The Oculus at the World Trade Center has as its signature design element exposed truss work that – to me, anyway – greatly resembles the skeleton of a stegosaurus. Whether or not that design is good aesthetically is not really a topic I want to debate. But there’s a usability issue that I noticed the …
The archetypical American home is a wood-framed stand-alone house. Despite the growing popularity of apartments, attached townhouses, and other options besides the detached singe-family house, that type still dominates. Using data from the Census Bureau, the estimates are (as of 2017), there are something like 121,560,000 “housing units” in US, of which 76,833,000 are detached, …
It’s that time of year again: the media are going to drown us all in top-ten lists. (There are sometimes top-twenty lists and a few brave writers have created top-hundreds, but the general assumption seems to be that our attention fades after ten items. That’s probably a good bet, as I know mine does.) In …
I seem to keep returning to the topic of Brutalism. It’s far from my favorite style, but it has its good points and perhaps I cheer for it because it is, as it is widely reviled, an underdog. Chatham Towers, pictured above, is a personal favorite. I can relax a bit and let SOS Brutalism …
Tim Michiels was kind enough to point out that the building I discussed with cast-iron sperm-candle columns is landmarked, and therefore should be reused at some point. Good news. On the other hand, the building has been in its current state since at least 2013, when the picture on its Wikipedia page was taken, which …
