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Wrath Of Gnon

@wrathofgnon

21 Jan

The famous 519 East 11th Street, N.Y., is looking pretty excellent these days. In 1973 the building was abandoned, after being gutted by fires lit by its slum-landlord. In 1974 its 18 units were sold to a group of tenants who convinced the city they could renovate it themselves!

The group took out a loan of $220,000 from the City and paid themselves $3 and hour for a 32 work week to completely rebuild the interiors. All overtime became "sweat equity" (there was lots of it...). It took them 18 months but they did everything even plumbing and electrics.

Although they bought the shell of the building for $1800, they sold each unit for $500 and started moving in 1975/76. This being the oil shock years, they even experimented with solar heating to cut utility costs (which ultimately only ended up working a few years but still).

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Wrath Of Gnon

@wrathofgnon

5 Jan

The City of San Cristóbal de la Habana, or Havana, as it looked ca. 1850. At the time the most heavily fortified city in the Americas. About 100,000 souls lived within its walls, and fairly uniquely, that is roughly the same number of people who live there today, in Old Havana.

Up until maybe 1800, the walls and the need for defenses kept the city from sprawling, but already by 1850 there are plans forming to build a city ten times its size. Then as now, the sprawl is less thought out: there are no real centers, no squares, few churches, monuments, etc.

The buildings are very well designed for its climate: tall ceilings, tall windows, to make the hot and humid summers tolerable. And look at the streets, the awnings that hang from buildings on both side, creating shaded covered streets for the foot traffic that dominates it.

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Wrath Of Gnon

@wrathofgnon

31 Dec 20

Back in the old days all rice grew with enough straw to make its own containers for storage and shipping. When you finished one of these you could simply feed it to your livestock, use it to make New Year's, rope, winter gear, compost or fuel. Plastic just becomes toxic garbage.

The standard weight of these "tawara" was 60kg, set so that anyone young, old, male or female ought to be able to lift and shoulder one. I doubt many moderns can do it. Farmers were supposed to be able to lift two at a time or climb ladders with one. Hundreds of times a day.

Making one (even small ones) takes an amateur about three hours. An experienced farmer could make three or four in that time. A lot of work but it must have been satisfying after all the labor growing the rice in the first place. All the materials came from the same rice paddy.

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Wrath Of Gnon

@wrathofgnon

29 Dec 20

The most trad fruit tree of them all: the quince. Here's a gathering of Chinese quinces (Pseudocydonia sinensis). Quinces are inedible raw, only useful cooked. In the early days of the American colonies every garden had a quince: you couldn't have a kitchen orchard without one.

Quince fruit is naturally very rich in pectins, which is a must if you want to make long lasting marmalades, jams, preserves, jellies, etc. Growing lots of fruits without being able to preserve them wasn't optimal, so every kitchen garden had a quince until lemons became common.

It also helps that the quince is a remarkably durable, interesting, fragrant tree with wonderful flowers. In my opinion the Chinese quince (a close relative of the European quince) is even wilder looking and it takes up so little space in a garden that planting one is no-brainer.

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Wrath Of Gnon

@wrathofgnon

24 Dec 20

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.

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Wrath Of Gnon

@wrathofgnon

21 Dec 20

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.

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