The Vine

Hat tip to Amie MacPhee for calling our attention to Coolhaus, a mobile purveyor of architecturally inspired ice cream sandwiches.

Coolhaus is the brainchild of food architects (“farchitects”) Natasha Case and Freya Estreller, who bought and renovated an old mail truck found on Craigslist. Decked out in chrome rims (or Rem’s, ha ha), a pink top, and a fold-down bar and table, the truck regularly appears at Los Angeles area events and festivals, drawing crowds by tweeting its locations to followers (a la the famous Kogi BBQ truck).

Their menu is an homage to modern architects, featuring selections like the Frank Behry, Mies Vanilla Rohe, Richard Meyer Lemon, and Oatmeal Cinnamoneo.

The marketing and merchandising are extremely clever, to be sure. But underneath it all, what appeals most to me is the simple pleasure of people flocking to the ice cream truck — a grownup reincarnation of one of childhood’s most enduring memories.

This is no accident; Coolhaus is a product with social engagement baked in. When describing the company’s core characteristics, the website declares Coolhaus to be “a thinker about reclaiming public and urban space for eating and gathering.”

And when the eating and gathering involves something as decadent as what you see here, we say all the better.

NB: There’s a great firsthand account of the Coolhaus dining experience here. And more photos here.

Congrats to The Vine’s indispensable adviser, supporter and friend Sandra Kulli, who was selected to give an audience talk at this year’s TED conference. Served up in four-minute (tightly monitored) segments, it’s no easy feat to communicate a message that is at once substantive, focused and crisp.

In this very short window, Sandra took us on a Pecha Kucha-inspired photographical tour of the 17 homes she’s lived in throughout her life.

Sandra is a connoisseur of, among many things, places and books. And so, while narrating the slides, she paired each location with a favorite book that reflects the spirit of that particular neighborhood, city, or in some cases stage of her life.

The presentation was every bit as thoughtful and moving as it sounds. (In just four minutes!)

We’ll post the video once it becomes available. For now, enjoy Sandra’s booklist.

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• Toby Israel — Some Place Like Home: Using Design Psychology to Create Ideal Places

• Merry Ovnick — Los Angeles: The End of the Rainbow

• Richard Louv — Last Child in the Woods: Saving our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder

• Sunset Magazine Editorial Staff with Cliff May — Western Ranch Houses

• Lucy Lippard — The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society

• Allan B. Jacobs — Great Streets

• Karen Stabiner — Inventing Desire: Inside Chiat/Day

• Witold Rybczynski — A Clearing in the Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the 19th Century

• Andrea Buchanan and Miriam Peskowitz — The Daring Book for Girls

• Dave Isay — Listening is an Act of Love: A Celebration of American Life from the StoryCorps Project

• Ray Oldenburg — The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores…and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community

• Gordon MacKenzie — Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool’s Guide to Surviving with Grace

• William H. Whyte — The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces

• Reyner Banham — Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies

• Adah Bakalinsky and Larry Gordon — Stairway Walks in Los Angeles

• Romy Wyllie — Caltech’s Architectural Heritage

• Rachel Herz — The Scent of Desire: Discovering our Enigmatic Sense of Smell

• Sarah Susanka — The Not So Big House: A Blueprint for the Way We Really Live

• Clare Cooper Marcus — House as a Mirror of Self: Exploring the Deeper Meaning of Home

• Stanley Kunitz — The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden

• Frederic Morton — Thunder at Twilight: Vienna 1913/1914

The Vine held its second salon at IDEO earlier this week. In a previous post I described the collaborative process that our workshop was built upon. This time I’ll keep it topical, and I want to highlight one theme in particular that I found most resonant:

The notion of culture as community.

IDEO’s general manager Tom Kelley spoke about the significance of an organization’s verbal language vs. body language. (And it holds just as true for communities.) Your verbal language is what’s on your website, how you describe your company, and what you say you value. Your body language is how you behave, and it shows up in the way you treat customers, employees, partners and the community around you. When your verbal and body language are incongruous, people will notice—and the body language is what they’ll interpret as the “real” you.

John Foster, head of talent and organization for IDEO, paraphrased Marshall McLuhan in reminding us, “You are the message.” All of us, as individuals and as organizations, can be incubators (or inhibitors) of community through behavior. If you are the message, what message are you sending?

Systems designer Patrice Martin then observed that great organizations (or brands, or causes) attract personality with personality. This starts with being distinct and genuine, to be sure, but it goes beyond that. It also requires the willingness to polarize and the guts to declare, “We’re not scared to lose you.”

The common thread running through these messages would appear to be authenticity…and that’s certainly at the heart of it. But underlying authenticity, I believe, is alignment. It’s being clear in the what, and grounded in the why, of all that you’re trying to accomplish. Everything else flows from that.

Thank you, IDEO, for two stimulating and mind-expanding salons. Thank you James Hardie and Target for sponsoring them. And thank you to everyone who participated and brought them to life.

A new series of salons is in the works. More to come.