Beach House Research Articles

Commentary on Gregory Tassey’s “Rationales and mechanisms for revitalizing US manufacturing R&D strategies”

Greg Tassey’s ‘‘Rationales and mechanisms for revitalizing US manufacturing R&D strategies’’ is a scholarly, well researched, and well argued article documenting how the United States is losing global market share in advanced manufacturing and what the US should do about it. But he also astutely analyzes the predominant neoclassical model and how holders of it fundamentally not only misread the problem, but more importantly, prescribe the wrong solution. As David Audretsch and I have argued, the neoclassical economics doctrine is a fundamentally flawed guide to making economic policy in a global, innovation-driven economy. Tassey starts by documenting the extent of the problem of declining US high-tech manufacturing leadership. He documents the hollowing out of many advanced production supply chains, as more advanced manufacturing has moved offshore than has expanded in the US. The challenge though, with effectively communicating this message is that advanced manufacturing loss in the US is a bit like the eroding foundations of beach house, every year a little bit more erodes but it goes unnoticed. It takes the arrival of the big storm that knocks the house down for people to finally become aware of what has been happening. As such, even with the bankruptcy of companies like Chrysler and GM, it’s easy for the public and policy makers to be unaware of this trend. Even more troubling are the many neoclassical economists who rationalize away this trend. Many argue that we’re not actually losing manufacturing share. But this view is normally based on in part on a misreading of national output data that overstates output in the computer and semiconductors industry. Manufacturing output as a share of GDP has stayed somewhat constant between 1994 and 2008, at around 13.7%. But when looking in more detail the picture changes. Over the last 25 years the share of

PRAIA DO PRESÍDIO: santuário da vilegiatura

The construction/approach possibility of an object follows the way of practical exploration of maritime summer vacation and its symbolic character. The approach is characterized by the attempt to weave a “tram”, where socio-spacial is constituted from the diverse dimensions of reality (economic, cultural, symbolic and political). In such way, it becomes necessary to find three basic links to this writing: a space (the beach), a social practice (the staying - the summer house) and the symbolic content involved. In the direction of increasing the analysis, the case Presidio Beach (Aquiraz-Ceara- Brazil) was selected, symbolic place, planned to attend and to foment the necessity of being by the sea. A reflection is pointed about the house and the beach as lived deeply spaces, first sanctuaries, that involve the familiar unit and the nature. In this case, summer house practice appears as an example of construction from this interrelation between spaces: the beach house and the beach. Keywords: space, maritimity, beach house.

Energy and exergy analyses of seawater desalination system integrated in a solar heat transformer

Abstract Among the numerous options to improve the energy efficiency of desalination plants stands out the absorption heat transformer. A heat transformer is a device, which can deliver heat at a higher temperature than the temperature of the fluid by which it is fed. Solar thermal energy can be used as heat input for single effect heat transformer while the high grade thermal energy delivered by the heat transformer can be used as heat source for water desalination. In this paper, an attempt has been made to study the combination: flat plate solar collectors, a single effect heat transformer and desalination system (distillation process) used to provide a beach house located in Skikda (East of Algeria; Latitude 36.52°N, Longitude 6.57°E) with drinking water. This system produces about 500 l of drinking water per day in July. Mathematical models of the solar flat plate collectors (FPC), absorption heat transformer (AHT) operating with the water/lithium bromide solution and the overall desalination system (WP) were developed to simulate the performance of this combination system. The energy and exergy analyses are carried out for each component of the system. All exergy losses that exist in this solar desalination system are calculated. Energy and exergy efficiencies are estimated.

The Beach House (R)

Used in conjunction with UVA-QA-0614 and UVA-QA-0615. Three couples, all good friends, rent a beach house for the week. They all have different financial circumstances and different beliefs about what's fair. They need to find a way to decide who sleeps where, and how to divide the costs of the beach house.

