The Slow Pace of Bercy Village

There’s a neat spot, a little off the beaten track, in Paris that I have some fond memor­ies of. It’s an oasis, small in scale and slow in pace. It’s not the sort of place that you find in the tour­ist dir­ect­or­ies and its not envel­oped by the legend of Paris vaca­tion­eer­ing. Bercy Vil­lage is …

Forensic Engineering

French archi­tect Jean-Pierre Houdin has unveiled a quite fas­cin­at­ing the­ory of pyr­amid con­struc­tion. Appar­ently based on a dec­ade of invest­ig­a­tion, he is able to pro­posed a series of con­cepts pro­pos­ing that internal con­struc­tion ramps allowed for the effi­cient and remark­able con­struc­tion of the Pyr­amid of Cheops. Addi­tion­ally he demon­strates the most effi­cient means by which …

I’ll Never Experience It But…

This is an abso­lutely stun­ning piece on engin­eer­ing! The Grand Canyon Sky­walk is situ­ated 3,800 feet above the canyon floor and is con­struc­ted of steel and 4 inch thick glass. It can sup­port 800 people, but will be lim­ited to 120. The floor is glass (that’s why I won’t be there — no chance — …

The Secret Life Underground

Rus­sos at Live­Journal pos­ted an abso­lutely exquis­ite set of pho­to­graphs (many HDR) of the deep under­ground in Moscow. Many relate to sub­way con­struc­tion, repair and aban­don­ment. Oth­ers seem to have deep sub­ter­ranean nat­ural cav­erns. Abso­lutely amaz­ing views of things we never see. Thanks for Eng­lishRus­sia for catch­ing these and doing some trans­la­tion so Eng­lish readers …

Water, Water Everywhere

Have had a little dry spell in post­ing to the blog. Iron­ic­ally this has been par­tially caused by excess­ive mois­ture. I was work­ing away at home on Thursday even­ing when I heard this whoosh­ing sound com­ing from my wash­room. Think­ing it was just the toi­let doing its cyc­ling, I actu­ally jiggled the arma­ture before realizing …

Of Things Calatrava…

I finally got around to watch­ing a doc­u­ment­ary I had pvr’d a week or so ago. The Social­ist, the Archi­tect and the Twis­ted Tower doc­u­ments (lyr­ic­ally I might add) the design and con­struc­tion of the Turn­ing Tower in Malmo, Sweden. I am fas­cin­ated by the inspir­a­tion behind the design by San­ti­ago Cal­at­rava who sought to …

A Real Apple Museum

This guy’s place puts me to shame. Even in my pre-move glory days, my col­lec­tion was nowhere in the vicin­ity of this one. For those of you that don’t know I reduced my space when I made the move to Hamilton and at least half my col­lec­tion of hard­ware went to the dump along with …

Speaking of Visualisation…

As Google offi­cially released new ver­sions of SketchUp! and SketchUP! Pro, bring­ing them to a 6.0 release, it reminds me to recom­mend these to those intrigued by spa­tial visu­al­isa­tion. I have been using SketchUp for the last few years and when Google acquired <a href=“http://web.archive.org/web/20060429100556/http://www.atlastsoftware.com/” target=_blank”>@Last Soft­ware, there was the usual con­cern over how the …

Making the Magic Believable

Eng­lish Rus­sia has pos­ted some great foot­age of a Sta­lin­ist video show­ing the won­der­ful archi­tec­tural rewards that the popu­lace was about to reap. I was par­tic­u­larly impressed by what must have been a rather impress­ive tech­nique for the time of put­ting the modeled or rendered struc­tures into live video of the actual con­struc­tion sites. I …

Water Media

Wil­liam Pye makes magic with water. Check out the won­der­fully designed web­site which chron­icles his life’s work. He is a sculptor who uses water as his medium. I was par­tic­u­larly struck by Sibirica Minor and Tavola, both of which use his spouts concept. I quite like the sys­tem­atic way in which he traces vari­ous themes …