After Corbu » new york

Counter-revolutionary design

Quixote — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 02:55:00 +0000

What If New York City 3 by Studio Lindfors

This is pretty awesome, but it would make it much harder to use the political & economic disruption of a precipitous rise in sea levels to stage a world revolution.

[vis BLDGBLOG, so so long ago]

Steel Work

Quixote — Sun, 14 Oct 2007 08:36:39 +0000

“Old-timer, keeping up with the boys. Many structural workers are above middle-age. Empire State [Building]” Photograph by Lewis Hine, 1930 (check out more of his work at the National Archives).

I’ve been spending most of my work-time on the engineering for a 700-foot steel building, and so it’s neat to see all the small pieces and actions that go into one. Truly awesome/horrifying undertakings.

Freegans

Quixote — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 18:23:38 +0000

LA Times does a profile of Freegans living in…New York! Similar to the NY Times longer, better article from back in June. Now I’m a fierce defender of LA against the New York evangelists, but the LA paper makes it hard when they get scooped by 3 months. Plus, I know LA has it’s own dumpster-diving culture. A little local documentation, please?

Newspaper complaints aside, dropping out of the economy has a strong appeal. Combine urban hunting-gathering with squatting abandoned buildings and you have the perfect, non-parasitic lifestyle. There’s a scale at which Freeganism would cease to work, but at present it just increased the efficiency of our resource consumption.

Freegan.info has some great information, but in my head I’m envisioning a more comprehensive free-living destination site. I need a map of Los Angeles overlaid with wireless hotspots, prime dumpsters, Food not Bombs distribution spots, the routes of bus drivers cool with fareless passengers, abandoned buildings, accessible dormitories and other shower sources, etc. Who has some venture capital?

It’s a beautiful day for a coup

Quixote — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 11:10:20 +0000

I looked down at the calendar to check the date and, lo and behold, it’s September 11th, the 34th anniversary of the US-backed coup that toppled President Salvador Allende and brought Pinochet to power in Chile. That act of terrorism resulted in thousands of deaths and made political prisoners of thousands more.

Of course, 6 years ago a more famous act of terrorism had worse results: tens of thousands dead in New York, Afghanistan, and Iraq and hundreds of political prisoners at Guantanamo. The toll of the attack didn’t have to be this severe, but we let it get out of control — we let a horrible tragedy become a coup.

6 years ago we had a moderate, incompetent president who couldn’t move conservative legislation and compromised with liberal institutions like Ted Kennedy to pass education ‘reform.’ Then: the September 11th attacks, and everything changed. Ever since, our country has been ruled by an extremist, incompetent president who steamrolls bills past weak, assenting legislators.

Maybe this will change now that Democrats are starting to put the “fuck you” back in “opposition party” with their wonderful investigations. Maybe they’re ready to end the coup. But first they have to realize that this man is just as much a hack as this man turned out to be, and call him on it. Military uniforms are not inoculations against becoming Bush cronies; this war remains past its sell-by date, no matter who is trotted out to ask for another six months.

Bring the troops home now.

Football Longings

Quixote — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 10:53:59 +0000

Look at how happy Oliver Willis is after his team won. I’m jealous.

Living in LA, I have no ‘real’ team to root for, as all legitimate possibilities — Chargers, Niners, Raiders, and expat Rams — don’t really feel like my team. So even though I embraced traditional masculine roles and watched football for most of Sunday, I have none of the vicarious pleasure of Willis. Or even the resigned depression of Zeitlin watching the 1st installment of 16 crushing defeats.

All this to say, LA really needs a team. The team should have to pay to upgrade the Coliseum out of their own pockets, but they should definitely come. I even know who we should get: the Jets. Here’s my case:

They suck. See today’s 38-14 route by the Patriots.
The 77,900 Jets fans were Olbermann’s “Worst Person in the NFL” for cheering when their quarterback was injured. As punishment, they should lose their team.
New York already has two teams. That’s greedy.
Jets fandom is a cruel affliction I would wish on no one. Moving the team gives us the hope of a cure. Not for current Jets fans; they are a lost cause. But for their children, who will grow up to be Giants fans.
The Jets need their own stadium, but when they try to build one in New York they piss everyone off. Harder to mess up an already existing facility.

Note that I don’t want to actually root for this Jets team after the move; It’s hard for me to think of a group of players less exciting. Probably it’d be better to make all their players free agents and just run an expansion draft. But then: football! Back in LA! At last!

Architectural Flashing

Quixote — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 08:10:23 +0000

…and I don’t mean waterproofing.

I’m a big fan of Norman Foster’s buildings, including the Hearst Tower at left, but it seems it has a few glitches — such as the glass escalators, which allow visitors a view up the skirts of riders. As if women didn’t have their hands full contending with the glass ceiling.

The oversight has already inspired a funny NPR segment, and I kind of fear that as word gets out this will become a tourist draw for the tower. Maybe the glass could be tinted?

I don’t suggest this because I’m a prude. Part of life is occasionally seeing more reality than the viewer or viewed intends, whether it be underwear, bulge, crack, or nipple. However, it seems incredibly wrong to force people to display themselves. And I love this line from the New York Magazine feature:

Some editors were concerned enough that they warned members of their staff prone to wearing trendy mini-minidresses or ballooning short skirts to take care to keep their legs closed.