A Phone Call to the Future: New & Selected Poems (review)

Reviewed by: A Phone Call to the Future: New & Selected Poems X. J. Kennedy (bio) Mary Jo Salter , A Phone Call to the Future: New & Selected Poems (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), 222 pp. Mary Jo Salter is as astute a commentator on the current American scene as poets come nowadays. Moreover, this severely chosen sampling from her collections published since 1984, preceded by eighteen new poems, maintains an extremely high level. It displays Salter's graceful skill both in and out of strict forms, wit and an unerring eye for detail, an abundant human sympathy. A large proportion of the poems tell stories. One of the most ambitious, "Alternating Currents" yokes together histories of Alexander Graham Bell, of Joseph Bell (a model for the character of Sherlock Holmes), and of Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan. This union of disparate narratives is well enough achieved, if a bit arbitrary. "The Hand of Thomas Jefferson" succeeds better, I think, bringing together the stories of the widowed Jefferson's lost love (not Sally Hemmings, but Italian-born artist Maria Cosway); of his successive injuries to wrist and arm, and of his final reconciliation with John Adams. Jefferson's longings, his triumphs and frustrations, are rendered real and graspable. Several of the most engaging poems seem immediately personal, involving loved ones or drawing from direct observation. The poet's strengths emerge in the elegiac poems "Lunar Eclipse," for Anthony Hecht, and "Another Session," a sonnet sequence in tribute to a therapist whom the poet calls "Possessor of my secrets, not a friend." At times I think Salter's work might gain from concision, from stepping up the pace of the story, although, Lord knows, I couldn't remove a word from "For Emily at Fifteen." And "Lullaby for a Daughter" informs with meaning a mere four lines: Someday, when the sands of timeinvert, may you find perfect restas a newborn nurses fromthe hourglass of your breast. How is that for taking Longfellow's worn phrase "the sands of time" and making it new? It would be hard not to like several poems that give us on-the-spot portraits or vignettes: "Executive Shoeshine"; "The Rebirth of Venus," in which a sidewalk artist redraws in chalk Botticelli's goddess; "At City Hall," where an intimidated bride and groom are applying for a marriage license; "Boulevard de Montparnasse," a glimpse of two people whom the poet nominates as the most beautiful couple of lovers in the world. If Salter is at all like any other poet, she recalls at moments Robert Frost and Elizabeth Bishop. Hers is a similar Bishoplike precision, as in "Point of View": [End Page 310] As if the leaden clouds had let loose all their force as sharpened pencils,the rain falls into line- or dotted lines, in length and slant so uniform,so steadily dashed off, they are themselves the calm within the storm. That isn't a self-contained poem, only the rich beginning of one. And in the couplet that ends "Goodbye, Train," I can almost hear Frost wrapping up a poem with his gravel-throated delivery: I think what luck it is, to be one who says goodbye to trains instead of other people. In poems that don't remind me of anyone else, Salter is fond of citing odd details in seemingly whimsical fashion, then letting them open up into deeper comparisons. Waking up in the morning, a weekend guest finds her thoughts leading to the birth and death of planets ("Beach House, Space-Time"). The experience of waking is beautifully conveyed, too, in "Wreckage," in which coming out of the world of dreams is likened to having a ship sink beneath one's feet. A poem, we are told in the deftly turned "Poetry Slalom" is like a downhill skier weaving his way between obstacles: "Much less / the slam / than the slalom / gives me a thrill: / the solemn, no fuss / Olympian skill / in skirting flag after flag / of the bloody obvious." At moments formal, Salter's language never descends to bookishness. It is as if she were writing a letter to an intelligent and sensitive reader-so that, reading her, we...

The Beach House (Y)

Used in conjunction with UVA-QA-0614 and UVA-QA-0616. Three couples, all good friends, rent a beach house for the week. They all have different financial circumstances and different beliefs about what's fair. They need to find a way to decide who sleeps where, and how to divide the costs of the beach house.

The Beach House (G)

Used in conjunction with UVA-QA-0615 and UVA-QA-0616. Three couples, all good friends, rent a beach house for the week. They all have different financial circumstances and different beliefs about what's fair. They need to find a way to decide who sleeps where, and how to divide the costs of the beach house.

