Books
(1) Finding Florida: An exhaustive, sometimes disheartening chronicle of the rogues, connivers, hypocrites, scoundrels and thieves in Floridian history. (WSJ – Registration Required)

(2) Guidebooks Go Niche: These three travel references find the beauty of playing to small crowds (WSJ)

(2a) Hop in the Saddle, A Guide to Portland’s Craft Beer Scene, by Bike

(3) A Fateful Meeting That Shaped the World: In 1944, John Maynard Keynes and a Treasury official who was later unmasked as a spy hashed out an economic system for the post-war era. (WSJ – Registration Required)

Architecture & Design
(4) The Greening of a Midcentury Classic: A glass home needn’t be an energy hog, as this rethink of Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House makes perfectly clear (WSJ)

(5) Frank Lloyd Wright’s Millard House (WSJ Magazine)

(5a) A quote from In the Cause of Architecture: The Third Dimension by Frank Lloyd Wright

“Both civilizations [Greek and Roman] have been saddled upon as the very ideal so long that our capacity to think for ourselves atrophied. Yet, we may now, from the vision opened by the ideal of a plastic architecture, look down upon the limitations of this antique world with less respect and no regret. We have wings where they had only feet, usually leaden with shoes. We may soar in individual freedom of expression where they were wont to crawl—and we are the many where they were the few. A superior breath and beauty in unity and variety is a universal possibility to us—if we master the Machine and are not, as now, mastered by it.”

Raw Materials
(6) A quote from Rome: A cultural, visual, and personal history by Robert Hughes

“On buildings it [Luna marble] was combined with other marbles, whose variety of origins symbolized the vast spread of the Roman Empire, which could bring any kind of stone from anywhere in the conquered world, from Asia, the Near East, and all over the Mediterranean. Pink marble came from the Greek island of Chios; a greeny-blue marble known as cipollino from Euboea; yellow from North Africa. There were many others, though not as many as would be exploited by late-imperial designers or, at the extreme, by those of Baroque Rome.”

“Color was a sign of preciousness, particularly since colored stone had to be brought a long way; there was none in the environs of Rome. The stone came from all over the Empire: red porphyry from Egypt, green serpentine from Sparta, giallo antico from Tunisia, pavonazzetto from Turkey These imports were ostentatiously expensive in ancient Roman times, and hardly any cheaper in medieval Christian times.”

(7) The Engineer of Playground Pizazz (WSJ – Registration Required)

“But for Mr. Heuken, dreaming up new climbing frames and tree houses is less child’s play than German engineering. Playgrounds need wood that won’t give splinters, metal to withstand the weather and ropes smooth enough for small hands but strong enough for safe climbing.

‘Creativity is hard work,’ he says. ‘Usable ideas require knowledge and a close command of details.'”

(1/8) Manifest Disney (WSJ – Registration Required)

“Geology shaped Florida’s destiny. The conquistadors’ El Dorado it could never be: Florida, Mr. Allman observes, not only has no gold; it is the only American state where no metals at all are to be found. Instead, a spine of tough, porous limestone runs the length of the state, just off the east coast.”

(9) A quote from FLOOR.DWG by Keller Easterling

“Within each supply chain, the movement of containers is just the first stage in a choreography of storage and retrieval that also extends to warehouses and fulfillment centers. Reading GPS signals, magnets, and graphic patterns on these slick and clean floors, forklifts, selects materials from eight-story-tall pallet racks. Intricate networks of belt and skate-wheel conveyors together with horizontal and vertical carousels work with robotic gantries and AGVs of all kinds to constantly redistribute the contents of the container and deliver the individual units for sale. The ground or floor, more than merely the durable surface underfoot, has become the brains of an intelligent navigation system.”