Tag: architecture

Cookiecutter Castles

Imagine a rolling landscape of towering, pristine castles almost as far as your eyes can see. It sounds breathtaking — and it is — just probably not in the way you’d think. These Disney-esque villas are in a Turkish housing development called Burj al Babas, and it’s completely abandoned.

Construction remains terrible

The Problem
Construction is error-prone, expensive, and suffers delays. The government thinks construction productivity has slightly decreased since 1960. It just needs some clever engineering and solutions, but which ones? This post will focus on the ubiquitous single-family home.

Why Things Aren’t Getting Better
The combination of consumer tastes, low dollar value per volume building components, and the complexity of buildings inhibit efforts to scale.

nevertheless, there’s a constant stream of “innovation” that will supposedly solve this, but that remains unlikely. For example, this lego-like modular construction

Outdoor Dining arms race

What started as a haphazard collection of tables and chairs set up in blocked-off parking spaces has evolved into a seemingly non-negotiable extension of running a restaurant in NYC. There are local construction companies dedicated to building outdoor dining shelters. New restaurants are baking outdoor dining setups into their startup costs. For those who can afford it, the constant upgrading of outdoor dining — still only a temporary allowance in the city — hasn’t showed any signs of slowing down as indoor capacity restrictions have loosened. “It’s like the face of the restaurant now”

Solar Panel Windows

Classified as a Building Integrated Photovoltaics (BIPV) system, ClearVue’s solar PV windows are integrated within a building’s envelope, as opposed to conventional PV systems where modules had to be mounted on the top of existing roofs. This has a dual benefit: clear solar glass serves as an energy-efficient window product for any building, but also generates electricity for on-site use or export to the grid. This can provide savings in materials and electricity costs, reduce pollution, and add to the architectural appeal of a building.

2022-11-12: ultrathin organic solar cells hit new efficiency records

Organic photovoltaics (OPVs) are 10x lighter than silicon panels and cost 50% as much to produce. Some are even transparent, which has architects envisioning solar panels not just on rooftops, but incorporated into building facades, windows, and even indoor spaces. “We want to change every building into an electricity-generating building”. OPVs reach 9% efficiency. Prototypes have reached efficiencies of 20%, approaching silicon and alternative inorganic thin-film solar cells, such as those made from a mix of copper, indium, gallium, and selenium (CIGS). Unlike silicon crystals and CIGS, where researchers are mostly limited to the few chemical options nature gives them, OPVs allow them to tweak bonds, rearrange atoms, and mix in elements from across the periodic table. Yet, stability and high efficiency still won’t be enough. To make it in the market, solar cells also need to prove reliable for decades. Under intense exposure to the ultraviolet (UV) in sunlight, the organics in solar cells can degrade, much as our skin burns during a day at the beach.

NYC Gems

This is a pretty great and comprehensive list of what makes the city awesome.

Following up our master list of 160 secrets of New York City, we bring to you 160 hidden gems of New York City! Every one of these hidden gems are places for you to discover. Some show the uniqueness and quaintness of New York City’s architecture, others reveal the infrastructure that supports New York or the history hidden in plain sight. Some are simply off-the-beaten path. All, we believe, are hidden gems in their own right. The majority are publicly accessible although some only on limited occasions. Some come from our book about the secrets of Brooklyn, but this list covers all 5 boroughs of the city. Many others come from the archives of Untapped New York and some come from exciting user-generated submissions on our Facebook page. So without further ado, here are the hidden gems of New York City!

When will prefab take over?

Striking a balance between pragmatism and experimentalism, the firm develops prefabricated solutions in order to respond to a driving challenge of contemporary architecture—to speed up and simplify the construction process.

At first, we believed that the most interesting aspect of prefabrication was speed. Today we find other advantages in this type of architecture. The lack of labor is felt throughout Europe prefabrication allows us to “build without builders”. Traditional construction is doomed to disappear.

Waterline Square Park

New York City’s newest public park is a nominee for Untapped New York’s Best of New York Awards. Waterline Square Park, which opened over the summer of 2020, was chosen along with other New York City parks that opened this year by our panel of urban experts in the category of Best New Park. You can see all of the nominees and vote for your favorites here! Located between Manhattan’s Midtown and Upper West Side, this riverfront park features a huge children’s playground, lush greenery and unique water features.

Werner Vogels

The 8 services were really just the fundamental pieces to get, put, and manage incoming traffic. Most importantly, there are so many different tenets that come with S3, but durability, of course, trumps everything. The 11 9s (99.999999999%) that we promise our customers by replicating over 3 availability zones was unique. Most of our customers, if they have on-premises systems—if they’re lucky—can store 2 objects in the same data center, which gives them 4 9s. If they’re really good, they may have 2 data centers and actually know how to replicate over 2 data centers, and that gives them 5 9s. But 11 9’s, in terms of durability, is just unparalleled. And it trumps everything.

learnings from scaling AWS