Watching The Trades

Originally posted over at Ape Man

If you have been keeping awake as the talking heads drone on, you have probably heard of America’s problem with aging infrastructure. After all, we have had the levees break in New Orleans. We have had a bridge collapse in Minnesota. We have a major dam threatening to blow in Kentucky. Since all of these problems are related in one way or another to America’s aging infrastructure you ought to be dimly aware that the problem exists. But I don’t think most people know how bad the problem really is.

In order to understand the scale of the problem, you need to understand that the reason that so much of America’s infrastructure is reaching old age all at once is similar to the cause of America’s baby boom generation. In the years following World War II, America got busy doing all sorts of things. Not only did the Greatest Generation produce one heck of a baby boom, but they also built much of America’s infrastructure. And lot of that infrastructure is going to start failing at the same time the baby boomers start to retire.

The scale of this problem is obscured by the fact that the experts discovered some kind of design flaw in everything major that has failed so far. I think that this gives people the impression that the only thing we have to worry about is the dodgy work. But while the poorly designed infrastructure will be the first to fail, everything is going to fail in the long run. And given that so much of America’s infrastructure was built within a couple decades after World War II, quite a lot of it is going to need to be rebuilt all in a similar time period. The challenge for my generation will be to duplicate the Greatest Generation’s construction feats while supporting Baby Boomers’ retirement. On top of all that, we will be dealing with increased environmental and labor regulations.

Naturally, the optimists of this world will argue that this should be very doable. After all, the Greatest Generation raised the Baby Boomers and built all of the infrastructure that we are going to have to rebuild. What is so different about handling the Baby Boomers’ retirement and rebuilding the old infrastructure with all the new technology available to us?

My short and snarky answer is that the Baby Boomers couldn’t vote when they were kids. Now they can, and they are going to want all kinds of goodies from the taxpayer. A wealthy Baby Boomer requires more government funds than a welfare mom on crack.

But I will leave the analysis of the likely burdens of the Baby Boomers’ retirement for some other time. Right now, I would like to focus on the scope of the problem that our aging infrastructure presents.

For starters, there are the bridges. The average age of the bridges in this country is a little over 40 years old. This is why so many bridges are failing to make the grade….

Of the country’s nearly 600,000 bridges, 26% were found structurally deficient or “functionally obsolete” in a 2006 U.S. Department of Transportation report. The condition of heavily used urban bridges like the one that collapsed this week is even worse: one in three are classified as aging or unable to accommodate modern vehicle weights and traffic volume.

(more…)

These links are pretty serious and they have a lot of eye candy. So don’t bother looking at them unless you have some time to blow.

We will start you off easy with a post from Andrew Cusack’s excellent blog on the rebuilding of a historical church in Maryland. Being the committed and historically minded Catholic that he is, Andrew goes into a lament on the evil Protestants who created that necessity of rebuilding this church. But he also provides some excellent photos of the rebuilding.

The noteworthy thing about this church is that it is being rebuilt using historical methods. It kind of cool seeing how they built their scaffolding from trees cut from the woods. Sadly, those photographs don’t capture any of the actual work that was going on at the time.

This next link is a bit more time consuming. Go here and you will see a picture of two Tantos. These are Japanese fighting knives (you can read about Tantos here).

Now they don’t look like much; for one thing, my western mind can’t get over the fact that they don’t have a cross guard (though the same smith does make Tantos with cross guards). But the looks are not the point. Look at the bottom of the picture and you will see a link that details how these knives were made.

What follows is an impressive photo essay that starts with the guy smelting ore to make steel and ends with the finished project. A fascinating read.

And last, but not least, is Castle Magic. The design of the site looks sort of amateurish, but don’t let that fool you. These people build honest-to-goodness castles. To get a reasonably decent one, you have to spend over a million dollars. Nothing faux about these babies.

Of course, they do make few changes as a concession to modern times. For one thing, they put some insulation between the outer stone layer and inner rubble core. Also, I don’t think that secret passageways were all that common on historical castles. But mostly they follow the historical template when it comes to building details.

There is a lot to see at this site, but I recommend that you start out with the FAQ, this set of pictures, and these plans.

This was cross posted over at my Ape Man blog.

Over at Architecture + Morality (they changed the “and” to the plus sign) Corbusier has a new post up called “What Makes a Community: The Problem of Property Ownership and New Urbanism.” As usual, Corbusier’s post is excellent and long overdue. (How come all the good writers take so long to post on their blogs?) But I want to elaborate a little bit on his post.

