Hare-brained Scheme Enthusiast

@dennisbhooper The one where he orders the mousetrap. youtu.be/ZxK72FB-1BA?si…

What’s your favorite George Saunders story

@AndrewHammel1 But here's the thing: that is literally the design brief for this project. Communal housing built by residents using recycled materials. Intentionally designed to be inexpensive, adaptable and simple to construct.

I have always admired the resourcefulness of slum dwellers who build makeshift but sturdy homes out of random scraps of lumber, metal, and astroturf. Oops, my bad: This is an apartment house in Munich and a finalist for the 2026 German Architecture Museum Prize.

@chacaranda It took a multi-decade project to get it this way. The falls were covered by a 4-lane highway bridge until 2004!

COME ON

Currently having my mind blown by the urbanism, vibrancy, and walkability of downtown Greenville, South Carolina. I have never seen this many people walking around a small American city in my life.

@architext14 Beautifully written.

You’re standing under the Brion arcosolium, i.e. the great cantilevered Scarpa half-arch, and you tilt your head back, and what should be cold, gray, 1970s Brutalist concrete is instead shimmering like a Venetian lagoon. The reason is: glass tesserae. Not bathroom-supply-store “mosaic tile” but hand-cut smalti from Murano, i.e. the same raw material that’s been catching torchlight in St. Mark’s Basilica for about a thousand years. Scarpa doesn’t just slap them on with mastic like a suburban backsplash. No: he has masons build up a lime-cement bed on the underside of a concrete arch, meaning they’re troweling this wet stuff overhead, gravity actively rooting against them. Then each little piece of smalto is pressed in at some infinitesimal angle—like two degrees this way, five degrees that way—so that when light from, say, the late-afternoon Veneto sun skims the surface, the arch ceiling flickers with different wavelengths: cerulean, aquamarine, the color of oxidized bronze. And then he micromanages the grout, tinting it so that the tiny seams vanish or, occasionally, pulse with shadow, depending on how he wants your cornea to register the transition from tile to sky. There’s also this thing Scarpa does with edges. If you look at where the mosaics stop—say, a band of tile terminating against raw bush-hammered concrete—it’s never messy. He’ll inset a razor-thin bronze strip, like a bookmark marking where matter ends and shimmer begins. Which means the tiling is not so much a surface finish as a threshold condition, a kind of architectural punctuation. The paradox (and this is very Scarpa): the whole exercise is wildly impractical—glass mosaics outdoors in northern Italy’s freeze-thaw cycles? under a dripping concrete arch?—and yet it’s also perfect, because the impermanence is the point. The tesserae sparkle and corrode and fall out and get replaced, which means the tomb is less an eternal monument than a system for modulating decay and repair. And Scarpa, who will himself be buried here (in a different corner, under grass, with an 11 carved into his stone, long story), knew that what survives isn’t the tile or even the concrete, but the effect: the moment where you crane your neck and feel that gravity has inverted, and you’re suddenly standing at the bottom of a shallow pool, looking up at the rippled surface of light and water.

@gmoult This absolutely did not need to look like the Colosseum. I always respect when someone carries through on a vision.

zoom in, you won’t be disappointed

@zach_hazard We can't have nice things.

They changed the Rock or Something. Unbelievable.

@who_shot_jgr Selinsgrove would like a word.

shamokin mt. carmel tamaqua hazleton

@duckbldg Lots of Three Stooges energy.

This is what it says about unclassified and CUI information. “The misuse and mismanagement of mobile apps poses a cybersecurity and operations security risk…”

@ndkirschmann Just amazed at some of the trash replies immediately assuming the Soldier is at fault.

@Culture_Crit A sculpture commissioned by the richest man in the world.

@MemoryMedieval @Culture_Crit Borromini sitting around hoping someone's gonna buy that church he just built.

@Culture_Crit Because people stopped paying for it. Nobody ever shows photos of sculptures that Michelangelo or Bernini did "for the love of the art." 🤔

@Culture_Crit Those sculptures were all paid for by wealthy patrons. Want to see more? Go harass those guys.

@JodyBrownArch Late FLW is a mixed bag IMO, but Taliesen West is awesome. Those tiny little chairs!

Spent the morning at Taliesin West

@TheSpaceshipper I hope they take some artistic liberties with the second book Shift. It's maddeningly dumb compared to Wool. Could not even finish it.

How many seasons for Silo? Showrunner Graham Yost: "We've got plans for how the series would play out if we get to do the whole thing (...) The books are a trilogy. This is not Outlander. This is not a long science fiction series. It's a trilogy. We're..."

@jibreeladonna @gmoult Great minds... x.com/A_Luckmann/sta…

they should have a contest for most telescopic house in buffalo

@sevensixfive And these little stick wheels that fall away for taking off.

@sevensixfive They have replaceable skid plates at the wing tips for landing!

wait what