While others were slogging through the recession, Starbucks apparently got its mojo back, reports Claire Cain Miller in the New York Times (1/21/10). This was supposed to be a time when we were giving up the lattes along with other luxuries, but at Starbucks, in the first quarter, net income went up by $64.3 million, revenue rose by four percent, as did same-store sales. Over the past year, Starbucks "stock has nearly tripled to $23.29, though that is still significantly below the record high of nearly $40 in 2006."

Starbucks chief Howard Schultz, who returned to the company two years ago, suggests this is just the beginning of a revival that returns to the company's roots. "We lost our way," says Howard. "We went back to start-up mode, hand-to-hand combat every day." After closing stores and laying off workers, his goal was to get his people "to think like employees of a scrappy little company that just wants to serve a good cup of coffee." This meant buying coffee beans in smaller batches, and tailoring drink menus by region, for instance.

It also meant re-designing stores to achieve a certain "local-ness." For example, at Starbucks stores in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood, "bunches of wildflowers sit in mismatched jugs on tables found in antique shops. Beans are ground to order and poured through a cone like those used in artisinal coffeehouses. On the outdoor patio, coffee grounds are piled in a bucket with a handwritten sign encouraging neighbors to take them for composting their gardens." Howard plans more of the same in more cities. "I think we'll be able to scale this in a similar fashion at a lower cost," he says.

"... A whole, unmilled tree can support 50 percent more weight than the largest piece of lumber milled from the same tree," reports Anne Raver in the New York Times (11/5/09). That's according to research by the Forest Products Laboratory, and it is the organizing principle of Whole Trees Architecture and Construction, which uses whole, small-diameter trees -- those too small to mill -- to build homes, commercial buildings as well as greenhouses. "Curves are stronger than straight lines," says Roald Gundersen, who runs Whole Trees with his "life and business partner," Amelia Baxter.

"A single arch supporting a roof can laterally brace the building in all directions," says Roald. It's also both cost-efficient and environmentally-friendly, he continues: "It's eminently more frugal and sustainable than milling trees ... These are weed trees, so when you take them out, you improve the forest stand and get a building out of it. You haven't stripped an entire hillside out west to build it, or used a lot of oil to transport the lumber." The designs are pretty cool-looking, too (images). Typically Roald uses "small-diameter trees as rafters and framing ... and big trees felled by wind, disease or insects as powerful columns and curving beams."

"It almost feels like we're in a forest, the trees have such presence," says Marcia Halligan, a client. Roald's designs are also passive-solar, with "double-paned glass, positioned to optimize the low-angle winter light," facing south. The concept is especially useful for Roald's solar greenhouses, which "can extend the growing season through the winter, even in a place where temperatures can drop 30 or 40 below." Cost to build a home is "as low as $100 a square foot," and Roald says demand is growing, especially for smaller homes. "I've taken 20 trees per year off one acre, for 12 buildings," says Roald. "You can never tell that we've taken that much wood."

He was born 20 years before cars were introduced but Frank Lloyd Wright was "eerily prophetic in understanding how the car would transform the American landscape," reports Ingrid Steffensen in the New York Times (8/9/09). This understanding also manifested itself in his architectural designs, particularly "his masterpiece, the Guggenheim Museum in New York," whose spiral rotunda and ramps is "linked to the mundane parking garage." In fact, Wright had previously designed a parking garage that "was a giant, off-kilter layer cake of ramps, with concrete ribbons snaking around a central parking core."

Wright's idea was "that visitors should take an elevator to the top of the ramp inside the Guggenheim, and then allow gravity to help them in their gentle centrifugal descent as they admired the artistic scenery ... the smooth forward motion and interrupted spatial flow of the ramps are an architectural equivalent to automotive motion ... Like a highway for art, the Guggenheim's ramps ... created a new viewing paradigm in formed by our shared American love for life experienced through the windshield."

Wright, whose first car was a 1909 K Stoddard Dayton roadster, thought cars would doom urbanism because they would "decentralize the American way of life." He designed the first house, the Robie House in Chicago, with a three-car garage in 1909, well before cars "became a ubiquitious accessory to American homes. He also coined the term carport and often incorporated them in his modest homes of the 1930s." The Guggenheim is currently presenting a retrospective of his work, "Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward," to note both the 50th anniversary of his "death and the opening of the Guggenheim."

You can imagine the hullabaloo when Wilfred J.O. Armster proposed building a condo that looked like a spaceship in leafy Guilford, Connecticut (image). As reported by Penelope Green in the New York Times (8/13/09), Wilfred's "copper-clad, lozenge-shaped, monumental structure," anchored by "vast concrete piers" and resting on a steel H-beam, could hardly be more the opposite of the neighborhood's traditional, Colonial style. But Wilfred pretty much shamed the town into letting him build it, suggesting that their objections were based purely on the way his creation looked, which he said wasn't his idea of democracy.

