So I took a brief hiatus to go to Paris, and that is why I missed a week of posting. I am sorry. I needed cheese, wine, macaroons, and croissants in the worst possible way, and as a consequence last week I was unable to focus on materials that cannot be ingested. I hope you understand. Now that I’m back, I’d like to kick things off by telling you about a fantabulous rammed earth building system being developed by, fittingly, a French company: Toulouse-based Meco’concept.
We don’t see many rammed earth buildings in …

I grew up in Northern California, and I suppose I like the look of structures clad in wood because they’re comfortable and familiar. Wood works wonderfully in that earthquake-riddled part of the country because it’s flexible and can handle the forces imparted by the occasional seismic event better than a brick facade.  Brick is great, but it can’t be denied that it will undergo a complete nervous breakdown when placed under unusual stress. More often than not, wood faced with lateral forces takes a deep breath, squares its shoulders, and carries on with the vital business of protecting building interiors …

Every once in a while I like to find out about a new way to use a very old material, like brick for instance. Human beings have been working with brick at least since the times when the flooding of the Euphrates might engender the total destruction of the walls Gilgamesh built around his city, so the material definitely qualifies as ancient.  And I found out about a rather interesting way that a Dutch company, Tiger Stone, has been laying brick: they are rolling roads out like carpet.

I have no idea …

 
When I first heard the term “fly ash” in architecture school, I remember thinking that it sounded pretty sick.  I mean, flies are annoying and it’s gross when they buzz over and land first on some unidentified, dog-generated substance on the ground and then, without a single shred of consideration, approach and settle on the rim of your drinking cup or slice of pecan pie.  But it boggles the mind to think about the enormous number of flies you’d have to crisp in order to produce so many metric tons of fly ash that there’d even …