true crime. My partner doesn’t get why that genre is my escape. It isn’t soothing but it is interesting. Those who also watch crime shows will understand. It is an escape of sorts because it is about solving the mystery, understanding what is foreign to us, getting some sense of satisfaction when the “bad guy” doesn’t get away with it.
If you love sappy Hallmark movies, watch those. If you are totally into military movies and documentaries, make time for that. If you geek out on sci-fi, awesome. Set time to explore those new worlds.
We spent time remodeling our patio recently and I now spend some evenings out there just watching the birds at our bird feeders or noting the breeze blow through the trees. I highly recommend shifting the brain to something unrelated to you, hence, true crime for me, or on nothing at all, like a breeze or rain.
#3: Hobbies
Where I have always been challenged is that I want to do so many things. I want to read, write a blog, write a book, start a side hustle, feed the hungry, help lonely seniors, etc. On the one hand, I love that I have so many interests. On the other hand, that can become paralyzing. My list is so long that I don’t do anything. Perhaps this sounds familiar to some of you?
The best advice I ever received was to pick one thing. It is easy to get overwhelmed with all that could be, all the things we should be doing. You can “should” yourself to death. Discover what you really want to do and then do that. Focusing on too many things will lead to anxiety, inadequacy and frustration. After you pick one thing, take one step. Don’t analyze what step to start with. I have spent months on something like that. Just take one step. Act. Through action comes clarity. Try something out. As you get more routinized about that one thing, you may be able to take on more. To start with a list of 10 things and figure out how to cram them all into a weekly schedule, will burn you out.
#4: Sleep
For those who may struggle with anxiety, you probably have received lots of advice on how to get a good night’s sleep. Go to bed at the same time. Listen to a podcast or white noise to help you block out other noise. Don’t eat before going to bed. Breathe deeply to relax, and so on.
Here is what I have learned about sleep. It eludes some of us some of the time, and that is okay. I often will analyze why I wasn’t able to sleep, which leads to more anxiety and more sleeplessness. Don’t fall into that trap.
I go to bed every night at the same time for the most part. I wear a headband speaker (highly recommend to avoid the pain from earbuds) that plays wind noise through my phone app called Atmosphere. I find that soothing. If I start to spin or focus on my to-do list, I breathe deeply or open up Insight Timer, a meditation app that has great sleep meditations. If none of this works, then I do the best I can. If I don’t get great sleep one night, I force myself to shrug it off. Oh well. It happens. I will go to bed early tonight. That usually works.
Now, I still struggle from time to time. Sleep is a very difficult objective to reach when you are concerned about it. But, if it eludes you, don’t stress about it. That only adds more stress.
#5: Kindness
While we should be kind to others, we really should be kind to ourselves. I am a huge WIP in this homework assignment. Have grace and kindness for yourself. Most of us are our own worst critics. Choose grace over guilt about something once a week. If you don’t go help the elderly one week, so what? Try again next week. If you don’t cut the cord to work out at 4 pm on Wednesday, it’s okay. There is always Friday to try again. If you grab takeout instead of making that healthy meal you planned, no worries.
This has been one of the hardest things to do…cut myself some slack! When we get down on ourselves, we create our own anxiety. This has taken me a while to figure out. I still fall into that trap but I pull myself out of the trap much quicker than I used to. One day, I won’t fall into the trap in the first place. Until then, I have grace over guilt on this topic every week.
I find that today, more and more of us are battling with stress and anxiety. Some days, we are fine. Some days, we struggle and lose it over something silly like your child not putting their dishes in the dishwasher (for example – smiley face). Some of us are unemployed and struggling. Some of us have an ill family member or a struggling teenager. Life still continues whether we strike a balance or not. So, we need to think about the five things above and cut ourselves a collective break!As such, Hoffman was particularly fond of the seminal work of Frank Lloyd Wright. For this reason, Hoffman commissioned the architect to design a private house for him in Rye, Westchester Country, in 1955.
The previous year, Hoffman had had another job for Wright: A Jaguar showroom on Park Avenue. Promised two cars as compensation, the architect, who was using two adjacent suites equipped with custom furniture at the city’s Plaza hotel as his New York office, set to work.
Despite featuring floating automobiles and giants roaming Park Avenue, Wright’s concept for the showroom becomes abundantly clear in this illustration. Not unlike the rotunda he was devising for the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum during the same period, Wright envisaged a spiral ramp alongside part of the round display at the centre of the showroom, encircling a Jaguar leaper atop a large planter.
As it turned out the people in the sketch weren’t giants, but the cars were rather smaller than those aimed at adult drivers. For that matter (and due to the absence of a leaper in the wake of the importer’s falling out with Jaguar), Wright’s Hoffman showroom didn’t turn out to be quite as spectacular as the illustration had suggested.
By the median standards of the business, the Hoffman showroom was a rather intricate environment. Yet it was hardly exceptional – certainly not at a time when General Motors regularly held Motorama exhibits at the Waldorf Astoria hotel down the street.
Next to GM’s Tech Center home or the architectural temples devoted to other marvels of consumer product engineering, such as Eero Saarinen’s TWA Terminal at New York City’s Idlewild Airport, the Hoffman showroom inevitably fades into insignificance.
In that context, it hardly comes as a surprise that the showroom received rather drastic cosmetic changes over the following decades, particularly when Max Hoffman handed it over to Mercedes-Benz, by the time he’d chosen to focus his business solely on importing and selling BMWs (he would eventually sell his company to the Bavarians in 1975, before retiring to his Rye estate).
Given this turn of events, it doesn’t come as a surprise that Mercedes’ Park Avenue showroom didn’t attain the status of hallowed ground. Instead, it received a considerable makeover in 1982, which appears to have taken inspiration from nightclubs above all else. The arrival of mirrors on the ceiling (forming a three-pointed star) and carpet on the floor, not to mention the levelling of the main floor height, dispelled not just the brand emblem that used to be at the centre of the rotunda, but most of the showroom’s 1950s flair as well.
With colour palette and materials thus changed to run-of-the-mill 1980s tastes, as well as a more cramped overall spatial impression, due to the addition of office space, the showroom lost most of its subliminal lustre, just as it had gained much of the literal kind. If it hadn’t been for the idiosyncratic balustrade, the (former) Hoffman showroom could have been mistaken for just another random piece of corporate architecture.
Another renovation in 2002 brought other minor changes about, before Mercedes-Benz announced the building of an all-new Manhattan showroom as part of the brand’s new dealership premises in 2008, which would inevitably render the Park Avenue premises redundant.
This eventually happened in May 2013, after Mercedes-Benz had finally moved out and the building’s owners started demolishing the empty estate, in order to ready it for its new, non-automotive tenants.
Today, there are no more traces of Frank Lloyd Wright’s work to be found at 430 Park Avenue. Even the association with such a giant of American cultural history couldn’t prevent this piece of commercial architecture from suffering the same fate as its more mundane counterparts.
This loss isn’t particularly tragic, but deserves a moment’s hesitation. And this brief retrospect.
Frank, hi, thanks for the drawings.
It’s about the bathrooms….
Oh, do you need there to be another one? You did say three.
No, it’s the spiral connecting them up.
Is it too steep?
34 degrees was as shallow an angle as I could manage otherwise I’d lose space for the car park ramp.
Yes and the carpark ramp, Frank. And the ramp in the sitting room and the spiral to the bedrooms.
It does appear