Architecture
Design
26 rabbit holes · 16 people exploring
Common starting questions
- Is glass actually a very slow liquid?
- Why are houses in Japan torn down so often?
- Why do Soviet apartment blocks all look identical?
Rabbit holes
- Stockholm's metro is a 110 km art gallery
Samuel Okafor · 4 sources
- the Pantheon's dome is still the largest unreinforced concrete dome
Almost 1,900 years old. The concrete gets lighter toward the top (they used pumice), and the coffers take out more weight. And there's just a 9 m hole at the top.
Elena Marchetti · 4 sources
- brutalism isn't named after being brutal
From béton brut, 'raw concrete', Le Corbusier's phrase. Banham's 'New Brutalism' essay popularized it. The name has done the style no favors.
Kate Lindqvist · 6 sources
- hostile architecture is everywhere once you notice it
Benches with armrests in the middle, spikes in doorways, sprinklers that go off at night, high-pitched tones only teenagers can hear. Cities quietly designing against people.
Matteo Rossi · 4 sources
- Geisel Library looks like it's from the future
Named after Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seuss). Pereira's buildings all look like 1960s sci-fi set design. Also did the Transamerica Pyramid.
Anya Petrova · 4 sources
- the Moscow Metro was built to look like palaces
'Palaces for the people'. Chandeliers, mosaics, marble. Also built deep enough to double as bomb shelters.
Kate Lindqvist · 5 sources
- how they stopped the Tower of Pisa from falling
Maya Rivers · 4 sources
- Chandigarh, Le Corbusier's city in India
Ingrid Solberg · 5 sources
- Habitat 67 was supposed to be the prototype for cheap housing
Prefab concrete boxes stacked so every unit gets a garden on someone else's roof. It was meant to make housing cheap. It ended up as sought-after (not cheap) condos instead.
Yuki Tanabe · 4 sources
- Kowloon Walled City: 33,000 people on 2.6 hectares
Densest place on earth, no planning, buildings fused together, dentists and noodle factories and schools inside. Demolished in 1994. The photos are unreal.
Ingrid Solberg · 5 sources
- the Parthenon has almost no straight lines
Columns bulge slightly, lean inward, and the floor curves up in the middle. All so the building looks straight to human eyes.
Lena Kowalski · 4 sources
- before reverb plugins, studios had rooms just for echo
A hard-walled room with a speaker at one end and a microphone at the other. You send the signal in and record what bounces around. Then someone figured out a big steel sheet with a pickup on it does a similar job in a fraction of the space.
Kate Lindqvist · 6 sources
- the Pruitt–Igoe myth
Kate Lindqvist · 5 sources
- old church windows aren't thicker at the bottom because glass flows
Jonas Becker · 5 sources
- Japanese houses lose all their value in ~20 years
Houses are treated more like cars than investments. Earthquake codes keep changing, so new is assumed safer. Ended up mourning the Capsule Tower (demolished 2022).
Tomás Rinaldi · 5 sources
- Boston City Hall: the most hated (and defended) building in Boston
Matteo Rossi · 4 sources
- Stalin's Seven Sisters
Marcus Thompson · 4 sources
- why American houses are made of sticks
Cheap timber, cheap nails, and balloon framing in the 1830s let anyone with a hammer build a house. Europeans are always shocked by it.
Elena Marchetti · 4 sources
- why Paris looks like Paris
Same height, same cream limestone, same balcony lines on the 2nd and 5th floors, grey zinc roofs. Mostly one guy in the 1850s-60s bulldozing the medieval city.
Kate Lindqvist · 4 sources
- Grand Central's whispering gallery
Whisper into one corner of the arch outside the Oyster Bar and someone in the opposite corner hears you clearly. The vaults are Guastavino tile, and once you know what it looks like you see it all over NYC.
Matteo Rossi · 5 sources
- Ian Fleming named a Bond villain after a brutalist architect
Fleming supposedly disliked Goldfinger's modernist houses in Hampstead. Goldfinger was not amused. Trellick Tower went from 'tower of terror' to listed building with expensive flats.
Jess Wong · 5 sources
- Brasília was designed from scratch in under 4 years
Shaped like an airplane (or a bird, depending on who you ask), built in about 41 months, inaugurated 1960. Gorgeous buildings. Famously hard to walk around.
Ola Brekke · 6 sources
- why every ex-Soviet city has the same apartment blocks
Kate Lindqvist · 6 sources
- elevators are why skyscrapers work
Steel cables get so heavy past ~500 m that they can barely carry their own weight, so supertall buildings use sky lobbies where you change elevators. Some newer cables are carbon fiber.
Ludovica Ferri · 5 sources
- the Barbican took 20+ years to build and it shows (positively)
Went for a concert, got lost for 40 minutes (everyone does, there are yellow lines on the floor to help), went home and read about it until 2am.
Anya Petrova · 6 sources
- Derinkuyu: an underground city discovered by a guy renovating his house
1963, a man knocked down a wall in his basement and found a tunnel. It goes about 85 m deep and could hold thousands of people plus livestock. Big stone doors that roll across the passages.
Inês Carvalho · 4 sources