave of a church, and we have many of his images at our home, some printed as large as five feet across with key objects or human figures for scale.
4. Invention
Active observation skills can lead to invention. When we look at something intently and question why or why not something else, we have planted the seed of invention. This compilation of sketchbooks and insights is loaded with global “inventions” that in many cases are improvements and practices handed down over multiple generations. Parents inspired children and their children to follow.
The year 2013 marked the celebration of one hundred years of innovation across four generations of my family. Since 1913, the spirit of invention and “made in America” manufacturing has driven innovation and job creation through patents, production, and improvements to the ways that we both live and work within the built environment. This century-old commitment has inspired me to continue innovating. The US Patent and Trade Mark Office (USPTO) granted my first patent in 1993 on a modular building constriction system, and a year after the hundredth anniversary of my great-grandfather’s thirteen patents on indoor plumbing, my patent for light-emitting diode (LED) technology was granted as a step toward the next hundred years. In the LED market, the patent is part of an ongoing focus on energy-saving technology for Independence LED Lighting, which I founded and where I currently serve as the chairman and CEO.
The innovative and strong men and women in my family have profoundly influenced my work. The “One Hundred Years of Family Innovation” section in the appendix of this book includes biographical highlights on multiple generations of influential family members.
Summary of the Power of Observation
The power of observation is about empowering all of us with active observation skills to look more intently at the world around us versus defaulting to a less engaged passive approach. Good things happen with active observation. The good things could be as small as improvement to soil in a personal backyard garden or as large as a paradigm shift in global food production. Imagine seeing a neighbor grow bigger tomatoes, then applying the new compost technique, and then scaling the results to create efficiencies in large-scale vegetable farming.
Situational awareness is a key requirement and advantage to active observations. Innovation and invention often spring from critical thinking, which in turn springs from active observation. The power of observation starts the chain of positive events.
The next chapter addresses some examples of critical thinking, which often involves the ability to question why certain things are done a certain way and not taking anything for granted.
