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Re: Itinerant Air-Cooled Visits The Old Lions ...

Posted: Wed Jul 10, 2019 10:29 am
by Amskeptic
Curtp07 wrote:
Wed Jul 10, 2019 9:34 am
Hopefully electric cars will bring people more in tune with how much money is wasted driving above the limit, and accelerating like crazy to the next red light...for now pulling up to the pump and dropping $50 and racing off in your huge hunk of metal is too ingrained.....
Oh well.
Yes! I like your insight here.
Colin

Re: Itinerant Air-Cooled Visits The Old Lions ...

Posted: Wed Jul 10, 2019 12:28 pm
by andrewtf
Art is suffering the same sad fate as car design—eternal echo chambers of concepts...lack of innovation...and why? Maybe this circles back to the Safety and Security mentioned above. An addiction to Comfort. Maybe innovation is born from fertile acts of creativity...and maybe creativity can only flourish in the act of risk-taking. Are we free to embark on a journey of risky, groundbreaking design if our highest cultural values are Safety and Comfort? I don’t think so. Maybe we need a revolution...a rebellion from Safety and Security and Comfort, so that we’re free to live in insecurity and discomfort.

Try being an architect.
There is a reason everything looks so.... blech.......these days

Re: Itinerant Air-Cooled Visits The Old Lions ...

Posted: Wed Jul 10, 2019 7:17 pm
by Amskeptic
andrewtf wrote:
Wed Jul 10, 2019 12:28 pm
Art is suffering the same sad fate as car design—eternal echo chambers of concepts...lack of innovation...and why? Maybe this circles back to the Safety and Security mentioned above. An addiction to Comfort. Maybe innovation is born from fertile acts of creativity...and maybe creativity can only flourish in the act of risk-taking. Are we free to embark on a journey of risky, groundbreaking design if our highest cultural values are Safety and Comfort? I don’t think so. Maybe we need a revolution...a rebellion from Safety and Security and Comfort, so that we’re free to live in insecurity and discomfort.

Try being an architect.
There is a reason everything looks so.... blech.......these days
Please please fill us in. If I can understand it, maybe I will feel better.

I know that car makers are more constrained as we discover "optimal" aerodynamics and packaging, but I have seen pretty car designs right in the middle of "optimal". I'd like a crack at doing a business-like dash that keeps the driver more focused.
ColinMaybeThisWinter

Re: Itinerant Air-Cooled Visits The Old Lions ...

Posted: Thu Jul 18, 2019 9:36 am
by tommu
This is something I always wondered about too. The loss of cheap slow grown hardwood together with the loss of cheap manual labour has obvious changed things post-war. But the proliferation of boring apartments was covered in an excellent Bloomberg article: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features ... k-the-same It's the iterative culmination of the best design to meet the most building codes cheaply and with the highest density. Like boring but functional cars, they're here to stay.

"Los Angeles architect Tim Smith was sitting on a Hawaiian beach, reading through the latest building code, as one does, when he noticed that it classified wood treated with fire retardant as noncombustible. That made wood eligible, he realized, for a building category—originally known as “ordinary masonry construction” but long since amended to require only that outer walls be made entirely of noncombustible material—that allowed for five stories with sprinklers.
His company, Togawa Smith Martin Inc., was working at the time with the City of Los Angeles on a 100-unit affordable-housing high-rise in Little Tokyo that they “could never get to pencil out.”

By putting five wood stories over a one-story concrete podium and covering more of the one-acre lot than a high-rise could fill, Smith figured out how to get the 100 apartments at 60 percent to 70 percent of the cost. The building, Casa Heiwa, opened its doors in 1996, and the five-over-one had been invented. (“Let’s put it this way,” Smith says. “No one has challenged me to say that they did it first.”) The public didn’t take note, but West Coast architects and developers did. They could now get near-high-rise densities at a wood-frame price. Soon, the rest of America could, too."