Author Archives: Nichole L. Reber

About Nichole L. Reber

Nichole L. Reber is a writer experienced in journalism and marketing communications, especially with an emphasis on architecture, sustainable building, residential development, and interior design. Her career further includes non-profits, publishing, education, and public speaking. Available for speaking engagements and to lead seminars, she currently seeks employment in or around but not limited to the vicinity of Phoenix.

Curse the Waiting! The Global Faces of Impatience

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Before I lived abroad I thought Americans were the most impatient people in the world. After three years and as many countries, I saw impatience in every culture. It’s a human condition. Just as people feel when impatience stabs, it’s also unnerving to discover what turns people into players in their own mini-dramas. Let’s take a look at some seemingly arbitrary experiences that makes us all realize how ridiculous impatience is— even if it is a human trait.

China
I was unaware of the stereotype of the Chinese as bad drivers until I lived there. Though reams could be written about what makes them bad drivers, for the sake of brevity let’s just talk about honking. This is apparent in north and south China. For instance, if a line of traffic doesn’t move forward before the light turns green, the long line of cars begins honking. Then, regardless of the fact that the six lanes are each 43 cars deep, #2 through #43 honks. This is not simply little putt-putt honk. This is full-on laying on the horn as if it’s the one-note soundtrack for the NASCAR race going on in his mind. Then there’s honking when the cars reach another stoplight. Honking when they drive the same speed as the car before them. Honking when they drive the same speed as the car next to them. Honking at pedestrians walking in the opposite direction as if suddenly he’ll turn around and want a ride in your direction. Honking at pedestrians walking perpendicular to them. Honking at a car a quarter-click down the road that looks like it might turn onto your empty, two-land road. The impatience is so predominant that its manifestations become habit, an undiagnosed tick. This, however, is more like road rage, less like the high school girls of LeRoy, New York.

 

India

Imagine you’re shopping for something, a purse, a video, whatever, at a market. It seems you’ve got the vendor’s stall almost to yourself when whamo! A corpulent woman shoves you aside with one hand. You’re not even looking at the same purse she is. Yet she’s decided she must haggle— now— with the vendor. Then another woman comes up and begins screaming with the vendor, and then another and another until you’re surrounded by a cloud of women like a cloud of gnats. You soon realize that acting polite (at least by your country’s standards) means this vendor will sell out of purses before you get yours. Therefore you watch the crowd of screaming, haggling women for a few minutes. You pick up the gestures— those geared toward the vendor and others to thwart other shoppers—and strongly push your way back into the crowd that seems to have shit you out like yesterday’s lunch. Within minutes you’ve got your new purse and new uses for elbows and shoulders. Only the strong survive.

Peru
What would happen if you make a Peruvian wait a full minute before answering a door? Would they break out in nervous hives? It would never have occurred to me that I’d be thinking, ‘Crikey, shut your pie hole!’ about an impatient Latino. Their reputation is one of almost sloth, yes? Not so when it comes to doors.
There they wait in their cars when picking up a friend from his house and honk until the maid comes to open the (nonelectric) garage door. But it isn’t just a pop-pop honk like the Chinese. This is a cartoonish dut-dah-dah-DUN-dah dat-DUN. Rather than get out and open the things on their own, they get their money’s worth out of their maids, honking for her services as if also trying to get their money’s worth out of their car’s accoutrement.
Same can be said of doorbells. These can’t be rung only once; it’s an unwritten rule to ring them in quick succession half a dozen times. They will not cease ringing the bell until indeed the maid has run to answer the door.

I don’t deny I too become impatient about certain things. But, just as age comes with wisdom, patience comes with travel. It’s taught— or forced— me to simmer down the mini-dramas. It’s allowed me to spend my waiting time focusing on things I like (reading, listening to podcasts, writing, smoking cigarettes, observing people). Patience is perfect; She always gets what she waits for.

 

HS

Architect Blurs Lines of Modern Phoenix

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For those who didn’t get enough Modernism during Modern Phoenix Week, ATW is highlighting a local architect who turns Modernism on its head in the Xeros residence.
Located at the end of two dead-end streets, Xeros rests on the upward slope of a 50’x 250’ double lot that overlooks the city skyline and the mountains behind it. The odd shape of the lot gave architect Matthew G. Trzebiatowski ‘the opportunity to go narrow and tall’ for the 1,650-square-foot house (2,250 including covered outdoor spaces).

 

Images by Bill Timmerman, Timmerman Photography

‘We love to call (the neighborhood) the Hollywood Hills of Phoenix. There’s a lot of things going on in the neighborhood,’ he says. He designed the residence, giving it a Greek name that means ‘dry’ in honor of Arizona’s desert climate. He uses it as his home and architecture studio. Trzebiatowski spent some time on the project, living in a ramshackle house left on the project while he acquired the lot piecemeal and had the design built.

The no-nonsense and efficient, yet playful and user-centered abode rises three levels. The lower two below-grade levels house his studio and client-meeting space. The community areas and bedroom comprise the upstairs, where the almost totally glass-enclosed house maximizes the night skyline views of the city.