Stasis, He Says, Is Not the Object, and: Monsieur Duvet & Madame Lit

Stasis, He Says, Is Not the Object, and: Monsieur Duvet & Madame Lit Susan Terris (bio) Stasis, He Says, Is Not the Object Falling birds as white scraps of paper,The mountain spiking a wreath of fog. A promise, like a pomegranate,Bleeds when it is cut, This blood-letting more painful than most.Each seed another bitter sweet. Don't Count. Counting confuses the future.Consider terror, yet don't wrap it In the cotton wool of everyday.Let the paper birds fly. Let the bloody seeds Burst. Let the fog keep its secrets.No matter what you do, he—discarding Red fruit—will turn towardWhiteness, step over the crest and vanish. [End Page 83] Monsieur Duvet & Madame Lit In this new storm, the power has failed, so it'scold in the beach house, though the duveton her legs is weighty and—yes—metaphorical. Occam's razor. Maybe Schrödinger's cat, too,and the elephant in the room. Cat, razor, elephant,and an easy woman, a weeping woman. If what seems is or may have been or happenedbefore it happened, then everyone else sees—the woman and man but sees without seeing. His body's cinnamon scent confuses. His wiry hair.He is here yet not here. Another kind offailure; and some days she feels she doesn't touch his life at all. A cold truth no duvet will help.Once, in jest, he'd called himself Monsieur Duvet,and, in response, she became Madame Lit. Still, rain, sadness—pathetic fallacy—and powerlessness.Soon the sun will reappear and the electricity,light and heat, a literal return. The metaphor, however, the elephant-cat-razor one,will be left tense and unlit.M. Duvet & Mme. Lit. Gender wrong, too. Pathetic. [End Page 84] Susan Terris Susan Terris's 2008 book is Contrariwise (Time Being Books). Recent work has appeared in Field, Denver Quarterly, Volt, The New Orleans Review, and Ploughshares. She has a poem in The Pushcart Prize XXXI: Best of the Small Presses. She is poetry editor with Ilya Kaminsky of In Posse Review. Copyright © 2008 University of Nebraska Press

Haunted Histories: Time-slip Narratives in the Antipodes


 
 
 In a startling moment in Margaret Mahy’s The Tricksters, Harry draws apart from the rest of her family in her attic bedroom in the family beach house, Carnival’s Hide. She looks into a mirror and sees her image dismantle, allowing a very different, but nevertheless clearly related figure to emerge. This is a typical event in time-slip stories, with their peculiar interest in the problematic construction of subjectivity. In this case the characters who slip between times are a bizarre trio of brothers who erupt into the more or less ordinary family lives of the Hamiltons, disturbing the modern moment with ancient memories, igniting passions, provoking revelations, raising questions about identity, threatening fragmentation, but finally harnessed in the interests of the ongoing narrative in which Harry’s adult life forms.
 
 

