I reviewed David Gissen’s The Architecture of Disability for this month’s Landscape Architecture Magazine. Featuring the Acropolis, Yosemite, and Madrid’s Salon de Pinos: an interdependent take on the classical allée: landscapearchitecturemagazine.org/2023/08/0…

The Salon de Pinos features trees held up by elegant red stanchions, making an architectural interdependence out of landscape.

six verbs for accessible design (hint: nothing “universal”): https://sarahendren.substack.com/p/six-verbs-for-accessible-design?utm_source=activity_item

Shearing layers in a building, and teaching the big ideas in and via design. sarahendren.com/2023/07/3…

Architect Frank Duffy's drawing of a house outline with concentric lines inside it labeled site, structure, skin, services, space plan, and stuff

Not so interested in Barbie, but loved going back through some old Gerwig interviews about Little Women + Lady Bird (the latter far less successful as a film, but great to see her talk out each process): www.youtube.com/watch & www.youtube.com/watch

My mom on her first kayak trip at age 75. We had a blast in Olympic Natl Park this week and on glorious Lake Crescent (low nitrogen, clear as glass!). I love that she’s sufficiently offline that she told me about a woman I grew up with who’s “wanting to be an in-FLU-encer, do you know what that is?”

My mom with gray hair on the front of a kayak on Lake Crescent—mountains in the background, blue sky above.

Planning a design class toward philosophy, not a philosophy of design: sarahendren.com/2023/07/2…

Olympic National Park! Unbelievable.

Old growth forest in the park has mosses growing on enormous tree trunks and incredible green growth in every direction

Same daughter reporting to the family chat on her other new July skills

Our family chat includes Freddie’s announcement in all caps: GUYS I CAN MAKE A LATTE

My daughter’s foray into printmaking this week. She has just the right mix of hand-eye acuity and relaxed playfulness.

A table is strewn with woodcut prints, some of red or blue fish, some black and white with wishbones and lemon com slices.

Currently obsessed with watermelon sprinkled with Stardust chili lime mix.

Seeking readings and resources for my new course on design for the assisted human body: sarahendren.com/2023/07/1…

Thinking about how one might organize an architecture/planning class around the themes of US transience, family structures, social mobility, the choice to stay rooted in adulthood, rather than chase jobs only. We got that discourse in Wendell Berry when I was in college, but almost nowhere else.

So pleased my teenagers can still get excited about building a fort on a summer day. How much longer?

A teenager’s bedroom has an elaborate fort made of blankets and pillows and suspended from chairs and bed frame.

My social design collaboration called the Accessible Icon Project is now on view at the Cooper Hewitt, as part of Give Me A Sign: The Language of Symbols: www.cooperhewitt.org/channel/g…

An installation shot of the exhibit featuring the Accessible Icon, with the old image, new image, street art image and accompanying text.

I see my preferred podcast app, Stitcher, is folding later this summer. What other podcast services are folks into these days? I also use the Apple Podcast app, but its UI is…about as good as iTunes.

[School superintendent] Marlon Styles did the opposite of what most leaders do in conflict: he asked for help. He called on local ministers and a group of well-informed community members, whom he called his “positive gossipers,” to speak up… sarahendren.com/2023/07/1…

Possibly the most milestone-birthday-year cliche ever, but I have gone ahead and scheduled a call to explore working with a marathon coach.

It’s going to take a lot of effort to create a countervailing narrative to a generous-seeming “autonomy-led” idea of the good life — to situate autonomy in its right-sized place among a panoply of other strong virtues and civic goods…https://sarahendren.com/2023/07/10/permanent-relief/

Currently reading: Stephen Buoro’s The Five Sorrowful Mysteries of Andy Africa, and Jay Baruch’s Tornado of Life: A Doctor’s Journey through Constraints and Creativity in the ER.

This girl’s three years old today.

A three year old fluffy white Great Pyrenees lying on the sidewalk.