“The road to low-carbon concrete” by M. Mitchell Waldrop is a thorough summary of the situation. In short, concrete use contributes way too much carbon to the atmosphere, and anyone involved in design and construction needs to be conscious of that. There’s a great deal that can be said on this topic but I’m not an …
Rain Noe has an interesting piece up at Core77 about adaptive reuse of an abandoned power plant by building new spaces within the cavernous main hall. He rightly refers to this as box-in-a-box architecture. I think that, for certain types of buildings, it’s a great idea. Most adaptive-reuse projects center on how to get the interior …
The picture above is the 1914 Adams Express Building at 61 Broadway. The two biggest buildings below are Singer, on the left, and the 1907 City Investing Building on the right. These two buildings are used as examples in the article below, “Heat Losses From Buildings Of Modern Type,” which I’m putting up here in …
The Mohawk River is a tributary of the Hudson River, joining the bigger river at the north end of Troy, New York. Unlike the Hudson, which is a sea-level estuary all the way from New York Bay to the Federal Dam located halfway between downtown Troy and the Mohawk, the Mohawk naturally has a reasonably …
Gotham Unbound: The Ecological History of Greater New York by Ted Steinberg sounds, at first, like a bad joke: it’s a natural history of the New York City area, which is one of the most heavily modified landscapes in the world. We’re surrounded by all sorts of nature here, including aspects that are impervious to …