Because you know women, it’s your job to make sure the dude standing beneath the stairs watching you can’t see up your skirt. And besides, if you’re wearing a skirt, you’re obviously a slut who wants men to see anyway. Such Bullshit.

I can’t help but wonder how many women were involved/consulted on this aspect of the project. I suspect very few, though of course these kind of oversights do just happen. But there are fundamental problems with architecture and its habit of marginalizing female users that makes these kinds of oversights likely.

So, previously quoted “editors” you need to warn Foster & Partners (not your employees) that they need to tint, or etch, or sandblast, or paint, or replace the glass escalators or they will face a sexual harassment suit from the thousands of women who have used those stairs.

WTC Steel

Quixote — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 17:02:05 +0000

Warped, yielded steel from this issue of Engineering News, picture taken at the WTC. It somewhat illustrates what I was talking about below — the wide flange is bent and it look like some type of edge connection broke off, but the beam as a whole is still in one piece. Mostly, I just think its kind of beautiful as an industrial artifact.

Sunday Conspiracy Blogging

Quixote — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 05:02:04 +0000

By linking to this Robert Fisk article about questioning the 9/11 explanations, LitBrit produced quite a bit of commenter angst over at the House that Klein Built. As an engineer, I find the discussions of 9/11 steel collapse fascinating, and at the risk of revealing ignorance within my own field I want to wade in a bit here.

Fisk’s version of the “Steel shouldn’t have failed” complaint:

If it is true, for example, that kerosene burns at 820C under optimum conditions, how come the steel beams of the twin towers – whose melting point is supposed to be about 1,480C – would snap through at the same time?

Apparently he’s mixing in issues about how fast the various buildings collapsed, but I’m setting that aside to focus on the tempature-induced steel collapse. The accepted explanation for this is laid out by Popular Mechanics:

“Steel loses about 50 percent of its strength at 1100°F,” notes senior engineer Farid Alfawak-hiri of the American Institute of Steel Construction. “And at 1800° it is probably at less than 10 percent.” NIST also believes that a great deal of the spray-on fireproofing insulation was likely knocked off the steel beams that were in the path of the crashing jets, leaving the metal more vulnerable to the heat.

And PM quotes other experts who explain that the kerosene fire would have spread to the office finishes, which burned as hot as 1800°F. All this makes intuitive sense, and I trust AISC — they wrote my steel manual. What I don’t understand is how the steel “snapped.” Also from the PM article:

“I have never seen melted steel in a building fire,” says retired New York deputy fire chief Vincent Dunn, author of The Collapse Of Burning Buildings: A Guide To Fireground Safety. “But I’ve seen a lot of twisted, warped, bent and sagging steel. What happens is that the steel tries to expand at both ends, but when it can no longer expand, it sags and the surrounding concrete cracks.”

This is exactly as I’ve been taught. A Temperature change loads a steel member, reducing it’s capacity until it fails. It’s important to understand that engineers use “fail” in a very particular way, and it is distinct from “fracture.” Here’s the stress-strain curve for steel at different temperatures, taken from this article:

Stress just means force per area and strain is basically elongation. So, as you load a member more, it deforms more. Note that, at every temperature level there is a point where increasing the load is not necessary to cause the steel to continue elongating. A member has “failed” when it has passed the initial near-linear portion of the stress-strain curve, and begun deflecting at great rates. The steel warps and bends, and is structurally useless. Eventually it will fracture, but it’s rare; long before a beam actually cracks through, its connections to adjacent members will break.

Connections are always the weak point of a structure. They experience higher forces since loads flow across them in three dimensions. Welding can weaken steel, lowing its capacity. Lines of bolts reduce the cross-sectional area of a member, creating a failure plane.

So: it would be extremely surprising if steel members snapped through as a result of temperature increase and excessive load transferred from neighboring columns. I’m betting people throwing “snap” around are referring to connections failing, causing steel elements to break apart from each other. Which, since connections are weak, occur at lower loadings than you might expect by just calculating the capacity of a system.

Of course, this doesn’t address the fact that fireproofing should have caused the collapse to take longer and I don’t know that a plane crash could have scraped off enough of it to make a huge difference. But I’m hardly knowledgeable about plane crashes or fireproofing, so on this I trust the experts.

However, I do have an alternative explanation for how the fireproofing was overwhelmed and the steel collapsed:

(God this image is horrifying. I mean, of course women do construction in a low-cut micro-dress with sky-high heals, but that tool belt is just not going to cut it.)

Suburban Kids w/ Biblical Names

Quixote — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 20:58:49 +0000

This clever tool brings some quantification to walkability competition, and there’s some good comments at City Comforts about the application and how different cities score.

Above are the stats for my childhood home in Bakersfield, CA. Unsurprisingly, given its slightly-better-than-suburb-but-not-much status, its performance is mediocre. If the metric took into account design, B-town would fair worse since the streets are wide, mildly confusing, and missing connections, while public transit is insufficient. On the plus sign, the town has quality public schools, a fair amount of parks, and is very affordable — don’t mean to only talk shit. Plus, the weather their is ridiculous in the summer (100+ daily), so the planners had some justification in abandoning any pretense at walkability.

In contrast, my house in downtown San Luis Obispo, CA gets a 98, rivaling New York. Since SLO’s population is only ~60,000 (which is including the non-incorporated student dorms), I feel this points to how density and walkability can be achieved without needing any great absolute number of people.