“This is just another exercise where I will impose an artificial budget of £1 for 1 day, to see if I can work around that to make three nice meals – breakfast, lunch and evening meal.
So this isn’t £1 a day for a week – it’s £1 for 1 day only – there is no scaled budget here to save by buying things in any kind of bulk
Parameters for this challenge include::
NO spices or ingredients from my own store cupboards (tap water only)
BUT I can add in anything else that I can get for free without stealing.
Just in case it isn’t abundantly clear: this is just an exercise to try to stimulate my own creativity. This is not intended to represent any kind of real-world hardship scenario.”
01) Exploring Planets Outside the Solar System – In Search of Alien Planets in the Universe Documentary
“Scientists already know about a vast number of exoplanets, or worlds beyond our solar system: telescopes have helped us catalogue thousands already, with many more to come. But it is far more difficult to know what conditions might be like on those planets, since they are so different.
In order to narrow that down, the researchers behind the new study combined a variety of data to understand how habitable planets around M dwarf stars – which make up 70 per cent of those in our galaxy – might be. Planets around M dwarf stars are thought to be the most likely place for us to find alien life, because they are so common and therefore easier to find.
The study helped them redefine our understanding of whether a planet could be habitable, adding new questions to be asked of planets by taking into account the radiation coming from a star and how the planets rotate.”
01) RAINDROP CAKE Recipe Mizu Shingen Mochi – You Made What?!
“Raindrop cake a.k.a. mizu shingen mochi is a lovely jelly dessert that looks like a giant wobbly raindrop. See how to make it and how it tastes on this episode of You Made What?! on Emmymade in Japan.”
“You asked for an affordable Dry Age experiment and today I deliver your request. Normally you dry age an expensive cut of meat as it takes time and patience to do. But after so many requests made I decided to make this video to see what would happen if I dry age a $1 dollar steak.”
Hmmm…
…Marinating in pineapple for two hours, then basting with butter and garlic?…on cheap meat?
01) Oldest US mall blends old/modern with 225-sq-ft micro lofts
“The Providence Arcade is nearly 2 centuries old, but when Evan Granoff bought it was considered one of the city’s most endangered properties. Realizing that the demand for commercial space would never match that for downtown housing, Granoff decided to convert the upper floors of the country’s first indoor mall into tiny loft apartments.
At just 225 square feet, the smallest units would have fallen below the city’s minimum size standard for apartments so Granoff decided to classify his micro-lofts as a rooming house. The Providence rooming house code allows for rooms as small as 80 square feet (single occupancy), as long as they don’t have a cooking facility. Fortunately, for Granoff and tenants, a microwave is not considered a cooking device.
The tiniest units rent for $550 per month, almost half the city average, and all of them rented out almost immediately (there’s now a waiting list). Many of the tenants don’t spend a lot of time at home. We talked to Naz Karim, a doctor who works emergency room shifts, and plans to spend much of the year on a fellowship in Africa and Sharon Kinnier who uses the loft for when she’s working in a Providence lab formulating organic cosmetics (she spends the rest of the time with her husband in Washington D.C.).
The bottom floor of the mall is still commercial, but Granoff limits it to micro retail so no chains and they’re all focused on fashion and art design. We stopped in at nude boutique where Amy Stetkiewicz, one of the 6 local designers, was closing up shop downstairs from her micro loft.”
$750 a month for this is obscene…but I love the general thing they’ve done with this old mall.
01) Habitat 67 stacks 354 prefabs that get urban/suburban balance
“Habitat 67 was a 1960s experiment in dense, downtown housing that tried to combine the best of urban and suburban living. Architect Moshe Safdie wanted to integrate the qualities of a suburban home- the access to nature and views- into a high-rise. Built for the 1967 World’s Fair, Habitat 67 was also a prototype of an affordable “3D modular building system” that he hoped would “reinvent the apartment building”.
Like the Japanese Metabolism movement (see Nagakin capsule tower: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXRJE2caPNY), Habitat 67 is an interconnected web of prefabricated cells stacked so the emergent whole feels less coldly geometric and more organic.
“Habitat 67 comprises 354 identical, prefabricated concrete forms arranged in various combinations, reaching up to 12 stories in height. Together these units create 146 residences of varying sizes and configurations, each formed from one to eight linked concrete units. The complex originally contained 158 apartments, but several apartments have since been joined to create larger units, reducing the total number. Each unit is connected to at least one private terrace, which can range from approximately 20 to 90 square metres (225 to 1,000 sq ft) in size.” – Wikipedia
Originally, Safdie had aimed to create an affordable prefab system, but given the experimental nature of the project, costs reached approximately C$140,000 per unit (pricey for the 1960s). Today, the apartment owners all own shares in the building. Long-time resident George Boynton helped instigate changing the status of the complex from government-owned apartment building to a private Limited Partnership Complex. He gave us a tour of the 10-story building and a walk-through of Mosha Safdie’s newly-renovated apartment.
Not so sure I’d do well with the open heights…but, this is still awesome.
Nakagin: 140 plug n’ play capsules float in metabolist tower:
“Resembling clusters of space pods stacked 13 stories tall, the Nakagin Capsule Tower is the world’s first example of capsule architecture. When erected in 1972, tiny prefab apartments were stacked like LEGOs (by crane) around a concrete core. Attached by only 4 high-tension bolts, the capsules were designed to be plugged in and replaced when necessary.
Each pod was a micro apartment measuring 4 by 2.5 meters, intended for Japanese businessmen who wanted to avoid a long commute home. Everything came built-in: a bed, a sink, a refrigerator, bathroom, folding desk and even a TV, radio and alarm clock.
Built in 1972 in Tokyo’s Ginza District, the building is one of the only remaining examples of Metabolist architecture: a movement begun in the 1960s that treated cities as dynamic, evolving organisms. Designed by Kisho Kurokawa for sustainability and recycleability, the Nakagin Tower has not been maintained and now nearly 50 years after it’s construction, many of the capsules are uninhabitable.
In 2007, when the building’s residents voted to demolish the building. Kurokawa proposed “unplugging” the worn-out units and replacing them with newer capsules (an idea supported by the Japan Institute of Architects). Kurokawa died in late 2007. Given the high rents in the Ginza neighborhood, most of the residents continue to push to replace the entire building, but an online group has organized to save the building and its fate remains unclear.
Today, a few residents like Masato Abe rent their unit outs on AirBnB. We (the faircompanies family of five) rented it for a night. In this video, Abe shows us his neighbor’s unit which is in nearly original condition and we filmed our night with the five of us sleeping in a self-contained capsule built for one.”
