Working. Draw a building. Crash the computer.

Stop work. Walk the grand all-American pit bull terrier by the crashing waves.

Working. Continue on the building. Get deeply involved in window placement.

Stop work. Walk. Look at the horizon all yellow, orange, red, purple, dark blue and black.

Grow a brain via newthings. This has a good section on architecture by real estate people.

Here is a cable reinforced system for protecting a floor from collapse, via boing boing.

To test the cable system, Astaneh and his students built a full-scale typical building floor with five support columns in Berkeley's civil engineering test bay. The steel cables passed through one-inch holes in the columns and were affixed to the concrete model floor. In one test, a support column was knocked out and a massive hydraulic jack — the largest in the country — applied 240,000 pounds of downward force to simulate the weight of a floor above. The test floor dropped three feet, but stayed connected to the remaining columns that carried the extra weight.

Reserve Cal Day, April 12, for a talk by the leading researcher, A. Astaneh.

Memory Foundations is the name of the thing.

Excellent analysis by John King of the WTC appears in today's Chronicle. He wrote that the (below) ground level pedestrian space was particularly brutal, but the ten-year design and construction timeframe should allow opportunity to fix shortcomings like this. When TT looked at the animation yesterday, which recalls dump trucks on the existing site with approximately 50' high slurry walls in the background during clean-up magically overlaid by gigantic new construction, he didn't recognize this problem, and only noticed a peculiar lifelessness of the stylized representation. Today, he looks and sees some amazing effort at realistic representation of people, though in an animation they should be moving, sophisticated coloring and texture of slurry walls recalling Anselm Kiefer and, of course, an array of exciting new, often colorful, often transparent geometric forms punctuating the plaza of death, and the new wailing walls are casting deep shadows around 9-11. It's frightening to think about.

It's the pits. Today is the announcement of Libeskind's selection for the new WTC. The New York Times has an article plus an animated demonstration.

Really nice picture of Zach and Annie on their bicycles. Takes a special gift to catch them relaxed like this.

Pictures of a contentious building pad condition are here.

Another example of artistic use of sunlight and mirror...

Here is an excellent description of many sunlight-related phenomena in the form of simple Q&A. Example: Why are any materials transparent?

An expensive, but instructive, example of concentrating sunlight for surgery...

Natural light glossary, because one forgets. Light pipe or sun tunnel is an example. There are better solutions, but they are expensive and hard to find.

JB writes, "I'd buy one. Click on Products then Hermit's Cabin."

Analemma via ericalba.org.

William R. Yelland, maker of warm houses people like, not the cold modernist cubes people hate, according to yesterday's Architext. Also Cliff May and Carr Jones.

This is great. Ikea clobbers Breuer.

The Data Processing Primitives
Input
Save
Retrieve
Output
Copy
Change
Translate
Derive
Compare
Decide
Repeat
Destroy
Count
Sum
Collect

72 x 84, our king size bed...

Along the lines of Rudofsky's vernacular architecture, we have caterina's finds.

Thick profile fake, fake, fake roofing...