There are long treatises on the topic of the aesthetics of the machine age, starting in the nineteenth century and working their way up to the present. That topic includes everything from the precisionists to steampunk. Great stuff, but not what I want to talk about. The machine-made mass production of architectural elements in the …
It’s not often that obscure engineering criteria make it to the op-ed page of the New York Times, but it happened recently with regard to “concrete masonry units” also known as CMU also known as concrete block. “The Joy of Standards” by Andrew Russell and Lee Vinsel is about the way that modern technological system work …
The NYC Department of Buildings has released another on-line tool. This one provides a fast summary of permits, complaints, inspections by the DoB, violations, and construction accidents for every building in the city, accessible by a map. If you click on the screenshot above, you’ve got the entire city, as I zoomed way out. I …
The picture above is the answer to a question that people outside the field rarely think about: how do you know where your building actually is? There are two common ways of thinking about location: using a map (at any scale, up to maps that are detailed to the inch like Sanborn Fire maps) or …
That’s a picture I took in a church attic some time ago. The wood members in deep shadow are the purlins and plank deck of the roof, and are fairly ordinary structure for a building constructed circa 1900. The brightly-lit piece of wood is a support for the electric wiring, and the wiring is of …
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