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On Flight Decks
A deep dive into the complicated controls inside commercial aircraft.
When boarding a commercial flight, passengers often get the chance…
Feature
Long-form, original writing on the built environment.
28 posts
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Solarjunk
A new life for old landfills
On a brisk spring day in April, I walked across the vast expanse of…
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Manufacturing an Ecosystem
Revisiting Vaclav Smil's Made in the USA
Following the 2008 financial crisis, manufacturing output in the United States…
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On Stretch Wrap
The diaphanous material that holds together the containerized world.
To look at a container ship is to see the world…
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Remittance by the Barrel
Each year, millions of barrels are shipped from NYC to the Caribbean. Here's why, how, and the economics…
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In Case of Emergency
A brief history of just-in-time manufacture
The pandemic has brought not one crisis, but many. Supply disruptions have meant that…
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Anyone Can Build a House
The Segal method and the UK's self-build movement
In 1962, the German-born architect Walter Segal was living in…
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Déneigement Montreal
A peek into Montreal's mastery of snow
Before moving to Montreal in 2020, I had lived my whole…
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A Never Ending Grind
The mortar and pestle is one of the most common kitchen tools in the world, and one of the most…
TW Lim
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On Geofoam
Images from the 2014 construction of Maggie Daley Park in Chicago are something to behold. Where one might expect earthmoving…
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A Symbiotic Truce
On composites, crayfish, and reinforced concrete's tentative alkalinity.
For most of a red swamp crayfish’s life, cambarincola…
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Ise Jingu and the Pyramid of Enabling Technologies
Our buildings are often long lived things, capable of outlasting the society that produced them. The Egyptian Pyramids are still…
