The New York Times


April 13, 2011, 8:13 am

On the Merits of Face Time and Living Small

I mused with my wife early yesterday morning about how, more and more these days, humans speak with their fingers, silently tapping keys and hitting “send.” (We were side by side in bed with our MacBooks, checking weather and schedules and the like.)

So it felt refreshing to spend a couple of hours in the afternoon as the docent for the “Creative Splash” exhibit of kids’ poetry and drawings about nature in the physical offices of the local online community-run newspaper, Philipstown.info (made famous in the New Yorker not long ago).

It was very quiet, there, too, so I returned to writing for a bit, but reverted to speech with the arrival of Simon Draper, a champion of living small through his Habitat for Artists project (six-by-six-foot freestanding studios).

DESCRIPTION Simon Draper and Andy Revkin.

I’d touched on his work once before on Dot Earth in “Small (Car, House) is Beautiful.” Here’s a video of Simon at work (music by Dar Williams, who’s a Draper fan and neighbor):

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Simon mentioned that one of his habitats is featured in “Shedworking,” a book (and blog) that the editor, British journalist Alex Johnson, describes as being “for people who work in garden offices and other shedlike atmospheres.”

He also admiringly described the book “Twelve by Twelve,” in which William Powers recounts a year of living (relatively) large in South Carolina in a grid-free home twice the size of one of Simon’s mini-studios.

The closest I came to such an experience came in 1989, when I spent three months essentially living in a six-by-nine “bedroom” in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, writing 1,000 words a day for 100 days straight (with a Thanksgiving break), with the result being my first book, The Burning Season.

That is a feat I will never be able to repeat, for sure.

Here’s to living small, local and face to face — at least some of the time.


About Dot Earth

Andrew C. Revkin on Climate Change

By 2050 or so, the world population is expected to reach nine billion, essentially adding two Chinas to the number of people alive today. Those billions will be seeking food, water and other resources on a planet where, scientists say, humans are already shaping climate and the web of life. In Dot Earth, which recently moved from the news side of The Times to the Opinion section, Andrew C. Revkin examines efforts to balance human affairs with the planet’s limits. Conceived in part with support from a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, Dot Earth tracks relevant developments from suburbia to Siberia. The blog is an interactive exploration of trends and ideas with readers and experts.

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Andrew Revkin is covering the global climate change talks in Cancún, Mexico.

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