As much as it might surprise the people who know me, I have to admit that I am sympathetic to core idea that lies behind the New Urbanism. As best as I understand it, New Urbanism is basically an admission that the historical way to design a city was the best and the post World War II departure from this historical standard was a big mistake.

Of course, the proponents of New Urbanism can’t just leave it at that. They have to throw in a heavy does of ecological and social justice concerns. And to top it all off New Urbanism people tend to have a big time god complex. Read too much of their stuff and you will want to clutch both your wallet and your pistol every time you hear the word “New Urbanism”.

Still, if you ignore their methods, you have to concede that ideas of New Urbanism have some merit. Since the time that man has first settled cities until World War II, cities were a place where people’s living quarters, the places where they shopped, and the places where they worked were all closely intertwined. In the medieval period the craftsmen and their families would live over their place of business. Even after the Industrial Revolution was well under way, small shops and residential areas were closely intertwined.

But after World War II, some dingbats got into their heads that commercial areas, industrial areas, and residential areas should all be strictly separated. So cities started imposing all kinds of zoning and other sorts of codes to make sure that happened. And that has stayed the controlling idea behind city planning all way until quite recently.

As any proponent of New Urbanism will tell you, the post World War II changes were all a big mistake. The whole point of cities is to have things close together. If some stuck a gun to your head and made you live in a city, which would you choose; an old style city or a modern one?

In an old style city you could walk around a couple of blocks, do all your shopping, chat with all your friends and half your family, and still make it back in time to make supper. In a new style city, you have to take your car through city traffic or fight your way through the crowds so that you can use the public transportation. Once you get to where you are going, you will be shopping in these big impersonal places where nobody knows your name and there are even more faceless crowds.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out which kind of city is more livable. Such stupidity is one of the reasons why all the middle class people started moving out of the cities. They figured that if they were going to have to take the blasted car everywhere they might as well live in the suburbs where it was easier to get around. The end result is that most of the residential-only areas turned into slums where only people to poor to escape live.

Now that most of their middle class tax base has got up and walked, cities are starting to wonder what they should do differently. This is where the New Urbanism people run into the room saying “Your problems are solved. We have all the answers.”

But as Corbusier points out, New Urbanism does not have all the answers. You can’t change a culture just by building differently.

The center piece of Corbusier’s essay is a project he is working on out in the Rockies that tries to reproduce the old European city style. Most notably, residential housing built over retail space, though there is more to the development than that. Corbusier muses on some of the problems that this is likely to bring in this modern culture by saying…

And naturally there are blocks and blocks of housing on top of street level retail, much like traditional town life anywhere outside post-war suburbia, but with a distinctive twenty-first century twist: almost all the units will be condominiums instead for-rent apartments. My more experienced colleague had objections with that particular part of the programs declaring that all sorts of problems emerge when people who own and live in dwellings above retail stores. Noises, smells, and the coming and going of service vehicles are often too much for condo boards, which have been the institutional vanguard of NIMBYism. I can image nothing more unpleasant than squabbles between the hundreds of residential owner, the handful of retail tenants and the commercial landlord.

Corbusier goes on to blame these problems largely on prejudices against people who rent and on the financial realities of large scale development. While I think he is right as far as he goes, I think he is missing the larger issues.

In the first place, the old way of doing things would have the workers in the retail outlets below living upstairs. But the people who work in retail outlets are primarily working class people such as sales clerks, bank tellers, and waitresses. In this country working class people can not afford to live in new buildings that are up to code. Instead, they must live in older building because they are the only ones they can afford to live in. Thus, in the development that Corbusier is working on, the workers in the retail outlets will not be able to afford to live upstairs. If they can’t, who else would want to?

I think that the upstairs would be too expensive for working class people even if Corbusier got his way and the space above was rented instead of being made into condominiums. New construction is just too expensive for working class people to afford no matter how you offer it. You can’t make a profit renting it to working class people anymore than you can make a profit selling it to them.

But even aside from that, there are broader cultural issues standing in the way of New Urbanism. The old styles cities worked because the culture of the time interwove family, work, and community. Just because you build old-style buildings does not mean that you can bring back mom and pop stores, children who follow their parent’s trade, and close knit communities. But without that kind of culture, I don’t think that New Urbanism will ever work.

To see the above picture in its original go here.

Concrete staining can produce some beautiful floors as the above photograph can attest. Maineloft produced that floor by using Scofield’s products. But there are many other products out there that you can use. Going by what I have read, all of them seem to produce stunning effects.

All Things Concrete is a good place to start if you are new to staining concrete. The web site has a Spartan feel and information is sparse and to the point. Still, it manages to cover all the basics.

