i love dwell. im sorry the editor left and i do hope the change is all good... i think dwell wolud be even better if it stopped being so serious and started living a little, if you know what i mean... i would love to see far fetched designs, designers and applications. we have lo live life and stop being so serious about it....

I was just reading the latest Dwell at the airport, and honestly I don't know what could make the magazine better. It's a decent magazine. There's no magazine aside from the Japanese mag IDEA (idea-mag.com) that I find truly amazing. I read Metropolis, Dwell, NewtypeUSA, HOW, Lurzer's Archive, ReadyMade, Print or CMYK, Swindle, and Architecture Record pretty regularly, and I actually like getting the information from multiple sources. They do what they do well, so I see no need for a major change in content.

I actually had a real problem with a recent issue of Dwell.

The issue was about sustainable design.

On the cover was a modern house... Made almost entirely out of concrete.

Concrete is made of cement, which is made by blasting limestone out of enormous quarries (often destroying irreplaceable habitat), and then cooking it with similarly vast quantities of coal.

Greenhouse gases and heavy metals are released into the atmosphere in huge amounts.

An all-concrete house is a monument to the desecration of our landscape and our environment. There's nothing sustainable about it at all.

I've seen this repeatedly in shelter magazines -- "green" design usually means bamboo tables and a couple of solar panels, with little attention to the fundamental building blocks of the home.

A straw bale or adobe home on the cover of a magazine touting green/sustainable values would be refreshing.

Ha, good point!

I do think that the houses they reported on in those articles presented a wide spectrum of what might be considered "sustainable" or "green", both in structure and lifestyle; even though they chose to go with a project that was decidedly on the lesser side of that spectrum for the cover, I think that has more to do with fact that concrete just looks great.

With Dwell, I don't think you can please both sides of this recent argument. No matter how much we love bringing design to the people, if you want "super-sexy" design, it's going to start skewing to the higher SKU after a few issues. People like to see what they can't afford, perhaps. The "wouldn't it be nice" factor is pretty huge in design publications. Even ReadyMade has some ridiculously impractical and unafforable projects every now and then.

As an environmental management person, I find these discussions a little tricky. While you are absolutely correct in saying that a few bamboo trinkets and solar driveway lights are not sustainable, saying whether adobe or concrete is more or less "sustainable" is a lot dicier. It often depends upon location, availability of complementary materials, etc. I haven't looked back at this issue of Dwell to see what the context was, but I'm not ready to condemn any project based only upon the use of 1 material.

I think that this mini-discussion here shines a light on the heart of an inherent problem with classification. It's easy to compartmentalize anything on a general level, but then subcategorization takes place to the nth degree. Factions form within organizations and then split again based on what sub-sub-sub category most fits a personal view. That's why Pluto is no longer a planet, right? Perhaps a rift of this nature is exactly what happened at Dwell.

While I love Dwell, I am increasingly dissatisfied with the high-dollar value of the projects they choose to showcase. True modern living isn't only for the super-rich. Figuring out how to remodel or build a home within a reasonable budget is something many, many people are trying to figure out. All the budget-conscious remodeling resources out there tend to be more traditional. I think Dwell is moving away from the realities of its readership, and its a shame. I'll still read it, but I'm sad they could not offer what so many are looking for.