Sapere Aude
Tag: architecture
In order “to prevent this heritage from disappearing,” a local planning and design group, calling itself Waterpower, “asked a series of Italian and foreign designers to make projects for the renewal of the deserted water and paper mills. There was one condition: that they take the ‘power of water’ as the poetic metaphor and technological guideline of their projects, turning the valley into an eco-sustainable environment.”
repurposing mills in Valle dei Mulini with architecture
a floating tower, hanging from a central core
I think everyone would agree that this is a compelling new vision for San Francisco
Lighttpd turned out to be poor for serving the thumbnails, because its main loop is a bottleneck to load files from disk; they addressed this by modifying Lighttpd to add worker threads to read from disk. This was good but still not good enough, with one thumbnail per file, because the enormous number of files was terribly slow to work with (imagine tarring up many million files).
Their new solution for thumbnails is to use Google’s BigTable, which provides high performance for a large number of rows, fault tolerance, caching, etc. This is a nice (and rare?) example of actual synergy in an acquisition.
memcached, lighthttpd, python, the usual mysql problems, sharding etc
Why not build your house like a gigantic gravity dam? It wouldn’t have to hold back water – so there’d be no flooding to worry about – and you’d have big windows on either side. You’d span canyons and have an incredible roof deck.
wow. check out the “apartments in dams” picture. this blog is pure crack
“The proliferation of signs, barriers and crossings could be making our streets more dangerous. We’re not suggesting that removing them all is the answer. But for too long we’ve been designing streets for traffic; they’ve become noisy, congested and cluttered, with people herded behind traffic barriers, ostensibly for their own benefit. Solving the problems of speeding and pedestrian safety doesn’t mean more and more signs telling you to slow down and more protective barriers, it requires clever design thinking.”
this one is for rekha.
A 4 hour stay in a premium cabin (10 square meters) costs $80. Bedside charging points, personal lighting, dimming control and bed deployment switch allows you to work or relax without moving from the comfort of your bed
a bit expensive, but yay for airports that are not hellholes. we need these around the world, imo
In an image that makes me want to cry it’s so cool, the basements of some 19th-century San Francisco homes weren’t basements at all… they were the hulls of lost ships. “As late as Jan 1857,” we read, “old hulks still obstructed the harbor while others had been overtaken by the bayward march of the city front and formed basements or cellars to tenements built on their decks. Even now [1888] remains of the vessels are found under the filled foundations of houses.
parts of sf are built on sunken ships. go into an embarcadero basement and you may be in one.
DOT presented its renovation plan for the intersection of Ninth Ave. and 14th St. to Manhattan Community Board 4 on Wednesday evening. Ryan Russo, DOT’s Director for Street Management and Safety, explained that the agency is taking advantage of a scheduled repaving of Ninth Ave. in mid-July to respond to long-standing community request to remove the 2-block northbound contra-flow traffic lane from the avenue, which has been blamed for several pedestrian fatalities
the NYC DOT seems quite pragmatic, coming up with workable solutions in months rather than decades.
2008-07-31:
For Mr. Tsao, taking over a piece of the bridge for a dinner party, as he did Friday night and likes to do at least once each summer, is an act both political and personal, a conscious gesture of civic engagement and a way to lay claim to a terrific party space. He is captivated and inspired by the persona of the 19th-century flâneur “the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes.” Being a flâneur “is all about taking in the world we’ve been given; we want to embrace it and engage with it.”
more take back the streets stuff.
2011-01-06: nice! astor place is currently a downside of living in the east village. not much longer.
2013-10-09: janette is one of my heroines. she is responsible for a huge quality of life increase in nyc in the last 5 years. in this video she talks about how she made even that pimple on nyc, times square, bearable.
2020-04-30: Restaurant reopening could include seats on closed streets. Perhaps this will trigger a longer-term change in street usage, which would be a great thing.
2021-01-28:
The New York City Council voted Thursday to approve Intro. 1116-B, the legislation that will create 4000 new permits for street vendors in the city over the next 10 years.
This is a tiny step in the right direction. The future of much of NYC is in the street, we shouldn’t limit these permits at all. Let a million flowers bloom.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 