- 17 reads
Sustainable Living Audio Book – Learn From Looking – Chapter 2: Part 1
Our GREENandSAVE Staff is pleased to provide our readers with updates on new printed books, E-Books, and Audio Books that peak our interest. If you are an author and you would like us to review your book, please let us know: Contact Us
The author of Learn from Looking, Charlie Szoradi, has given us authorization to share the written content and drawings from his book with our readers. This is one of many segments that focuses on the overall theme of sustainable design and overall sustainable living.
Book Topic: Sustainable Living
Learn from Looking is about critical thinking and reaching a sustainable future more cost-effectively than ever imagined. The book's subtitle "How Observation Inspires Innovation" speaks to the core aspect of the content, given that the author, Charlie Szoradi, is an architect and inventor who has traveled extensively around the world over multiple decades and built businesses that range from energy saving lighting to indoor agriculture systems. Mr. Szoradi shares insights on "green" clean-technology that are increasingly key for sustainability, profitable businesses, healthy living, and raising intellectually curious children in a pre and post Covid-19 world. We give Learn from Looking five out of five green stars! Note that the audio book comes with the E-book for only $15 together. Click here to Order the Audio Book on Sustainable Living
Sample content from Learn from Looking:
Active observation is about training the brain and honing skills. By contrast, passive observation can lead to missing out on a broad range of facets of life that may go unnoticed. Just as an athlete practices to build muscle memory, the act of looking intently requires some work to build expertise. I have identified four main areas of focus that are interconnected sections within this chapter on the power of observation:
1: Active Selection
2: Look Closer
3: Find It
4: Invention
1: Active Selection
Training young eyes is similar to giving children exposure to multiple languages and multiple sports at an early age. An early start simply increases the potential adoption of the skills as the brain and body develop. My parents would take my younger brother, Stephen, and me to the Smithsonian Institute and specifically the National Gallery on weekends. We grew up in Washington, DC, and the free price of admissions at the museums was certainly the right ticket. Shows ranging from King Tut to Degas would come to Washington, and we learned the history of art from a very young age in a similar way that a child might learn a second language without effort through bilingual parents or exposure.
Specifically at the National Gallery, we had to pick out our top three paintings, sculptures, or works of art and then explain to my parents why we picked them as our favorites. I remember that my brother and I resisted on many occasions, but the net impact was “active” observation versus a more “passive” walk-through of a gallery show. This early encouragement to look closely, shape an opinion, and then verbalize the rationale may have been more formative than any of us imagined. We were invested in our choices, and we often learned that two or more of us in the family shared a top pick among our three favorites.
We also had to read the biographical highlights of the different artists that were often displayed at the entrance to each show along with a super-sized photograph or illustrations of their face. Over a decade, from age four to about fourteen, we covered hundreds of artists, and we learned about historical trends through the lens of artistic representation. In high school, I remember taking the advanced placement (AP) exam in art history, and I was able to breeze through essays much more easily than completing the AP physics and AP calculus problems. The APs for American history and European history were loaded with the expected data points, but knowledge of the history of art at least helped put a face on players and events. Preparation for the AP English literature exam required all of the classes and reading that one would imagine, but we had an excellent comparative literature class at Saint Alban’s School for Boys that gave us tremendous perspective. I remember that Professor Paul Barrett would show us paintings ranging from the Enlightenment to midcentury modern, and we could start to see how authors were in sync with artists in how they reflected something as simple as human connection to nature. One of the other positive by-products of the early art observation and communication was a comfort in sharing information and eventually public speaking.
This early exposure to art history and comparative literature became foundational to my later focus on critical thinking and sustainable design. Artists and authors have their own points of view and express them in many different ways. I learned that the same thing can be seen and represented in dramatically differently ways without a binary right-versus-wrong outcome. Solutions may come from a middle ground through combinations and interconnections that are not immediately apparent from inception.
