Nathan Zeldes blogs on everyday product design
Here is a photo of the Jerusalem central bus station, a large blocky building at the entrance to the city.
So, maybe it’s just me, but whenever I see it I get reminded of a mathematical construct – the Menger Sponge, a three dimensional fractal. Judge for yourself:
OK, OK, the bus station is not a true Menger Sponge, but its structure definitely evokes the essence – the spirit, if you will – of that fractal.
And yes, I am a geek. Lucky me!
Here is the Physics and Mathematics faculty building in Bashkir State University, in the city of Ufa, capital of the Republic of Bashkortostan, Russia.
See what it looks like?
Depends on your age or your affection for the history of computing, I suppose. This building looks like a logarithmic slide rule, the icon of the exact sciences before the arrival of electronic calculators in the mid-seventies.
If you have no idea what those lovely devices were, here is a pocket model. Or check my collection.
The big question is whether this was intentional? Fellow collector David Rance, who presented it in a collectors’ meeting in Bletchley Park in September, says it was. If so, what a perfect design for a Physics and Math building!
You can read more in David’s article here.
Form follows Function, as we all know… but function can change, leaving the form out of context.
Consider the long, rather dilapidated building with the vaulted, tilting roof seen behind this parking lot in downtown Jerusalem. What does its form tell you?
In its heyday, in the 1940s and 50s, this strange form was dictated by the building’s function: it housed a luxurious, large movie theater, the Orion Cinema. The long, narrow, slanting form was due to the rising rows of seats.
Today these large cinema halls are a thing of the past, driven out of business by home video and the smaller, more modern halls of multi-theater complexes in shopping malls, whose function is not visible externally any more. And the grand old Orion building now houses a McDonalds… whose function has nothing to do with its form either. The younger generation who eat in it have no idea that it was one of their city’s major entertainment venues 70 years ago… and would certainly not recognize the building’s odd shape. Oh well…
I spent a weekend with family in Neot Semadar (Shizafon), a Kibbutz in the Negev desert in the south of Israel. And I mean desert: he place is searing hot in the day, cold at night, and all around is sand, rock and the majestic desolation typical of deserts anywhere.
In Israel we’re used to transforming the desert, using irrigation to grow crops; but Neot Semadar went one step further. They built the Kibbutz pretty much with their own hands and to their own designs, and they applied an eco-friendly philosophy throughout. At the same time they gave free rein to imaginative artistic expression, with amazing results.
Most impressive is the arts and crafts center, lovingly constructed over more than a decade. Housing multiple art workshops, it combines an exuberant style reminiscent of Gaudi’s Barcelona works with a passive cooling system in the central tower (now nearing completion). Water will be sprayed at the top of this huge hollow chimney, and its evaporation will cool the air; the cold air sinks rapidly, and is spread throughout the building through underground conduits.
The arts and crafts center is finished with loving detail; everything is decorated with animal and abstract shapes, like here:
The same passive cooling concept is used throughout the Kibbutz; here is a typical family home, built of thick adobe (mud) bricks that keep the inside cool in the day and warm at night. The small tower above feeds the desert cooler system. This works quite well, I can attest. The entire place is cooled with similar systems; not an energy-guzzling air conditioner is to be seen.
The Kibbutzniks here have managed to make the desert yield organic crops that let them produce and sell excellent dates and other fruits, as well as wine, cheese, and olive oil. Of course they use irrigation, and the main water reservoir for this is an artificial lake, complete with fish and lush green vegetation. The lake is fed with residual water from a nearby desalination plant, thereby recycling otherwise useless water to grow salinity-tolerant crops.
With so much sunshine, it was inevitable that solar energy be used – here is a tractor shed with photovoltaic cells covering its roof.
Lastly, a general view of the center of Neot Semadar. You see the arts and crafts center and a few of the residential homes, all with their funny cooling towers; and you see how improbably green it all is, against the background of the barren desert mountains.
For more and larger images, see my flickr photo set.
Information about Neot Semadar is on the Kibbutz’s web site.
Saw the panels below by an elevator. The left one is the familiar elevator control; the one on the right, however, uses fake buttons and reads: “Before you press, think of your health – use the stairs!”
Good advice, nicely implemented…
Check the latest addition to the History of Computing exhibition at the Possibly Interesting web site: Michaelis’s concrete calculator (well, actually, Kvasnicka’s version of it).
Still in NYC, following the auspicious IORG launch, and took the opportunity to visit the Empire State Building.
I was totally unprepared for what I saw.
Of course, It’s tall, and the view from the top is incredible, but somehow I was expecting a ‘has been’. After all, this skyscraper was built some 80 years ago, in the great depression, the days when giant apes were swatting at quaint biplanes… the world is full of much taller towers today.
I couldn’t have been more wrong. The Empire State is still the tallest in Manhattan, following 9/11; and it totally dominates the Midtown skyline. But it is its superb architectural design that sets it apart. Its iconic tearraced lines thrust skyward in a perfect platonic expression of UP and STRENGTH that none of the funky new Glass and Gossamer skyscrapers can hold a candle to (speaking of strength, this tower took a direct hit by a twin engined B25 bomber in 1945 with only relatively minor damage).
This assertive presence is complemented by a magnificent attention to detail. All lobbies and corridors are faced in marble. Tasteful art deco ornaments add a twenties touch that is just right. You can make snide phallic jokes all you want, but It’s all simply beautiful, and in a way that no photo can do justice to.
Makes you proud to be an engineer!
When we toured Scotland we visited an ancient building with a curious design feature: it had a staircase that ran in a counterclockwise spiral, opposite to the standard design.
We were told that there are a number of such buildings in Scotland, all built by the same family. Apparently the Kerr family tended to have many left-handed sons, and they built a number of their castles and buildings (notably Ferniehirst Castle, in the 15th century) with counterclockwise spiral staircases, the idea being that a left handed person could defend them more easily (and perhaps also confuse the more common right handed enemies? although it seems that the latter would have some advantage on the attack).
Such a degree of custom design, geared to a genetic trait of one family, is interesting. It is also told that once they committed the architecture this way, they handled the fact that not all their fighting men were lefties by training those who weren’t to fight with the sword in their left hand anyway. Customize the building to the family, then customize the retainers to the building…
With the wonders of Google Maps at our service, we can get some interesting insights. Take the photo below, also viewable here. This is the older part of the Microsoft campus at Redmond, where much of the software in the computer I’m writing this on was developed.
Notice how the buildings all have cross shapes visible in their plans. This is not because of a religious bias in the company’s management. It is, I was told when I visited there, because Bill Gates had decided when he started the company that an effective software engineer needs the peace and quiet made possible by an office with a door. Indeed, while myriads of hi-tech engineers (yours truly included) work in cubicles in the noisy open space made famous by the Dilbert comic strip, Microsoft coders all have their own individual offices with real doors to block out the world when they need to concentrate. Of course such an office requires a window too, or it gets claustrophobic… which explains the shape of the buildings – with a need for so many windows, they had to be made with a convoluted outline, to maximize surface-to-bulk ratio.
For my part, I admire the tenacity – Microsoft moved to Redmond in 1986, and 22 years later they still resist the temptation to compress their engineers into cubes. They have a good thing, and they stick to it!
