We tend to travel in one of two ways: to a city to dive into its rhythms and culture, or to some out-of-the-way place to abandon ourselves to the landscape. It’s this second kind of adventure that’s the focus of Once in a Lifetime: Travel and Leisure Redefined. The book showcases new international lodges, campsites, retreats and lookouts that lure guests to a quiet, secluded place.

Instead of high thread count sheets and Michelin-star restaurants, what these places offer is private, uninterrupted access to a special landscape. So it’s regions with extreme, picturesque geographies, especially those in less-traveled corners of the globe, that offer some of the finest destinations. The book takes us to the backwaters of Cambodia, forests in the Alps, and the deserts of Namibia and Tanzania. These lodges and the amenities they offer are modest compared to typical full-service resorts. Instead they break down the routines of sleeping, bathing and dining into clarifying essentials, pursuing sensuality over opulence.

The architecture of these retreats sits restfully within the surroundings and opens itself radically to the outside. Sometimes the experience stimulates, like the otherworldly forest views that pour through wraparound picture windows at the Juvet Landscape Hotel in Norway.

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The southern portion of the Great Plains was especially hard-hit during the Great Depression. Along with financial hardship, an environmental catastrophe of biblical proportions hung like a black cloud over the region. Severe drought in areas where the farmland had been overextended led in many cases to the drying up of an entire way of life and every conceivable thing around it. The Dust Bowl now gets the Ken Burns treatment with a new PBS documentary and an accompanying book. Burns and his collaborator, the producer and writer Dayton Duncan, consider this seminal event to be “the worst man-made ecological disaster in American history.” At a time when numerous other events are giving the Dust Bowl a run for its money in that distinction, Mr. Duncan spoke to PLANET about the lessons worth learning from this chapter in our past.
 
Can you describe your working relationship with Ken Burns and how you arrive upon chapters in American history that you decide to explore?

We’re both drawn to topics that are uniquely or quintessentially American. I have the best job in the world, because the films that I write and produce are about topics that I’ve suggested, from The West and Lewis and Clark to The National Parks and The Dust Bowl. I have a great interest in the connection between our land and our people, and how that interplay has affected our nation’s history.
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If there’s any rule at all governing architecture today, it’s that anything goes. Advanced computer-assisted modeling and fabrication techniques make it possible to build highly complex shapes. Emerging economies and burgeoning cities demand super-sized structures. And there’s no lingua franca for architects working around the world: just about anything each one of them draws can be built. A new book, The Sky’s the Limit: Applying Radical Architecture, takes a closer look at some prominent avant-garde buildings from around the world and tries to puts a finger on what’s really going on. It’s no easy task.

This book classifies buildings according to their physical character: organic, sharp-edged, pixellated, interior, and outward-looking. While radially different from one another, each of these approaches can be understood as a form of resistance to the generic, commercial glass-box buildings that have come to populate our cities. There’s a movement towards gently swollen and rounded forms, expressed in a language similar to Zaha Hadid’s Acquatics Center for the 2012 London Olympics. There’s also a movement for modulated structures that have been broken into an array of smaller parts, like Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. Both these types of buildings reflect a yearning for more varied, surprising and sensual forms. In that sense they’re opposed to orthodox twentieth-century modernism.

