Leicester Mercury – Cityscape of Leicester in January 1954 from the roof of the Colleges of Art and Technology looking across houses towards Filbert Street and the power station beyond
I was just buying a couple more of these magnets for finding studs and thought, I bet some people don’t know about them! Buy a dozen, they stick to drywall screws through the finish. If you stick enough up you can ‘see’ the framing very easily. They are plastic coated and I have never left a mark using them, even when I slide them around on the wall.
A programmer posts about his house build issues and what he would change about the process. Reading the list of issues, there are a ton of overlapping causes – bad material selections, bad specifications, bad record keeping, bad site hygiene, and (of course) bad work. Despite this spiderweb of root causes, it all boils down to a an unacceptable result. Why did the programmer choose to work with this contractor and his subcontractors? Figuring that out would reveal a lot.
Something that gets missed a bit in new building design is the concept of ‘the next occupant’ – what will they understand or not understand? Here is a good example from MIT where a previous office occupant installed a custom window opener in the pursuit of automated comfort, the current occupant figured out a work around, and now is trying to document the situation for future occupants.
Here is another one over at Green Building Advisor, Revisiting the Sunrise House in Fairbanks which details the second owner of Thorsten Chlupp’s experimental house. It’s behind a paywall unfortunately, but if you have the means GBA is really worth the subscription.
Kickstarter of the Week:Tiny Treehouses is a set of laser cut, intricate house models to liven up your house plant displays.
Photo Series of the Week: Varya Kozhevnikova and her daughter Lera Pavlikova shot a photo series titled 13.31 starring themselves exploring their relationship as teenage daughter and (former) teenage mother.
Japanese student serving lunch. Picture by AHLN licensed CC BY 2.0
Chad Kohalyk made a stressful move to Japan this spring which means we now get some cool insights into the Canadian experience with Japanese daily life. Recently he wrote about his children’s school and how they establish ownership of the school environment among both the students and the student’s parents. He also links to this short video on the subject.
Unity Homes has posted a new video tour of their Zum model home. It’s more of a sales pitch than a detailed discussion of design and construction elements, but it’s still a nice video for those of us who aren’t in the Northeast and can’t make a visit. The audio on the interior shots has a lot of echo despite all rooms being completely furnished – I hope that’s just a recording artifact.
Painted bicycle lanes always seemed like a municipal sisyphean task – the rate of wear is just so high that it never stays in good condition. I was really impressed by this look at colored concrete color stability, almost a decade and it still looks great.
When I was planning to install an area of fenced yard for the dogs to run around in, I had to decide whether to put it in the backyard or front yard of my home – both areas being similar in size. I ended up putting it in the front yard, since I figured that would give me an excuse to be out front where I can interact with neighbors and people-watch. I see a lot of like-minded spirits in this Curbed article on ‘porch culture’.
Stones of the Week: The Dinnie Stones are two lifting stones that live in Potarch, Aberdeenshire, Scotland. Originally installed in the 1830’s as counterweights for bridge maintenance with a combined weight of more than 700 pounds. Looking at the official website, attempts to lift them really took off starting in the 1970’s. They are featured in the documentary Stoneland.
The Fuggerei is the world’s oldest social housing complex still in use, serving a community of “needy Catholic Augsburgers” since the 1500’s. It is located in Augsburg, Germany and there is a museum onsite. The best overview I found is this Smithsonian Magazine article from last year.
Back in late April Fine Homebuilding hosted a webinar on double-stud walls featuring Dan Kolbert and Ben Bogie of Kolbert Building out of Southern Maine. The recording is available to watch here. Video quality is a little rough, but stick it on in the background – it’s always helpful to hear from the people who actually have to build the assemblies.
A brick wall rippling effect is achieved using augmented vision software to allow the precise placement of each individual brick.
Forced Landing of the Week:Engine failure leads to a forced landing of an antique P-51 in this video. What’s fantastic is the analysis of the forced landing that is included in a separate interview segment between the pilot Mark Levy and Richard McSpadden of the AOPA Air Safety Institute. There is a lot to glean from the analysis regarding how to manage your own head space while evaluating and reacting to difficult situations.