Laying on of Hands

Laying on of Hands Steven Harvey (bio) A dark slick rising and falling in silky waves—that caught my eye. Some dusky residue of night. The sun had just risen above the Gulf, igniting the sky momentarily in pinks and reds and giving definition to the dunes and sea oats all about me while the house, the wooden walkway, even my arms turned golden in the glow. The water, which lay placid and still against the bowed horizon, culminated along the beach in a hush of long, perfect waves. I had been sitting in a beach chair strumming a ukulele when a black shape appeared—materialized, it seemed, in folds of blue—undulating with the water. I set my instrument down and stood to get a better look, shading my eyes. Suddenly a shape like a wind-lifted lapel emerged briefly out of the spray, and I knew that the darkness I saw could not be a shadow, but an object of some kind, though the movement seemed involuntary, more the rocking of the lovely and indifferent semitropical waters than a thing alive. In Moby Dick Herman Melville compares a morning like this one to the morning after the nuptial night when formality and romance have given way to the act of engendering. The air, he writes, is “pensive” and “transparently pure and soft, with a woman’s look” while “man-like” the sea heaves with “long, strong, lingering swells.” The gulls, he imagines, float like the winking and fluttering thoughts of the woman roused from sleep, so different from the dark and “murderous” underwater creatures slithering through the man’s mind, and the horizon trembles with passion, “the fond, throbbing trust, the loving alarms, with which the poor bride gave her bosom away.” I often think of Melville on sunlit mornings at the beach when the sea takes the sky, the combination of elements creating life and offering it as a gift to the planet. It is a lovely metaphor. But this gift, this offering to the dawn, I wondered, looking at the [End Page 114] black shape in the breakers. What have we here? Rarely is it delivered so literally. And a leviathan, to boot. I did not realize at first that the shape rolling in the water was a whale—a baby sperm whale to be exact—but I did walk down to the water’s edge and on closer look saw that it was a large sea creature. Most of the enormous body lay hidden under water that was slowly turning azure in the morning sun, but I saw the tail clearly—the black lapel—that roiled with the waters and, when a breaker tumbled in, rose out of the wave with a gush and slapped back at the sea. We had often seen dolphins play here—St. George Island is famous for them—so I thought it might be a dolphin though it looked far too large. Recently we had heard reports of sharks attacking children at the water’s edge so that thought glided ominously through my mind. I kept my distance. I’m pretty sure that I was the first on the scene since I had watched the shape emerge out of the night with no one else around. After a long look—in which the body rose and fell with the swelling of the waves—I went back to my ukulele and sat in the sand, wondering what is done when an enormous, dead sea creature washes up on the beach. But it was not dead. I walked back to the beach house. Louisa, whose family shared the St. George house with ours, was pouring coffee and blinking her eyes to wake up. Louisa is usually game for anything, even the sight of a whale at the crack of dawn, so soon she and I were headed down the beach, holding coffee mugs in front of us as we tried to negotiate the tricky sand, making our way to the spot where the whale had washed up. It still looked lifeless and out of place, like a sofa rolling on the waves, but two plucky volunteers who were in the water, their...

World Enough and Time: The Handmade Literacies of Young Adolescent Writers

I begin autobiographically, with a story and an artifact of handmade literacy. Many years ago, I performed in my senior class play at Rutherford High School, in New Jersey. The play was Eugene O’Neill’s Ah, Wilderness!, his idealized portrait of family life. The tragedian O’Neill called it wishful thinking about the childhood he would have liked to have had. He subtitled it “A nostalgic comedy of the Ancient Days when Youth was Young, and Right was Right, and life was a wicked opportunity.” The cast and crew were exuberant, enjoying the camaraderie that develops in high-school theatre. I played Aunt Lily, a prim spinster who pines for Sid, the charming but alcoholic uncle. (It was O’Neill, after all!) As the performance nights neared, the nostalgic mood of the play itself, and our impending graduation, infected me, and I decided to give presents to all the cast and crew. I turned to what I did best, then and now—I wrote a parody. My magnum opus, entitled “Nat and Essie and Sid and Lilly: Or, As the Pleasant Beach House Turns,” by “Eujill O’Kedersha,” was a retelling of the play by way of our production—every cast joke, innuendo, backstage romance, and tic and nagging of our director and technical director were included. I ran off copies for everyone on the ditto machine in the teachers’ room. At the after-play party, I presented my gift. Cast and crew fell upon it, and their raucous group reading of the parody was my reward, their gift back to me. I have written many parodies since “Nat and Essie and Sid and Lilly,” certainly because of it, but none that so completely captures and recreates for me a particular moment of writing and performance, a time and place and space. This parody, presented and performed for an emotional occasion, recalls a formative moment in my own literate life, a moment of handmade literacy that represents my adolescent identity and self.

