Andersen Design Economic Evolution Discourse

 I find support for home businesses in unexpected places The Happy Face, a one of a kind painting by Brenda Andersen in the 1950s on mug by WestonAndersen produced in a categorically new type of production- the production as an art form located on Southport Island Maine, the home of original Andersen Design , Image by Mackenzie Andersen I have been trying to read the Camoin Report - a development plan for the Boothbay Peninsula in Maine. A local public-private group calling itself the Joint Economic Community Development council for Boothbay and Boothbay Harbor (JECD) spent 79000.00 of taxpayers’ money to hire New York consultants to prepare a plan for our community. My initial reaction was that a remote consultant firm cannot create as relevant a development plan as someone who knows the community well, but in all fairness, the report does a decent job of representing all views in the community, more so than we usually get from our community leaders. That scores a point for us...

 Greed and the real estate boom in Boothbay Maine  tolu-olubode-unsplash I was recently in an online dialogue in my local community where I encountered a developer willfully oblivious to the warnings from the state and the town water department concerning the danger posed by further development to Boothbay’s two water supplies. The warnings came in five years ago when the development on the peninsula was already occurring at a faster than average pace and before the Botanical Gardens built a parking lot in the watershed and the Country Club developer finagled a dysfunctional rearrangement of roads in the center of town to his advantage. The developer whom I shall call Howard, though it is not his name, expressed his vision for quadrupling the density of the village of East Boothbay, where Andersen Design’s production and home were located from 1958 to 2017.  Said by “Howard”: Low income housing should focus on rental units and cluster units like townhouses. Another appr...

jelleke-vanooteghem-unsplash Today there is a cloud of topics floating around in my head and I am wondering which is the starting point of this story and so I begin in the present where I am pondering how to begin.   I started writing on Medium because I have a mission to preser v e  my family's historical hand-crafted ceramic art and design business  into the future. My motivation for doing so is simple, or at least it was in the beginning. My mission began with a love for the work process for which I am very grateful for having been given such a life but such a life also makes me an outsider and so I understand the need for places in society where the outsider finds a home. Our business has provided that to more than a few outsiders throughout its history which began in 1952. Right now the business does not have a physical form and so it has receded into its primordial beginnings where its philosophical content and meaning are its form.  The material forms that the...