Originally posted 1.26.2012 at www.Forbes.com

‘The only thing I could have done to make them accept me was to water everything down — and I wasn’t prepared to do that.’

By Lindsay J. Westley

When architect Zaha Hadid walks into the Philadelphia Museum of Art, conversation stops. Dressed all in black,she strides purposefully across the vast exhibition hall, her presence nearly dwarfing even the mural-sized Marc Chagall stretching from floor to ceiling behind her.

Hadid’s larger-than-life persona is a frequent topic of conversation in the architecture world, and in concert with the gravity-defying, curvilinear buildings she creates, has earned her a reputation as the diva of architecture. It’s a term applied by admirers and critics alike, to which she responds bluntly “You wouldn’t call me a diva if I were a guy.”

Originally posted at http://www.emsexploration.com/wordpress/mitts-for-when-the-mercury-drops/

When the skis, boots, poles and skins made an appearance in the living room for the third night in a row last week, I knew it was time to either get my husband a hamster wheel, or go visit the snowmakers on the mountain.

Vermont holds the record for most terrain covered by snowmakers in the East — after all, it’s home to “Hug a Snowmaker Day” (really), so we headed up to Jay Peak to pick up DJ’s season pass and to check out the powder — whether real, imagined, or man-made. (And as per last night’s snow-dump, everything is newly dusted in fresh snow.)

We arrived late enough in the day that all of the lifts were closed, which made skinning up the mountain both easy and legal, according to Jay’s AT/backcountry rules (off-limits when the lifts are running). Stir-craziness abated, DJ took a few turns while I put my new Black Diamond Mercury Mitts to the test.

Originally posted at http://www.emsexploration.com/wordpress/even-greener-at-the-green-mounta...

Even a day hike on the Long Trail can feel like an epic journey, thanks to the tree roots, boulders, mud, slippery rocks and scree that litter the trail. It’s one of the toughest thoroughfares in the East, but not from lack of trail maintenance. On the contrary, the Green Mountain Club is just staying true to founder James P. Taylor’s original 1910 mission to traverse the highest, the most rugged and most beautiful of Vermont’s green areas. Most beautiful? Yes. But you definitely have to earn your vistas.

Off the trail, the GMC is equally protective of its green spaces, and last month unveiled a new wood-burning heat and hot-water system on its Waterbury Center campus. That might not sound so very different from the Vermont Castings that’s currently cranking out heat in your living room, but combined with new and existing solar panels and solar trackers, this wood gasification boiler means the club is now net-neutral and expects to produce more energy than it consumes.

So what does gold-star-worthy energy production look like?

Well, it looks an awful lot like a reused 8×20-foot shipping container with a red wood boiler inside, attractively clothed in knotty pine. It answers to the name of “Biobox.”

Originally appeared in the print version of Seven Days on Nov. 23, 2011 and posted here: http://www.7dvt.com/2011shelburne-museum-shuts-down-winter-not-everythin...

In Beach Lodge, the bears are hibernating. The temperature is a chilly 45 degrees, and the windows will soon be boarded up, leaving the taxidermy Ursus in darkness. It’s creepy in here.

Outside, groundskeepers, curators, gardeners, carpenters and conservators rove the grounds in golf carts, their activity recalling a scene from Richard Scarry’s Busytown. Twenty-three gardens have already been cut back and composted; the carousel has been disassembled and stored.

Welcome to the end of the season at the Shelburne Museum, where workers have indeed been busy battening down the hatches for winter. It’s an aspect of the museum the May-to-October crowd never sees. And, in a way, that’s too bad, because the process of buttoning up 39 historic buildings over 45 sprawling acres is itself an interesting “exhibition” with history lessons.

On board the 220-foot grounded steamboat Ticonderoga, director of buildings Chip Stulen resurrects many winterizing tactics from the early 20th century, when the ship was still sailing Lake Champlain.

At an age when most of her peers were riding bikes and playing dress-up, Laura Riedel was decorating. As a third grader, she kept a notebook full of design ideas, and she remembers the moment she walked into a friend's house whose living room was decorated "just right."

In her own house, she didn't have it as easy. When her mother told her she could choose the carpet for her bedroom, Laura requested a specific yellow hue, "but when I came home from school, the carpet was gold, and I really had a fit."

"I painted the walls apple green anyway, but it really mattered to me that the carpet wasn't the right color, and that my mother wouldn't replace it," she says. "I guess that should have been a clue that this was going to be a longtime hobby."

At 52, Laura's canvases are bigger. She designs with her husband, Ralph, 54, and their three adult children in mind, but her quest for good design is a constant.

Sometimes, it's an easy fix - she'll even rearrange the furniture in a hotel room or a rented condo if it doesn't feel right. Other times, it's more of a challenge.

When they first looked at a house for sale on a quiet lane in Radnor in early 2006, it was "really awful," Laura says. Built in the 1950s, it looked very institutional, with flat lines, a hip roof, and plain windows. An angled wrought-iron railing fractured the natural lines of the house, magnified by the flat garage roof and unadorned windows.