The Cruelest Month
Illustration by Marion Fayolle.
Dritero, Eric and I started KSB Build last year as a business which prioritizes two things: people and spaces. During a time, which redefined the ways we engage with both, we aimed to prototype our business model by the lessons learned in 2020. We considered ways that we value both impermanence and durability, we considered how to honor people and their needs both in the present and in the future.
My first job out of college was studio manager for a painter who made large scale paintings made up of tiny letters, as if the text blew off a page like leaves to the wind. My job was to start with a selected text, break down each word by letter, then manipulate each letter to be printed as a stencil. It was a surreal way to engage with language, taking it apart piece by piece, turning a poem into a picture. I first read T.S. Eliot’s Wasteland, a poem written in the aftermath of war, by physically dissecting all 17,564 letters in it. It was chaotic and sad and hard to follow - a portrait of a city that had survived something awful and would never be the same.
I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you
My Grandfather died last April, when travel was strictly forbidden, when only nurses and grocers weren’t home, when New York was a city of mourning. Grandpa was my role model, an artist, a business owner, a builder, a teacher. This past July I spent a week alone in the house he built when my Mother was a toddler. How foreign the most familiar place I’ve known suddenly seemed. It has been a year of grieving, for the people we lost and the world as we knew it. And now it is April again.
Last week, I was walking my dog on the beach when my phone pushed a notification for “one year ago today”, when I was walking my puppy on the same beach. It’s the beach where Dritero grew up, although he says now it’s much cleaner. It’s the same beach my grandfather was stationed near for naval training in WW2. Along with driftwood and sea glass, pieces of buildings and asphalt from the city wash on shore. The bricks are rounded and worn from the tide; the asphalt polished to terrazzo. Imagine going from clay to brick to structure to rubble in the sea.
I w i l l s h o w y o u f e a r i n a h a n d f u l o f d u s t
These bricks remind me that New York City isn’t a wasteland, but an amorphous place. It reminds me what a curious vocation we’ve chosen, to build in a world that is new each day.
-AK
The Long Spoon Approach
Construction was one of the last industries to be included in the stop work order during the Covid-19 shutdown and was largely business as usual even through the worst weeks in early April. It was also one of the first industries back to the detriment of many builders’ health.
We felt helpless as former co-workers and friends risked their health in order to complete punch-lists. We heard rumors of clients offering to pay the city’s steep fines to continue work regardless of the shutdown. We thought of our own families well-being, many of whom are skilled tradespeople and often work alongside us. How do you delegate when faced with considerable risk?
It brought to mind the classic allegory, in which guests arrive to a feast, prepared and set in an extravagant hall, eager to enjoy the meal until they realize their spoons are too long for them to feed themselves.
They starve only until they realize that they may eat if they reach their spoons toward their neighbors and feed each other.
This past Thanksgiving we found that even on Zoom, with our people just out of reach, this principal still rang true.
It is a parable we’ve taken to heart at KSB, a company formed by friends during the height of the pandemic. Our love of beautiful spaces cannot contend with our love of people. Whether our clients, workers, friends or family – it is paramount that our work is done in the safest conditions, virtually when possible, and in gallant unity.
You can read more about our Covid-19 Preparedness Plan here.
-AK
Building Renotopia
“The utopian art of our time is the kitchen or bathroom renovation—renotopia. Renotopia is the dream that if we could just rip everything out and start again, the perfect world might indeed come into being—if one could just get the appliances and the finishes right. Renotopia is a small but perfect world.”
This historic year has metamorphosed our concept of “home”, into a shelter which indeed has protected many from the madness of Covid-19. How we work, learn, live and mourn has become a virtual reality, our sense of community is now found at the kitchen table, our makeshift desks and workspaces where we see each other’s unobstructed faces. As renovators, we’ve also seen firsthand how our client’s wants and needs reflect the looming prospect of more time spent at home.
When Mckenzie Wark wrote about this satirical idea of Renotopia in 2015, they couldn’t have known just how consolatory home improvement would be in the midst of a pandemic. According to the NYT, professionals who list their services on Houzz reported a 58 percent increase in requests from homeowners compared to 2019, with queries about home extensions and additions up 52 percent.
The pandemic has not only changed the way we think of space, but also our relationship to the outside world. Wark points out that the core trait of renotopia “…is a denial of the necessity for large, infrastructural utopias as foundations for the private ones of kitchen and bathroom. Renotopia is the dream of a civilization in retreat.”
However that doesn’t mean we can’t be thoughtful about home improvement and how our choices might leave things outside our door better than we found it. Consider the following improvements when planning a renovation or new construction project which can achieve an idealized version of your home; both for your purposes and in consideration of its larger impact.
+ Microbial / Antiviral Products
HEPA filters and UVC lights are standard issue in hospitals and other hyper clean environments. We’ve seen an uptick in requests for these materials from homeowners and businesses looking to filter and disarm viruses and other airborne particles.
+ Efficient Energy
The best way to lower your homes ecological footprint also happens to drastically lower your utilities. Passive houses can be retrofit to an existing home or provide a standard for energy efficiency in a new build. These insulation upgrades to your home result in ultra-low energy buildings that require little energy for space heating or cooling.
+ Durable Upgrades
Affordable, compressed ply kitchens will always be the go to for renovators for the sole purpose of cost. We’ve torn out our fair share of Ikea cabinets which are rarely in a condition to be donated or repurposed. On a global scale, these mass production companies are a leading contributor to deforestation. Greta Thunberg would want you to build custom because fine millwork lasts generations.
We face historic changes every day to our health, our environment, our economy, our government… yet it can be bliss to set the outside world aside for a moment to add a fresh coat of paint.
-AK