Leaving Liza

This is Chapter Thirteen of Leaving Liza, a novel about life, death, love, friendship, jealousy and lesbian ex-lovers. In the novel, six women are spending the weekend at a beach house in Long Island's Hamptons, where they have gathered to be with their friend Liza, who is battling terminal ovarian cancer. Liza's lover, Jill, has agreed to the house party and helped plan the guest list. But, as she smolders with resentment at the attention Liza is getting and the depth of the women's friendships, she begins to come unraveled. After a severe asthma attack that requires an emergency room visit the day before, Jill conducts a seance, purporting to have contacted another of Liza's ex-lovers, who died a few months earlier. Now, on this last night of the house party, she lets Liza and her friends know what she's really feeling. The editors have asked me to add some “commentary” on the questions this story raises about the roles of ex-lovers. I would hope the scene reflects some of the tensions that can occur when ex-lovers choose to remain friends, particularly when those bonds provoke profound jealousy in both current and ex-lovers. For many of us, the job of assuaging and reassuring the current lover while maintaining intimate friendships with an ex-lover is simply too exhausting and prickly to endure. For others, it is worth the struggle. Liza and her friends clearly think it is. But at what point, they all wonder at this house party, does their hunger for honesty and their anger at being insulted and manipulated become more important than keeping the peace, and possibly their friendship with Liza? Perhaps only Liza's death will free them from this compromising coexistence.

A Stone House

A Stone House Bay Anapol (bio) Now that her mother is dying—will, in fact, die very soon—Kit manages most of the time to forget her. She types her dissertation. She weeds the garden. But her mother creeps in anyway: unannounced, unwanted. Kit imagines 1938 , the year her mother's parents rented a stone beach house on the unfashionable edge of Cannes. They took their daughters out of the heat of Paris as if they were any other middle-class French family. Kit imagines the stone house as small, gray, and perfectly square, the kitchen stocked with ingredients for Croque Monsieur, buttered croissants, chocolate pieces tucked in baguettes. Kit's mother, Solange, is perfectly calm, like all French schoolchildren, the part in her hair not the slightest bit crooked. She strokes each stone of the house with her little hands. She is smiling. She does not know what Kit knows: that in less than a year, the war will take over her life, and she will lose her father, her sister, everything. But now—in this last wonderful summer—Solange sheds her clothes, her city skin, and runs down to the water slapping the white sand cold and pure, far from the smelly streets of Paris. It is only 1938. She dips a clean toe into the sea. This may or may not be the real story, but Kit adds details to the one she tells Jon. She adds a German boy swimming with a blonde girl very close to the stone beach house, so close her mother's heartbeat stops and starts again at the words: Werner, nein. Nein. Kit adds a broken-down train on the way back to Paris, her grandfather searched and taken to Auschwitz, never to return. In the true story, Solange returned to Paris and to school, and the terror, the important things happened later. But Kit cannot help twisting her mother's fate for effect. She's been with Jon for more than a hundred nights, but every night, she spins a tale to capture his attention once again. Her ordinariness is like a birthmark—how can Jon not see it? There is no other dramatic incident to share with him, so she makes the most of what she has. Kit continues to curl up in the bed, under her mother's old silver comforter. It's true that the stories she tells Jon come from her grandmother, second-hand. Her mother said almost nothing of her life before the war, [End Page 14] before she left France, before she married a dull American who called her So. There are many stories Kit doesn't know about her mother: her first kiss, her first love, what it was like sailing into Ellis Island. I don't remember, her mother says, brushing aside all her questions. It isn't important. Her mother was strong. She had willed her past to evaporate as completely as clear water in a jar. "That was the last time she felt safe" is the way Kit ends the story of the stone house. Jon is not listening. He comes into her bedroom with carefully washed strawberries and whipped cream in a small blue bowl. It's like a movie scene, Kit thinks, a perfect movie scene of passion. In a movie, however, the stems from the strawberries and the red stains on the sheets would magically disappear. Jon smiles, but his smile is far away. "Organic berries are the best." Kit understands this is not the first time he has eaten strawberries in a woman's bed. She feels for her heart's relentless pound, buried under clothing and skin, refusing to halt. There is another story she could tell him, but what would it help? In this story, it is Kit who is nine and at a beach house with her parents. The beach house is in America, not France; it is made of pink stucco instead of stone. Florida, where the sun shrieks all day and the cars are white and turquoise, the color of wind-up toys. Her mother is standing by the doorway, calling for her, unsmiling, impatient. Kit is always late. For the...