No, you’re not mistaken to think that a glass house sounds like the epitome of modernist architecture. Trzebiatowski did embrace the modernist practice of blurring the boundaries between the in- and outdoors, but he reached toward a more contemporary approach to environmentalism and space optimization. And while his material selection prescribes to late modernism, it’s the aging pattern of those materials that shifts its paradigm.

‘The possibilities of steel are endless. I wanted this uniformity of materiality to tie everything together. I used everything from corrugated metal to steel mesh. It all weathers and patinas the same way. This material will long outlast me. It gives a lack of clutter. It was one of those materials where I didn’t have to think too much about it,’ he says.

‘The woven wire mesh on the outside of the building prevents heat, light, and glare from entering the house. That means I don’t have to use the air conditioning as much.’ Having placed the work space below-grade will help minimize air conditioner use during the day, while having his residential rooms upstairs works well for the cooler nights. Given his location in the desert, that translates to savings.

 


Navigability was a key factor that helped push Xeros past modernism.

‘Composition has predication in the idea of promenade. That’s one of the ideas I find critical. I try to engender that in all my work. There’s always a mystery awaiting you around the corner. Makes the space feel bigger when you’re walking through it. I call it “expanding the experience of the house.” By doing that, you slow people down and (show them how to) enjoy the path. In a way it’s a spiraling experience because it pulls itself apart and you enter a room obliquely and see its long axis first. You’re either spiraling down into the lower levels to come see me at the studio or you’re ascending up. That expresses movement,’ says Trzebiatowski, who’s also on the faculty of Taliesin West, the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture, in nearby Scottsdale.

 

Let’s consider that spiral movement. Guests going to the studio level must pass behind a mesh screen that’s part of the house’s façade and descend a short flight of stairs into an exterior, mesh-enclosed forecourt. A stainless steel water feature leads them down the steps and terminates at a reflecting pool.
Access to the private parts of the house also works on the spiral theory. From grade level, one accesses the studio via a long exterior staircase. That staircase emphasizes the home’s and the lot’s length. It leads to a balcony, one of the house’s multiple outdoor spaces, to then into the sitting, dining, and kitchen areas.
‘Because it’s so thin it’s transparent,’ Trzebiatowski says about the composition.

 


That helps guests to navigate through a central gallery towards the cantilevered master suite/media room. This space is completely glazed on the north façade to enjoy the mountain preserve views without sacrificing privacy. To complete the cycle of movement, a cantilevered yellow-glass framed ‘Romeo and Juliet’ balcony allows views back to the city and across the long axis of the building. From that balcony guests have a prominent view of the yard’s warm xeriscaping.
Xeros isn’t a common house. It uses its context in a curious fashion, but as the saying goes, people do crazy things in the desert. This one injected new, antimodernist life into a neglected modernist Phoenix neighborhood.

 

If you’re interested in having your interior design or architecture project profiled on ArchitectureTravelWriter, give me a shout.

This post originally ran in Hong Kong’s leading design magazine Perspective.

HS

Book Suggestion for Writers– Mentor: A Memoir

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Occasionally I suggest various media such as podcasts and web sites for travelers and writers, but rarely do I make book recommendations. It’s time to start.

This post is a hybrid review of Tom Grimes’ Mentor: A Memoir (Tin House Books, 2010, 242 pages). Grimes has written five novels, plays, and screenplays, and edited an anthology of Iowa Writers Workshop fiction. Mentor is the bildungsroman about his coming of age as a writer.

It starts with Grimes applying to writing schools and meeting his literary idol, Frank Conroy. Conroy accepts the 30-something, all-but-unpublished writer into the famous Iowa Writers Workshop (which seems to have lost a bit of its edge atop the US’s top-rated writing schools) Their relationship grows in parallel to Grimes publishing credentials. The mentor/mentee-ship morphs into one of friendship then takes on characteristics of that of a father/son relationship, and finally they achieve something akin to literary equality; meanwhile Grimes publishes a book, has plays staged, and gains recognition.

Read on to learn why I call it a hybrid.

Who should read it? Writers. It’s so literary writer-centric it’d be hard to conceive of anyone else liking it as much as we could.

Read it for content or writing? The former.

Flaws: Grimes sometimes goes off the rails by including too many threads, some of which seem like they’ll be major players in the first half but resolve themselves in just a few sentences toward the end.

He excerpts egregious amounts of copy from his screen/plays.

The narrative arc falls apart in the second half.

He loses his literary narrator’s voice and shifts to that of the teacher/department director (he directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Texas State University).

The gain: Writers will love the snippets of writerly advice: “Worry to maintain the power of the voice” and learning the difference between action and dramatic action.

Grimes’ honest, tense scenes of the crossing the threshold from aching to be published to having the publishing world bid on his work to having the critics reject it should taper my fellow writers’ expectations of what publishing will be like.

The author’s lamentations on the writing process from pre-writing to revising will ring true to writers. In fact they’ll feel like tokens of commiseration.

Despite its literary flaws Mentor‘s topic and a couple of rather arresting scenes made me want to point the book out to every writer I knew. Check it out at  your local library like I did.