"Aren't we free here?" he asked, at a town meeting. He went on to point out "the span of styles and periods of the houses that line the town green, ranging from early Colonial to mid-20th century." And about those "cute Colonials," he said, "the Indians with their teepees probably watched them being built and said, 'Who let that into the neighborhood?'" With that, Wilfred's plan was approved, but his next hurdle was actually getting the thing built. It took two years and $2.5 million to complete, and at one point involved renting a helicopter to deliver "cans of nails from the sky as workers blocked out the building."

The interior offers "13 lofty, light-filled apartments (mostly one-bedroom) that slice the building crosswise, from west to east." The exterior is "painted in a brooding matte black." Its perch, atop "concrete stalks ... capture views of Long Island Sound to the south and wetlands to the north." Wilfred came up with the design after developers asked him to create something "really wild." His design has been compared both to Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion house and Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim museum. "Like the Guggenheim, it is a response to and the antithesis of its context," says Duo Dickison, a local architect. "It is clearly looking to the future, surrounded by buildings that are reveling in the past."

PowerPoint may be a threat to national security, suggests David Feith in the Wall Street Journal (7/31/09). David cites a recent article in Armed Forces Journal by T.X. Hammes, a retired colonel in the Marine Corps, who wrote that PowerPoint causes the Defense Department and military to make "decisions with less preparation and less time for thought." He says PowerPoint leads to "vague, oversimplified and easily misunderstood bullet points" and pines for the days when decision-makers formed opinions based on "succinct two- or three-page summaries of key issues."

Edward Tufte, a former Yale professor, has been making a similar point for years, using the Columbia space-shuttle tragedy as his example. Back in 2003, when the shuttle exploded, Edward "fingered PowerPoint as a culprit. He argued that information vital to NASA analysts had been shunted to the bottom of a typically cluttered PowerPoint slide." Turns out he was right, apparently. The Columbia Accident Investigation Board concluded that the slide in question obscured "a life-threatening situation."

The board went on to say that NASA's use of PowerPoint illustrated "the problematic methods of technical communications at NASA." However, others say the PowerPoint critics are off the mark. "Any general opposition to PowerPoint is just dumb," says Harvard pscyhologist Steven Pinker. "It's like denouncing lectures -- before there were awful PowerPoint presentations, there were awful scripted lectures, unscripted lectures, slide shows, chalk talks and so on." Another professor -- a music professor named Jose Bowen -- thinks PowerPoint undermines performance," and advises his colleagues to "teach naked," instead.

"He's coming at it from a really innocent design perspective, and that's what makes this significant," says Sam George in a New York Times piece by Joshua Robinson (7/14/09). Sam is a former editor of Surf magazine and he's referring to Thomas Meyerhoffer, who used to design electronic devices for Apple but has now designed a "startling" surfboard for himself -- and for other surfers looking for something new. "It's about creating a different feeling," says Thomas. "Like the difference between playing tennis with a wooden racket and a metal racket. Or playing golf with wooden drivers."

Actually, Thomas "does play golf with wooden drivers." But the surfboard he's created, known as the Meyerhoffer, features a pointed nose, a pinched middle and a long tail. He fashioned its hourglass outline in a "tiny backyard shed," by hand, out of foam. The idea basically is "a longboard that rides like a quicker, more maneuverable shortboard." Thomas says the result is a shape that's more "organic and fluid which seems to fit the wave better. Instead of surfing the wave, the wave surfs you ... You become one with the wave."

He says the design evolved over time. "I never designed the board to look this way," he says. "It became this way." At first he tried designing by computer, and sending out his creations to be machine-cut into foam and then slathered with epoxy. But he soon realized he had to refine the machined shapes by hand. "Everybody can design on a computer today," says Thomas, "but to go from your computer screen to a board that really works is like cooking food. Anyone can read a recipe, but the master chef will always be much better." His first run of 1,000 boards, manufactured by Global Surf Industries, sold out.

To battle the Recession, Chris Martin of Martin Guitars took a page from his great-grandfather's playbook during the Depression, reports Timothy Aeppel in the Wall Street Journal (7/6/09). Back then, Martin manufactured a "stripped-down" guitar, still made of fine materials, but devoid of fancy inlay and other flourishes. It was made of mahogany and sold for somewhere between $20 and $30, and some say it saved the company. Today, Martin is selling a similar guitar -- dubbed the 1-Series -- although this time around the price is between $800 and $900. But the effect is similar, because that price-point sells well in the guitar category, and Martin quickly sold out its initial run of 8,000 guitars.

"We needed something so we wouldn't have to start laying people off," says Chis, who is the sixth generation of Martins leading the company. Keeping his highly-skilled workers employed is especially important for Chris because, over the long-run, it would be more difficult to train new workers once the recovery kicks in. The challenge was figuring out how to build a guitar that sounds like a Martin but doesn't cost $2,000 or $3,000 like most of its other guitars -- but does not use laminates instead of solid wood like Martin's other lower-end guitars, such as the DXM. Martin was able to accomplish this in large part because its "factory is still largely run as a handcrafted process."

