A Graying Germany Complicates Merkel's Task - Bloomberg
...While the West is graying overall, Germany getting older faster, with the highest median age in Europe, and one of the lowest birth rates....
... Despite Germany’s reputation for fiscal rectitude, the country’s pensions are headed for a cliff. Close to 80 percent of pensions remain pay-as-you-go and therefore unsustainable given Germany’s graying. Company-sponsored private pensions are supposed to fill the gap, but they are reported to be 30 percent to 50 percent underfunded, and they are overwhelmingly defined-benefit schemes. Recent reforms to raise the retirement age slightly and introduce defined-contribution pensions schemes didn’t come close to putting the country’s liabilities on a sustainable path....
...For all the plaudits that its system of skilled-worker apprenticeships earns, this year was the first one on record when a majority of firms cited skilled-worker shortage as the biggest risk ...
...Young people naturally react to an unresponsive establishment by disengaging from the process or voting for extreme parties....
...Germany’s Federal Statistics Office forecasts that by 2050, Germany’s population will have shrunk to 63 to 72 million from 82 million today, with one-third of those aged 65 or above. By that time, fully half of the under-40 population could consist of immigrants of North African and Middle Eastern origin and their children, while the overwhelming majority of the elderly would be of native German background. This introduces an ethnic, cultural and religious dimension to a generational split...
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ON THE WINDSWEPT southern side of Martha’s Vineyard, at the end of a rural road that emerges from a dark copse of oak trees, sit two austere, inky-black farmhouse-style buildings — a studio and a private residence — that compose Chilmark House. Designed by the New Haven, Conn., firm Gray Organschi Architecture with Aaron Schiller, founder of the New York City-based Schiller Projects, the home, which was built for Schiller’s family, is clad in approximately 80 charred louvers he torched entirely by hand. The striking ebony hue feels at once ancient and modern: Here is the enveloping matte darkness of Anish Kapoor’s Vantablack paint and the glittering primordial obsidian of lava rock. In the foggy early morning light, as the heavy marine layer rolls off the Atlantic, the house emerges dark and startling, as though it was dipped in oil. At other times of day, its opaque blackness, which seems to absorb all the light that surrounds it, acts as a kind of backdrop for the sky’s quicksilver mood changes.
Schiller, like an increasing number of Western architects and designers these days, created the house’s arresting exterior using a process known as shou sugi ban, a centuries-old Japanese technique for preserving and finishing wood by charring it with fire. The treatment — which leaves behind a dense, carbonized layer of blackness — has been around since at least the 18th century, though earlier examples exist. It began as a practical process used mostly for fencing and the facades of rural homes and storehouses, which held valuables, like rice, that families hoped to protect from blazes. Interestingly, while it is no longer as popular as it once was in Japan, it’s found new life in the West. ‘‘It’s become quite stylish,’’ says Marc Keane, a landscape architect and author who has lived and worked in Kyoto for 18 years, ‘‘but in the past, in Japan, it was considered countrified.’’
Shou sugi ban is the Westernized term for what is known in Japan as yaki sugi-ita (or just yakisugi), which translates loosely into ‘‘burned cedar board.’’ (Although in English ‘‘sugi’’ is colloquially defined as cedar, it’s actually Cryptomeria japonica, a Cypress-family species indigenous to Japan.) To achieve the effect, planks of wood are treated with heat on their outward faces only: Traditionally, three boards are tied together lengthwise to form a triangular tunnel. The interior is then set on fire and the scorched surface cooled with water.
Shou Sugi Ban, in Photos
Adam Friedberg
It’s a counterintuitive but ingenious idea: heating wood to render it fireproof. If you’ve ever tried to rekindle a campfire using burnt logs, you get the idea. The combustion also neutralizes the cellulose in the wood — the carbohydrates that termites, fungus and bacteria love — making it undesirable to pests and resistant to rot. The resulting charcoal layer repels water and prevents sun damage as well. By some estimates, boards that have undergone this process can last 80 years or more, but Japan’s Buddhist Horyuji Temple in Nara prefecture, whose five-story pagoda is one of the world’s oldest extant wooden structures, has been around for much longer. Initially built in A.D. 607, the pagoda caught fire and was rebuilt in 711 using shou sugi ban.
