Statistics can be very powerful pieces of information. It is a great way to take large areas of information and distill it into easily digestible pieces. But without a good understanding of math, it is easy to be deceived. I saw an example of this in a recent issue of Building Products: A March 2010 report from the [...]
As much as we like to believe our actions are entirely our own, every environment we find ourselves in affects our behavior. Our habits and runts are very much informed by the layout and features of our spaces. You can no more easily escape this effect than you can avoid breathing the air. There are [...]
Well, this place isn’t quite the top of the world. But living here would make you feel like it. This is The Smith Tower in Seattle, a hundred year old office building. For nearly half a century after its construction in 1909, it was the tallest skyscraper west of the Mississippi. Today’s focus is on [...]
Today’s topic is not about whether or not the Death Star shields are still up. Instead, we are discussing a different kind of trap. This is one created by cartographers: the trap room. The idea of a trap room is create a false room, be it a closet, a freight elevator, an employee bathroom, some [...]
The first widely popular computer mouse was packed in with the Apple Macintosh in 1984. This Macintosh had a black-and-white, 9 in CRT with a resolution of 512×342 pixels. The only drive was a single-sided 3.5-inch floppy disk drive. The current iMac has a 21.5-inch LED-backlit glossy widescreen with a resolution of 1920×1080 pixels. It has an [...]
One of my favorite parts of architecture is the huge breadth of experiences that it covers. Until this article on Archdaily, I had never heard of Vastu. Vastu is is a traditional Hindu system of design based on directional alignments. Initial impressions seem similar to the Chinese system of Feng Shui. Both are design philosophies [...]