Design

Observation Bias

There are obvious forms of observation bias, such as thinking that because nearly every building I see has some serious damage that they all do. If I’m looking at a building professionally, it’s usually because there’s something wrong with it. The photo above shows a more subtle version. That’s the station at Seventh Avenue and …

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Two Fields Of Engineering

The towers in the photos above and below are part of the system carrying electricity from the generating plant at Hoover Dam to Los Angeles. The photos are from the HAER survey “Hoover Dam, Los Angeles Bureau of Power & Light Lines 1-3, U.S. Highway 93, Boulder City, Clark County, Nevada” which is an accurate …

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Connected and Interconnected

The late 1920s picture above, from an unidentified building in Washington DC, was taken in an odd location. The gable roof above is a skylight. The plane that looks like the floor is actually a “laylight,” which is glass that looks like a skylight but is not. Typically, laylights are located below skylights, as seen …

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Unexpectedly Heavy

One last look at the George Blumenthal house on Park Avenue, midway in time between the previous two photos. The sidewalk bridge is complete, we’ve got a lot of brick stacked up on the sidewalk, and the street facades are complete at the first floor. It’s clear in this photo that house only has a …

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An Old Joke Endlessly Repeated

Folsom Library, the main library building at RPI, is located at the transition where the gradual westward slope of the campus becomes a steep hill down to the Hudson River and downtown Troy. As a new student, I had been on campus maybe a week before someone told me that the designers of the building …

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