2: Look Closer
The natural world is an excellent landscape to hone active observation skills. In the spring and fall, our parents would pack my brother and me into the car to go hiking down on the canal in Washington, DC, across the river in nearby Virginia, or over in Maryland. I remember specifically being tested on leaves. In the woods, my father would pick up a leaf or point to a tree and ask my brother and me if it was a white oak or red oak tree. He would explain that the white oak has curved “fingers” on the points of the leaf and the inside edges, while the red oak has sharply pointed tips and inside edges. When you glance at the trees among others with the leaves high in the air, the difference is not obvious until you look closer. We also learned to look closer at how an oak tree’s branches asymmetrically bend like the curled fingers of an old man or woman, while the branches on an elm tree more gracefully and more symmetrically rise up and away from the trunk. We were also tested on identifying oak tree bark versus sycamore tree bark, which peals away like it is “sick” of staying on the tree. Further, we would look at evergreens in addition to deciduous trees to identify the difference in needle length and thickness from white pines to other conifers. By hiking at different times of the year, we saw the shading capacity of deciduous trees and learned about the advantage of having them on the south side of a house for shading in the summer. Since my father had explored passive solar architecture in the 1970s, he also shared with us how deciduous trees could add value in the winter by allowing the sunlight to help heat a house after the trees had lost their leaves in the fall.
Looking back, these exercises shaped my design interest as an architect to incorporate nature at a fundamental level. When I designed our solar house in Wayne, Pennsylvania, outside of Philadelphia, I made sure to plant a fast-growing deciduous river birch tree on the south side of the bedroom wing for shading, and evergreens like the blue atlas on the north side for wind shear reduction. These help reduce the air-conditioning and heating load cost on the home, which was featured in the Cisco documentary series “A Million Acts of Green” as one of the most ecofriendly residences in the United States. The right type and placement of trees was one of over a hundred sustainability measures that my wife and I deployed. The breadth of the energy intelligence work became the foundation for the return on investment (ROI) analysis for the online resource that I created: www.GREENandSAVE.com.
Circling back to the childhood experiences with my brother, I remember other explorations into the natural world. As we grew a little bit older in grade school, we would climb Old Rag Mountain each year. Old Rag is about three thousand feet high and located in the Blue Ridge Mountains of the Shenandoah National Park in Madison County, Virginia. I remember that we had to look for the trailblazers on the trees and also identify which direction was north at various rest points. We learned that moss often grows on the shady north side of trees and that lichen grow on the north side of rocks. Years later, I climbed the significantly higher twelve-thousand-foot Mount Fuji while working in Japan and thought back to those early years on Old Rag Mountain. My brother, Stephen, has taken climbing to an extreme. After working in the Swiss Alps, he then moved to Aspen, Colorado, where he currently runs Aspen Alpine Guides. He is the family hero, because he literally saves lives through his work with Mountain Rescue Aspen (MRA). I get a terrific thrill and source of family pride when he sends me photos that include jumping out of high-altitude helicopters over the Rockies on search and rescue missions.
When hiking or traveling by car, my father would also give us topographical maps that had the contours of the terrain without the road names, numbers, and layers of information that are now on our vehicle navigation systems and smartphones. He explained that we could see where we were by learning how to read the topo lines, and he had used similar maps to get through the woods of Eastern Europe on his escape from the communists to come to America.
The parallel to the topo map lessons came with the exposure to nautical charts. Over summer weekends, we grew up sailing in Ocean City and Annapolis, Maryland. My parents bought a small piece of land on an inlet development, with the hopes of building a vacation house. The lot was covered with poison ivy and pine trees, and we kept our sloop on the end of a small dock. My brother and I would sleep up in the bow with the spinnaker bag and anchor lines. We learned how to sail on Sun Fish, Lasers, 420s, and Hobie Cats. I remember learning how to spot the ripples on the water from a wind shift, and it paid off to get a jump on a tack over the other skippers and win regattas.
Only years later, I started to piece together that observing the leaves and the bark, the topo maps and the charts, along with the wind on the water—it was all a foundation for looking closer at the nuanced details that surround us every day. In the part 3 “Commercial Impact” section of this book, the “Sustainable Smart House” and other chapters address some of the fruits of the early labor.