Among other things, All Things Concrete will tell you the difference between an acid based stain and an acrylic stain. This site will also give you basic pointers on how to create basic stain patterns. And last but not least, it has a photo gallery that gives you a realistic idea of what an amateur can accomplish.

If you want a high brow look at stained concrete you can look at Advanced Concrete Enhancement’s stained concrete portfolio. It is a little too geared towards modern art sensibilities for my tastes. Still their work is pretty impressive from a technical standpoint.

In fact, it is well worth checking out all of ACE’s portfolios. They will give you an education on what you can do with concrete.

And just in case the professionalism of ACE shakes your confidence, here is an account with pictures of ordinary people staining their own concrete.

I have wanted to own Chief Architect for a long time. What other program will enable you to create beautiful models of everything from light commercial buildings to grand log homes? What other program will also enabled you to print out full construction docs (including electrical, plumbing, and HVAC) for those same buildings? What other program will come up with a materials and price list for you? What other program will check your drawings against code (though I have to wonder how well this feature actually works)? What other program will also enable you to plan out your landscaping around the house in a professional and detailed manner?

Granted, you have to know what you are doing to use the program, but that is no problem for me. I know everything.

This weekend I thought, “So what if costs $400+ bucks? I want it.” So I go to the website to check it out again. They improved the program a lot since I last looked at it. Check out this gallery that was created by users of this software. And if you really want to make yourself want this program, watch this overview.

After I read a few online reviews and poked around a bit, I found out that they let you download a trial version. How could I resist? I had already decided that I really really wanted to own this program, but it never hurts to check a product out.

While I was downloading the trial version, I found out that the price of the software was $1,495.

Ouch.

I go though this every time. I always remember that I really really want this program. But I can never seem to accurately remember the price. And even though I am always increasing what I am willing to pay for it, it never seems to be enough.

They do make a striped down version for people who only want to have something to show their contractors that they sell under the “Better Homes and Gardens” label. Basically they are glorified drawing programs. If you need to draw up real plans you need Chief Architect (click here to see a set of plans drawn up with the program).

The problem is that I don’t really need to draw up real plans in my real job. When I work from prints I work from existing blue prints. When I need to draw up an estimate to do a job, all I really need is boring old Excel.

But even granting all that, I am still trying to convince myself to buy the program. Just think of it as spending money on your education, I say to myself. Myself is not buying that line of argument just yet.

I would have an easier time selling myself on this line of bull if their demo was a little better. I mean, I understand that the utility of the demo is going to be way restricted compared to the real thing. But did they really have to make it so that you could not save even one file? That makes it very tough to get through all their tutorials since all the tutorials are based off of one house design that you are supposed to work through from the bottom up (and that takes some time).

In the grand scheme of things, this is probably a good thing. Judging by how much fun I had getting through one tutorial, I would probably be short $1,495 by now if it was easy to get through all of the tutorials. Still, the fact that I can’t work my way through the tutorials kind of bums me out.

If you are curious, here are some screen shots of the tutorial that I did go through. They don’t look all that pretty because ray-tracing is not a feature that the demo supports. But when you consider how fast it was for me to whip something like this up, you realize why this is such a cool program.

This first screen shot is from the back of the house the tutorial made me design. That is my only excuse for the double deck.

This second shot is from the front. Did not get around to the stairs and other such details.

This is an overview of the first floor. Did not get around to doing the interior work. That is a separate tutorial.

This the plan for the second floor. But it looks different than it did on the screen because I converted it to a GIF to save space.

This is the plan for the first floor.

This is the plan for the basement.

This is the materials list.

Now come up with a good reason for me to buy this program.

In the process of getting my refrigerate license, I had it pounded it into my head that the method by which CFC’s (such as Freon) destroyed the ozone hole was well understood. So I got a chuckle of this….

But chlorine peroxide is a difficult molecule to work with. Extremely unstable by sea-level laboratory standards, it’s been hard to isolate in pure form for study. And despite the generally accepted cascade of ozone depletion reactions, it hadn’t even been detected in the Antarctic until 2004, which difficulty had been largely chalked up to its short lifetime. Now, though, a team at JPL has produced the best synthetic samples of chlorine peroxide to date, and they’ve checked how quickly it decomposes in the presence of ultraviolet light. And, well. . .the problem is, the stuff falls apart much more slowly than anyone had predicted – many, many times more slowly. If they’re right, it’s hard to see how the accepted chemistry of chlorine peroxide-driven ozone depletion can be correct.

Cross posted to the Ethereal Voice