Western Trailer Company of Los Angeles has also undertaken the construction of prefabricated houses (1942). Known as the “Westcraft home,” it is the conception of James H. Thomas Richards, designer. From the Library of Congress
I’m all for prefab construction elements, but often find that prefab houses are a poor fit for many applications – too rigid in their limitations relating to module size and finishes. A great exception are prefabricated Accessory Dwelling Units – they largely can fit into the size constrains of one transportable prefabricated module and the finishes are driven (in many cases) by affordability/relation to a rental balance sheet so light-weight, flexible finishes are more acceptable. Here’s a good article on Roger and Martha’s prefabricated ADU as well as an architect’s approach to the space. Here is Wolf Industries working in the niche up in the Pacific Northwest.
Club of the Week: To become a member of the Caterpillar Club you need to (successfully) use a parachute to bail out of a disabled aircraft. Related clubs: The Goldfish Club for disable aircraft survivors who survive exposure at sea and the Martin-Baker Ejection Tie Club for those who survive an ejector seat launch (not sure the aircraft has to be disabled for this one, ejection sheets are enough of a gamble already). I first heard of the Martin-Baker club in relation to whether the tourist in this story would receive one.
A video on How the Staircase Made the Victorians Suffer. Not the fastest paced exploration, but worth it for the visual demonstration in the second half of how precarious a poorly designed staircase can be – one slip and you’re falling quite a ways.
Structure Tech released their internal training video on water intrusion. Looks, it’s an hour and a half which is a stretch, but if you can stick it in the background it’s an incredible montage of poor exterior overhang/valley/trim details. Coming from New England, home of the zero overhang cape, it shines a searing light on what a bad design detail that is.
Reuben Saltzman writing on Stucco-Covered Chimneys over at Structure Tech. Chimneys with multiple construction layers (brick and stucco, veneer stone over framing) are a source of headaches – difficult to diagnose and yet a real threat to life and property.
RetroRenovation clued us in that the Daltile Mosaic Designer is back up and running. It’s a need web tool for the layout of mosaic details – I’m curious what the process looks like once you ‘submit’. It looks like perhaps it loops in a local Daltile distributor at that point.
Radiation Source of the Week: Rolling Stone published America’s Radioactive Secret documenting the growing radiation hazard presented by an oil and gas waste product called ‘brine’ which can be contaminated with radium radionuclides. An incredible health and safety risk and, like most health and safety risks, one borne by the lower paid workers in the industry and downplayed by the highest paid.
Radium in [marcellus shale] brine can average around 9,300 picocuries per liter, but has been recorded as high as 28,500. “If I had a beaker of that on my desk and accidentally dropped it on the floor, they would shut the place down,” says Yuri Gorby, a microbiologist who spent 15 years studying radioactivity with the Department of Energy. “And if I dumped it down the sink, I could go to jail.”
USModernist manages an archive of more than a century’s worth of architectural magazines (many even have been run through OCR!). If you have an archive, they’ll digitize them for you. I stumbled on this when someone linked to USModernist’s digitized copy of Christopher Alexander’s A City is Not A Tree published in The Architectural Forum (part 1 and part 2).
Paul Theroux’s The Kingdom by the Sea published in the 1980’s mentions a resort company called Butlin’s which is still in business today. It’s a package vacation company that, uh, doesn’t get a lot of respect in Theroux’s travelogue. The geography of their facilities is fascinating – they’re described as being located in “traditional seaside towns” but the nearby town is more marketing than reality, with no true connection to the resort compound. The most charitable metaphor I can come up with is “beached cruise ships.”
Lighting Vendor of the Week: I had a client looking for display lighting that will fluoresce some minerals he wants to display and had a difficult time finding a vendor for UV display lighting. Waveform Lighting looks like the pretty good solution, reach out if you have a better one!
TYPD 