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Like it or not, spring is arriving several weeks ahead of schedule in most places this year. The world outside began coming back to life long before the official start of the season and after the very mildest of winters. Time will tell if this is merely a freak aberration or a harbinger of the new normal to come. But since we’re able to venture back outside, the time is ripe to teach our children all about the natural wonders to be found out there. It’s the perfect opportunity to tell them about the events that take place throughout the cycle of the seasons, or at least what things used to be like.
     The recently released illustrated children’s book Outside Your Window is a guide to bird migrations, blooming flowers, foraging squirrels, and so many other yearly phenomena that repeat themselves annually in line with the internal rhythms of the planet. Nicola Davies’ descriptive vignettes and Mark Hearld’s Caldecott Medal-worthy drawings brilliantly capture the astounding magic tricks that the world produces with reliable ease. Whether the scene outside your child’s window is that of rainbows and bucolic pastures of sheep or simply tomatoes being grown on the fire escape, this book celebrates it with an equal measure of awe.
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     With an ever-expanding portion of the global population migrating to cities, it is urban environments that represent the known world for so many. But the realm of experience that someone comes to have in an urban space can actually share a fair amount with what others encounter in places far removed from the busy centers of human development.
     That’s the idea behind an exciting new journal on the personal experience of nature among urban dwellers. Developed in 2008 by three Rotterdam-based Dutch editors, Club Donny is published biannually as a global survey of the ways in which city life intersects with the natural forces that often prove to be even more powerful than the engineering marvels of steel and concrete dominating most visions of the modern metropolis.
     “We offer a platform that aims to bring into the limelight observations, coincidences, stories and encounters of the obvious and sometimes absurd existence of nature in cities,” co-founder Ernst Van der Hoeven tells PLANET.
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For most people, the thought of building a home from scratch would be enough to lay the foundation for a mid-life crisis. For Lou Ureneck, building the framework for a cabin in the woods is precisely the means for avoiding such a breakdown. While he gathers the various items he’ll need to complete the job, he also assembles a story to go along with the assembled structure, in which he tracks the course of the project, from the point of inspiration to his family’s first Thanksgiving dinner inside the cabin’s walls. It makes for a charming new memoir, based on a blog he wrote for The New York Times during the construction process, with the straightforward title Cabin.
     Ureneck’s motives are more complex than simply wanting a place for getting away. He conceives of the idea to build his very own cabin in the deep woods of Maine, not far from his brother Paul’s Portland home, as a response to the spate of bad fortune and difficult transitions taking hold of his life in the midst of his middle aged years – a failed marriage, a recently deceased mother, a newly empty nest, and a health scare of his own to top it off. This new getaway house, he figures, would provide respite from the complications of the outside world. Most likely, it would also reconnect him to his brother’s family after too many years of distance, both geographic and emotional. And having his brother’s family around might also provide some vital manpower from the pouring of the concrete foundation piers to the building of the timber-frame structure, the rafters and ultimately the roof.
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The Japanese comics known as manga can be repurposed in any number of ways. From Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s emotive everyday characters to Naoko Takeuchi’s “magical girl” super-heroines, there is seemingly endless variety in the current offerings of the country’s illustrated tradition. Rarely, though, does the form break so completely from the conventions of plot, structure, and characterization as in the work of Yuichi Yokoyama. Instead, the celebrated artist tends to focus on form itself.
     In the brand new English translation of his latest graphic novel Garden, published by PictureBox, Yokoyama constructs a fantasyland of geometric shapes and mechanized systems that bring to mind what might result if a Conceptual sculptor in the mold of Claes Oldenburg was hired to design a children’s playscape. Yokoyama’s garden abandons shrubs and flowers in favor of materials evoking modern industries. He fills the pages with disassembled airplanes and stacks of boats; conical mountains of paper and buildings made from cloth.
     Odd it may be, but what the artist seems to be drawing on these pages is an equivalence between the products of nature that would occupy a more Edenic garden and the machines that have come to inform contemporary living. It’s a connection both in design and mystique. Specimens from either group can appear to operate independently, managed by interior forces which make them all the more remarkable to those lacking knowledge of their inner workings.
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Last year I spent six unstructured months winding through Latin America from Costa Rica down to the southern tip of Brazil. Amidst my wanderings, there were several constants I found lurking in the many cities, coastlines and thoroughfares I passed through. One of those constants was the all-encompassing presence of public art — vast, unheralded and makeshift swatches of it everywhere I looked. Stencils, murals, wheat pastings, stickers and crude throw-ups… Entire streets, buildings, staircases and dumpsters — from Valparaíso, Chile to Bogota, Colombia — were covered in some form of visual expression.
     Nuevo Mundo: Latin American Street Art by Maximilliano Ruiz has just been released in the United States and is the first book to offer a complete documentation of current street art trends endemic to Latin America. Featuring such heavyweights as Os Gêmeos, Bastardilla, Vitché, Titi Freak and Run Don’t Walk, the book is divided by country and displays the full spectrum of each region’s artistic multiplicity. Each page acts as a vignette or picture postcard from the artists, accompanied by a short, explanatory message that though intended to provide context, generally lets the image speak for itself. Turning the pages, it’s evident that Latin America remains an evocative breeding ground for public art. Thanks to a long history of socio-political adversity, economic instability, lengthy dictatorships and indigenous cultures, there’s something blatantly alive and hungry in each image.
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There’s something simultaneously childlike, hippieish and fanciful about a treehouse. Who would build their home in the supple, swaying branches of a tree? And who would feel comfortable living perched so precariously off the ground? The answer is, apparently, lots of people. A new book in DOM Publisher’s “Design and Construction Manual” series, “Treehouse,” offers up serious, practical, advice, and also some inspiring contemporary examples.
     Most of the treehouses featured in the book are in Central Europe, and tucked within immense, leafy perennials that look as if they’re centuries old. The book’s overarching image, of a small cottage tucked within an explosion of foliage, has a fairy-tale resonance. The trees offer protection from sun and rain, and a sweet retreat from the pressures of everyday life. Treehouse living fulfills our yearning for a simpler, more elemental way of life, one less bound up in materialism and more closely aligned with natural rhythms.
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This Earth Day, after a year that has seen an unprecedented oil spill, devastating natural disasters, and an ongoing nuclear crisis, it’s a good time for some positive news about the environment.  Those looking to counterbalance the fatalistic stories that have dominated the headlines with a few reasons to feel more optimistic about the future sustainability of life on the planet will be happy to find scores of promising items in My Green City: Back to Nature with Attitude and Style, edited by Robert Klanten, Sven Ehmann, and Kitty Bolhöfer. 
      The newly published book is an illustrated guide to a number of the design trends that are guiding the global movement toward the greening of our urban spaces.  Individually, none of the small developments will likely make the lead story on the evening news.  But like stubborn weeds peaking through the cracks in the pavement, they are slowly gaining ground in cities everywhere and supplying evidence that the metropolitan centers of the future will be more unrefined and far wilder than the stark grids of steel and cement previously envisioned.
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