Construction

Raking sunlight is a fantastic way to get information about a facade. Any out-of-plane geometry is immediately visible as a shadow. You can see the natural irregularity of a brick wall...and a bulge that might indicate steel damage.

I have on occasion waited around longer than I care to admit for the sun to get to the position necessary to rake the facade.

To sum up: there’s a few reasons to believe that stone construction could theoretically be cheaper than concrete or steel, based on the fact that stone could have simpler supply chains and construction process, and be less energy intensive to produce. And there's a small group of architects and engineers (most of whom are talking their own book) advocating for the material. But the theoretical lower cost of stone is partly based on intuitions that don't take into account economies of scale, which can make added process steps and long supply chains surprisingly inexpensive. Highly processed materials like OSB can be as cheap or cheaper than “raw” ones like dimensional lumber, and it's not clear if structural stone could be produced as cheaply as concrete or steel, even if automation greatly improved.

Stacking the rails in an interlocking zigzag configuration creates a self-supporting structure that is easy to repair and to take apart. This traditional construction method also has the advantage of requiring few tools, since no holes have to be dug for posts and there is no requirement for nails.

I’m beginning to suspect that software, and more conspicuously the Web, is fundamentally the wrong shape for the archetype of the construction project.

To build a folly is essentially to do something a second time, something at an inopportune moment. That something is always the memory of something forgotten, about which we can paradoxically say "There it is again."

Follies were misunderstood, purposeless constructions. They were often only small, extravagant gestures in a garden, easily whisking off the imagination to distant lands, a sort of time capsule built to awaken the memory and induce surprise in passers-by. They marked locations, organized secondary paths in a park, or simply predicted the arrival of better times—a demarcation, a sacred spot, a mysterious trail, a hill whose tragic rocky nature begged for a tower, a party, or the arrival of summer.

What is different about construction is the level of coordination that takes place: whereas in a car everything is carefully designed to tightly integrate together, in housing construction the work can be done (and often is) with surprisingly little coordination between the various trades. Even something as seemingly basic as getting subcontractors together at the beginning of the design process to come up with a coordinated design is a very unusual practice in home construction. This style of work organization reduces upfront cost required, and allows homes to be built with an unusually inexpensive design process compared to other products, but it also means that innovation is risky, and new products tend to be evolutionary ones that don’t change the overall construction process.

Architecture equals structure. Design is also important, but structure is the basis of architecture.

By taking the good aspects of both traditional and conventional construction methods, we assemble it securely...So the reason we lay out the marking lines, and carve by hand, is to utilize the good aspects of wood framing from the past when building contemporary wood-framed structures.

"A builder who hides any part of the building frame, abandons the only permissible and, at the same time, the most beautiful embellishment of architecture. The one that hides a loadbearing column makes an error. The one who builds a false column commits a crime."

— Auguste Perret

With the loss of tactility, measures and details crafted for the human body – and particularly for the hand – architectural structures become repulsively flat, sharp-edged, immaterial and unreal. The detachment of construction from the realities of matter and craft further turns architecture into stage sets for the eye, into a scenography devoid of the authenticity of matter and construction. The sense of 'aura', the authority of presence, that Walter Benjamin regards as a necessary quality for an authentic piece of art, has been lost.