Space architecture: Schindler's 1930 Braxton-Shore project

Rudolph Michael Schindler (1887–1953) designed a beach house for Henry Braxton and Viola Brothers Shore in 1930. The house was to have been sited on Ocean Front Walk, Venice, Los Angeles [1]. It was never built, but remains a paper project. In the architectural drawings archives at University of California, Santa Barbara, there are both sketch plans and detailed plans for four levels: the ground floor, the main floor, the balcony floor and the roof level. There are drawings for each of the four elevations as well as sections. Constructional details are provided on five sheets. All told there are 13 extant drawings. In his signature upper case, Schindler typed a brief written description of the house [Table 1].

Love in Toytown

Love in Toytown

The architecture of R.M. Schindler

With such masterworks as the Schindler-Chace House and the Lovell Beach House in California, the Vienna-born modernist R. M. Schindler (1887-1953) is recognized as one of the most innovative architects of the 20th century. Nearly 50 years after his death, admiration for his breathtakingly original houses and apartment buildings is at an all-time peak.Containing many never-published drawings and photographs and spanning Schindler's early years in Vienna, his apprenticeship with Frank Lloyd Wright, and his bold contributions to West Coast modernism, this book -- which accompanies the first major Schindler retrospective -- offers the most comprehensive view of his genius to date.

R.M. Schindler: Composition and Construction

Modern Architecture: A Program (1913) (R. Schindler). Schindler's Program of 1913 (H. Mallgrave). The Wagnerschule and Adolf Loos (A. Sarnitz). Buena Shore Club (B. Giella). Pocketbook Collection (R. Schindler). Selected Writings (R. Schindler). Portfolio of Colour Renderings (R. Schindler). Integrity and Ambiguity (A. Sarnitz). 'Proportion Is an Alive and Expressive Tool' (L. March). Log House, Urhutte and Temple (L. March). The Schindler House (K. Smith). Dr. How's Magical Music Box (L. March). The Translucent House (L. March). The Wolfe House (R. Schindler). Portfolio of Apartments (R. Schindler). The Mythic and the Tangible (E. Moule). Space Architecture Inside Out (S. Polyzoides). Portfolio of Furniture (R. Schindler). Construction and the Schindler Frame (J. Sheine). Late Designs 1944-53 (D. Gebhard). Schindler at Work: An Appreciation (E. McCoy).

Proportion and Beauty-The Lovell Beach House by Rudolph Michael Schindler, Newport Beach, 1922-1926

This is a contextual investigation of the theory and design of Rudolph M. Schindler (1887-1953), one of the most outstanding and interesting architects of the Modern Movement in the United States. Born in 1887 in Vienna, he was trained under Otto Wagner at the Academy of Fine Arts, under Adolf Loos in the Bauschule, and under Frank Lloyd Wright working in his studio in Oak Park and Taliesin. The architectural design of Schindler not only reflects the influence of his teachers but it also has had a lasting influence on modern architecture in the United States. Although Schindler did not teach extensively at architectural schools, his articles and buildings were published throughout the United States and Europe. Schindler's personal background is unusual since, although trained in Austria, he spent the rest of his life in the United States without ever returning to visit Europe. He left Europe before World War I and maintained no direct relationship with architects and artists of the Russian Constructivism, Dutch Cubism, German Bauhaus, or Italian Futurism, and, living in the United States, he also was never confronted with the cultural policy of the German Third Reich and the notion of Entartete Kunst. Most modern architects from Austria and Germany left their countries during the time of the fascists. Schindler was in a unique position. Since he remained in the United States after World War I, he was spared the fate of his contemporaries. Throughout his life, Schindler was very much isolated from the so-called International Style, and as a result he gave his body of work a very personal interpretation.