Building a Martin guitar involves "a series of 60 workstations, with more than 300 distinct production steps." Some automation is used but for the most part guitars are "fitted and glued by workers hunched over workbenches." This affords Martin "extreme flexibility" and enables the company "to come up with a new design quickly and without tearing apart a production process" or making "a huge investment." For the 1-Series, "cost savings included switching to a type of lacquer that doesn't require time-consuming polishing," for example. Martin was founded in 1822, and currently employs "about 575 workers, who make 52,000 guitars a year" at its Nazareth, Penn., factory. It also has a factory in Mexico that produces beginner guitars.

"The desire to touch is strong with most textiles, but particularly so with felt," says Susan Brown in a New York Times piece by Tim McKeough (3/5/09). "There's something so tactile about it. Susan will also "tell you that felt is having a very big moment, finding its way into everything from fashion and product decision to architectural installations and home furnishings."

Her own feelings for felt are such that Susan, an assistant curator at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum "has organized an exhibition at the museum called Fashioning Felt." The show "explores the many uses of felt, from traditional pieces, like a Turkish shepherd's cloak and an Afghan saddle pad, to contemporary objects like the 'personal uniforms' designed and worn by the artist Andrea Zittel as conceptual art."

Susan explains that felt is "different from other fabrics because it is made not by knitting or weaving but by matting wool fibers together using water and friction." She says that the result "is very comforting, warm and inviting." She adds: "It's a little bit liberated from the constraints of other textiles ... It's a really wonderful, yet strange material." Her show runs through September 7th (link). ~ Tim Manners, editor.

A sixth-grade teacher in Minnesota has figured out that the way to keep her students energized is to let them stand up and fidget at their desks, reports Susan Saulny in the New York Times (2/25/09). Seizing on this insight, Abby Brown of Marine Elementary school designed an "adjustable height school desk" equipped with "swinging footrests, and with adjustable stools allowing children to switch between sitting and standing as their moods dictate" (image). Abby, along with other experts, believes the desks improve student concentration while also fighting childhood obesity.

She thinks classroom furniture is as important as what she teaches, and she's not the only one: "Dr. James Levine, a professor of medicine at the Mayo Clinic, adovcates what he calls 'activity-permissive' classrooms, including stand-up desks." Referring to the more sedentary lifestyles of many of today's children, he comments: "Having many children sit in a classroom isn't the craziest idea, but look at how children have changed ... We also have to change, to meet their needs."

Lynn Bormann, Marine Elementary's principal, says can quantify the benefits. "We can measure referrals to the office, sick days, whatever it might be," she says. According to Abby, her students love the desks, too: "As an option, it gives students choices, and they feel empowered," she says. Pam Seekel, another teacher using the desks, observes: "I've never seen students with their heads down, ever. It helps with being awake." Nick Raboin, 11, agrees: "Sometimes when I'm supertired, I sit," he says. "But most of the time I like to stand." So does Sarah Langer, 12: "At least you can wiggle when you want to," she says. ~ Tim Manners, editor.

 "I think the concept of luxury is passe," says Andres Izquieta, co-founder of Five Four, a menswear label, in a Wall Street Journal piece by Christina Binkley (2/12/09). That's quite a statement from Andres, given that he and his co-founder, Dee Murthy, built an $8 million business by designing and selling big-ticket apparel. Their very first offering, while still students at the University of Southern California, was a pair of men's jeans that "cost $14 to make and carried an intended retail price of $68." They were all set to ship when a friend said, "Nobody buys jeans for $68. You should sell them for $110."

They re-priced the jeans and of course they "blew out of stores at the higher price." That was five years ago. Five months ago, Andres and Dee were all set to sell a line of $500 peacoats ... and then the market collapsed. They re-sourced their fabric from an Italian mill (at $17 a yard) to India ($2 a yard) and re-priced the coat at $185. They also had to re-negotiate terms with their retail customers, in some cases even accepting "post-dated checks, personal credit-card statements, and even verbal IOUs." They laid off some staff, cut advertising, and moved both their offices and warehouse to save on rent.

They've pulled out of trade shows, stopped using airmail to ship goods to and from China, and "dropped the thread counts of some woven shirts to 40 from 50." Because they need to raise cash, Andres and Dee are "manufacturing just about anything that will turn a buck: backpacks, wine-bottle openers and socks -- three pairs for $20. They're cutting out middlemen by selling direct to consumers on their website and in pop-up stores." However, Andres sees these moves less as cost-cutting than as a new way of doing business. "I want to create our generation's Polo," he says, adding, "You can't be a megabrand in the U.S. today if you're selling a woven shirt for $200." ~ Tim Manners, editor.