Bold Ventures by Charlotte Van den Broeck is, to say the least, an odd book. The subtitle, “Thirteen Tales of Architectural Tragedy” gives a sense of the topic but not entirely. Van den Broeck, a poet most of the time, has assembled stories about buildings whose architects “either killed themselves or are rumored to have …
As some of you know, our email was out of operation yesterday from roughly noon until the evening. We’re addressing the problem and it should not reoccur…but making a promise seems foolish. In the spirit of investigating IT failures as well as structural failures, the reason we did not see this coming is interesting. In …
The image above shows what our website looked like from about 1PM on Wednesday until about 2PM yesterday. Our email was also intermittently failing during the same period. There are huge differences between the issue of reliability in computer services and structural engineering, but there’s enough similarities to make some discussion worthwhile. As a small …
Our website is back up after about a day of outage – no, we did not decide to present an all-white screen as a statement about minimalism – and our email is fully functional again. There’s an interesting engineering-adjacent story behind this, which I will tell tomorrow.
I would go back to the 1870s and endlessly berate New York architects and builders for the next thirty years about their use of brownstone. Yes, it was cheap and very easy to carve. It’s been a plague on this city for 150 years. It’s been a plague in my work for 35 years and …
