Things are heavy right now, man. People are fighting wars, Wall Street is occupied, a large percentage of the workforce can’t find jobs, airport security procedures intensify in complexity by the minute, the rainforest is shrinking as I type … and that’s just the tip of the rapidly melting iceberg. So if you’re already feeling like Atlas with the weight of the world on your shoulders, you’ll be glad to find out that scientists recently invented a material so lightweight it makes styrofoam seem as heavy as a lead ingot.
In …

I admit that my understanding of generators is pretty hazy, but I think the general idea is to wave magnets in front of conductive wire in an orderly fashion in order to produce a flow of current.  Once you have an electric current the door to a world of unmitigated awesome opens up and all of a sudden you have light when the sun has set and the ability to microwave popcorn.

Image courtesy todayifoundout.com
A fascinating new metal alloy material under development by researchers at the University of Minnesota, led by Professor Richard James, works …

When I sat down to write this post I realized that it’s the 100th installment of materials information that I have submitted to the Interwebs, which, if this were a sitcom, would mean that I’d have a sheet cake with “Congratulations – 100 Posts!!!!” written in frosting set set out on a table, and the key grip would be elbowing the best boy out of the way for the corner piece with the biggest frosted rose on it.

Image courtesy ursulinesmsj.org
But since there’s no cake, I’m going to write about a …

“The firmness of a boiled egg can be adjusted at will through the cooking time. Some decisions are, however, irrevocable – a hard-boiled egg can never be reconverted into a soft-boiled one. There would be less annoyance at the breakfast table if we could simply switch back and forth between the different degrees of firmness of the egg.
Similar issues arise in the making of structural materials such as metals and alloys. The materials properties are set once and for all during production. This forces …

“I got tiger blood, man. My brain…fires in a way that is – I don’t know, maybe not from this particular terrestrial realm.” – Charlie Sheen
Until this week I thought that Charlie Sheen was your ordinary aging Hollywood actor. Really, if I thought about him at all, I assumed he was working on a TV show, staying tan/undergoing the occasional face lift, failing at some marriages, and I believed that human blood and maybe some high-quality cocaine were flowing through his veins. But now I have a completely different perspective.  Now I know that …

ARCHITERIALS is a year old now, and like most healthy, well-adjusted one-year-olds it needs to be changed constantly, crawls all over my apartment, and makes strange burbling noises.  No, really – it does.  It’s terrifying.
Over the past year I’ve profiled approximately 65 materials and learned about blogging, bacteria, and biscuits, although I must confess that the biscuts were a side project.  A delicious, buttery side project.  Anyhow, to celebrate the birthday of ARCHITERIALS and the fact that the tagline “Investigating architectural materials since 2010” has finally attained temporal legitimacy, I’ve compiled for this, …

Does anyone else remember the Muppet Show skit called “PIGS IN SPACE“?  Actually, it was called “PIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIGSSSS IIIIINNNNNNN SPAAAAAAAAAAAAACE,” mainly because in outer space distances are vast and despite the fact that sound doesn’t travel through a vacuum, all announcements about astronaut pigs really should be made with excessive reverb.  I don’t really have any more time to go on about the pigs but I bring them up because they are hilarious and because they were the first thing I thought of when I heard about Cellulose Aerogel, which is the material I’m about to describe in excruciating detail over the course …

Generally speaking, architecture is kind of a big deal.  What I mean is that architecture is large in size; it accomodates enormous objects like people, cars, eighteen-wheelers, and the occasional overfed cat.  The Burj Khalifa in Dubai, for example, is 2,717 feet tall; that’s just over half a mile by my calculations.  (I’ve seen entire hills shorter than the Burj Khalifa).  But the thing about BIG things is that they tend to result from organized aggregation of small things.  And so today I’d like to take a moment to explore the implications of the recent development of some really really ridiculously tiny …

 
A long time ago before we were born, probably after he’d had a few and was waxing philosophical, Chicago architect Louis Sullivan wrote:
“It is the pervading law of all things organic, and inorganic,
of all things physical and metaphysical,
of all things human and all things super-human,
of all true manifestations of the head, of the heart, of the soul, that the life is recognizable in its expression, that form ever follows function. This is the law.”
Sullivan designed intricate ornamental elements inspired by natural forms, which were meant to look completely complex and awesome as well as to express …

Ever since I saw the movie Office Space, I can’t hear the word “flare” or any of its homophones without thinking of Jennifer Anniston’s waitress uniform and the “pieces of flair” they wanted her to attach to her suspenders.  Maybe I’m thinking too hard about this, but it seems to me that the idea behind wearing the flair (various buttons and patches with funny messages on them – if you haven’t seen this movie please stop reading immediately and rent it) was that it was a chance for people to express some individuality …