Monthly Archives: July 2011

Factories. Assembly Lines. Manufacturing Systems! Quality Control? Continuous Improvement? Feedback? Transportation Cost. Bulk Materials. Cookie Cutter Design. Lots of hot buttons and points to ponder when you talk about creating our dream home in a big old factory. I used … Continue reading →

Now that’s a mouthful for a Wednesday morning, geotechnical, or soils mostly has to do with the first line of defense keeping buildings against gravity. Know your geotech and build your house upon the rock, sometimes literally. Ignore it, or … Continue reading →

Getting plastered can have positive and negative connotations. I won’t deal with the latter cheap shot, but as we have completed our building foundation, frame and mechanicals hanging sheetrock is the harbinger of building finish! Exciting stuff, only two weeks … Continue reading →

Conserve, combine, create. That is the hierarchy. Why is it so difficult to adopt this attitude? Dawkins and Dennett, two authors of evolutionary tomes ask the question when a new species has developed: “Who benefits?” . A friend asked, “Why … Continue reading →

I was privileged to meet Buckminster Fuller in my grad school career at Dartmouth’s Thayer School of Engineering and listened to his random musings and wisdom. I still recall his dicta when it came to structural engineering: no structural engineer was ever … Continue reading →

The Ides of July! Beware moisture! It’s not just March with Ides. During the hot summer months, thoughts of condensation are not always with us, but our life giving Aitch to Oh (H2O) can come into view in awkward places … Continue reading →

Happy Bastille Day, also brother Bill’s birthday-big celebrations for him in Paris every year. I was going to call this Concrete Commonsense but it seemed redundant. Concrete, that Roman miracle of burned limestone that enabled the Pantheon to stand with … Continue reading →

Mark Kelley, a partner at the Hickory Consortium formed under DOE’s “Building America”  program was one of the first mechanical engineers of my ken who started the mantra of “looking at buildings as if they are systems”. As if! Of … Continue reading →

Okay. I am a mechanical engineer and had two suffer through four semesters of Thermodynamics and so couldn’t resist that trendy word of the mechanical age: Entropy. All of thermodynamics can be summed up with three propositions: You can’t win. … Continue reading →

Nowhere is material science so necessary as in the Sweet Division 16- electrical. Dominated by copper and aluminum we discover elemental properties as we harness these metals to conduct electricity. Copper is more expensive these days (it wasn’t always so, … Continue reading →