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24 Dec, 4 tweets, 2 min read
On the urban and rural settings of children's books: walkable, human scaled (or animal scaled), no suburbs. The stories we tell our children betray our own feelings towards our built environments. Why do we forget these things? psyche.co/ideas/why-you-…
"Even when there are private modes of transportation in children’s literature, they are ships, bicycles or hot-air balloons, where the transported are engaged with the world around them and the adventure or mystery that this world brings." —The best architecture is like this too!
Look at the settings of some famous children's stories in film, the settings are rural or urban only: Stand By Me, Peter Pan (London), Madeline, Little Nicolas (both Paris). The homes and the streets are as interactive as the fields and the forests.
When it comes to what we imagine for our children, we seem to have figured out what it is that we ourselves really want.

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More from @wrathofgnon

Wrath Of Gnon Profile picture
21 Dec
It is winter. What do you do if you want to quickly flush the air in a room without just opening the windows and wait a couple of hours and the room is freezing? One way is to build a wind catcher like in the Middle East but that isn't going to be practical in London. What else?
You can build the whole house to be a finely tuned instrument to catch and accelerate winds to transport both air and heat away: cross and stack ventilation. Works fantastically during sub-tropical Kyoto summer. Not a good idea in Leeds or Chicago though.
Without remodeling the house and building wall wings you can install two vertical sliding windows on a flat wall to increase room airflow by over 1000%. Slide them open: one catches the wind, leads it into the room, expels the old air through the other open window. Takes minutes.
Read 4 tweets
Wrath Of Gnon Profile picture
14 Dec
#Biophilia in architecture: “Our preferences for fractals are set before our third birthdays, suggesting that our visual system is tuned to better process these patterns that are highly prevalent in nature.” around.uoregon.edu/content/study-…
Explained by @nntaleb:
Order and hierarchy (fractal) vs. The Linear and Chaotic.
Read 4 tweets
Wrath Of Gnon Profile picture
13 Dec
A story of inappropriate technology: in the 1970s it was decided to modernize the rice farming of Sri Lanka, whose system that had not changed much for 3000 years. The goal was to replace the water buffalo with the modern tractor, but the attempt had disastrous consequences... Image
Buffalos create "wallows", pools of muddy water without which they cannot control their temperatures. Always filled with water, these wallows create many eco-services: in the dry season the become a haven for fish that then migrate back to the paddies when these fill with water. ImageImage
The fish is a valuable source of proteins for landless laborers and greatly help control the population of malaria causing mosquitoes who breed in the rice paddies. The vegetation around the wallows are breeding and hunting grounds for snakes and water monitor lizards who prey... ImageImage
Read 16 tweets
Wrath Of Gnon Profile picture
9 Dec
In a 2009 study Luis Balula asked about 800 residents of Évora, Portugal, “How appropriate is this image for the future of Évora?”, or in other words, what do people want? Each image was scored +10 to -10 (best to worst). The results were telling. Residential streets first.
Then commercial streets and buildings. Same patterns, lively, walkable, decorated, traditional, human scaled, distributed ownership over car oriented, faceless, chain stores.
The pattern is the same for office buildings and streets. Walkable, accessible, etc. No one wants the office park in the middle of nowhere only accessible by vehicle. But here people are less offended by modern buildings.
Read 9 tweets
Wrath Of Gnon Profile picture
2 Dec
The Greek city of Priene as it might have looked in 350 B.C. Planned so that all homes face south to make maximum use of solar heating in winter. Courtyards kept cold winds at bay. It is estimated even naked one could comfortably sunbathe indoors during coldest months Nov-Mar.
Housing 4000 at 0.37 km² (there again, the magic size for a human scaled city), twice as densely populated as modern London and only one or two story homes. Many streets were so steep they became stairs.
The city had free public baths, a theatre big enough to hold 6500, two free schools, several temples and a central agora/market located within a few minutes walk from anywhere in the city. All public buildings were charitably built by the richer citizens out of their own pockets.
Read 6 tweets
Wrath Of Gnon Profile picture
28 Nov
Today's long must read.
Some comments. This, is a great phrase, as good or better than anything Chesterton would have written:

«This, Fr. Albrich said, is the “paradox of cloistered orders.” Although they withdraw physically from the world, they remain present in prayer.»
Faith is fierce. We may think of faith as something dull and meek, but when you encounter it in person it strikes you like a hammer:
Read 6 tweets

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