Another word from close, oh so close to home.

A word about internship from afar, oh so far away.

Via boing boing, tents or not.

Three churches among others(?), same architect, Charles Geddes. There was a good article in a recent newspaper, but can’t find it.

• Noe Valley Ministry, San Francisco, 1888
• Westminster Presbyterian Church (St. Procopius Church), Berkeley, 1879
• Community United Methodist Church, Half Moon Bay, 1872

See Witold Riedel for two articles on earth structures, one of which is a drawing with eight variations and the other article gives links to Nader Khalili.

Morning News sends a lead to Matt's possessions obsession by way of drawings and photographs and clever navigation.

Caterina brings us an article on Christopher Alexander. Agree that Alexander favors, shall we say, the shingle style, that is, a homey, crafty solution. He seems to hate modern solutions, but what if they're perfectly good? Toph uses PatternLanguage.com as a resource, but it nags him to register or something. It does have some fun stuff though.

Detroit. Remember Detroit? Detroit iron? Detroit anything?

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.