The famous Saint Louis Gateway Arch in Missouri celebrates a birthday today. Designed by Finnish-born architect Eero Saarinen, the arch officially opened on October 28, 1965.
The Saint Louis Gateway Arch is actually an enormous steel catenary curve. It commemorates Thomas Jefferson's Louisiana Purchase of 1803 and symbolizes the gateway to the American West.
Challenge: Are you a math whiz? See if you can solve this Catenary Curve problem
St. Louis Gateway Arch Photo: ArtToday.com
Birth of the Arch originally appeared on About.com Architecture on Wednesday, October 28th, 2009 at 00:00:04.
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Our pals at the indispensable built environment site The Infrastructurist sent over a round-up of some of the best recent posts:
Crazy or Brilliant? A Plan To Build A Giant Floating Airport Off California Coast
San Diego desperately needs a new airport. Problem is, there's really nowhere to put it. So a local entrepreneur is trying to build a three squa... Read the full story on TreeHugger
"Despite the apocalypse, newspapers will refuse to die." Image credit:Guardian, OrgangrinderBlog.
US newspaper readership rates have slipped another 10%, ytd. Not to worry. A new print journalism business model may have been discovered by Terminix, the pest control company. Turning "readership" into "R-Value," they are selling pesticide-soaked newsprint as building insulation, entombing, for posterity, an archive of the scant coverage given climate science over the last two decades. Just skip the reading, and send the papers ... Read the full story on TreeHugger
Relative to less-clunkily named programs such as LEED and Energy Star, the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority -- or NYSERDA, if you're into (relative) brevity -- doesn't get a lot of attention. And yet NYSERDA's recent awarding of its 17th High Performance Building plaque, to the Woodland Hill Montessori School in the Albany suburb of Rensselaer, casts a spotlight on NYSERDA's very deserving incentive programs. Yes, it's kind of a dim spotlight -- no offense to Montessori schools in upstate towns, but CNN isn't breaking into its regular programming to deliver this news -- but the efficiency achievements at Woodland Hill and some continued good work on the part of NYSERDA both deserve a look.
While NYSERDA hasn't handed out many plaques, the program has, by its own account, "given more than $92 million in federal and State funds to provide assistance for projects affecting more than 137 million square feet of building space in New York State" since 1999 as part of its New Construction Program, and gave Woodland Hill Montessori School $28,000 in assistance as part of its High-Performance Buildings Program, which has over 900 projects active throughout the state. The long story short, here, seems to be that the incentive program works, even when it's not doling out seven-figure sums. (More proof: the existence of companies that specialize in helping developers qualify for NYSERDA incentives) Steve wrote about NYSERDA's Smart Loan Program back in 2008, and everything you need to know about the specifics of the program is on the other side of that link, but even as New York State faces down a scary deficit, it's reassuring to see that NYSERDA is still handing out funds to worthy projects -- $28,000 is a small price to pay, after all, considering the far-reaching benefits of a building that functions as efficiently as Woodland Hill Montessori School.
Woodland Hill added 11,000 square feet of space -- a couple of classrooms, a gym, conference rooms, the usual school stuff -- with the help of that NYSERDA grant, and incorporated a host of energy-efficient elements both to the newly added space and the older building. The school's new roof and wall insulation, energy-efficient windows, high-efficiency lighting and demand-controlled ventilation are expected to save as much energy annually as is consumed by three single-family homes in a year. Again, not that bad for $28k, and certainly not that bad for a program that still flies largely under the radar.
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Photo credit: palindrome6996 via Flickr
Your kitchen is the heart of your home, so it's easy to see why so much time, energy, and money gets spent on just that one room. From floor to ceiling (and the cabinets and countertops in between), there's a lot that goes in to making a green kitchen, and a lot of choices out there; while that can make greener materials a little easier to come b... Read the full story on TreeHugger
Last Sunday was the second NYCSA, an event organized by the Public Art Campaign to oppose the proliferation of illegal advertising billboards around the city. I followed a team of whitewashers as they whited-out six billboards in SoHo- and later in the day, I photographed different teams of artists using the billboards as blank slates for their art. Most of the pieces didn't last long: the billboard company had teams out postering all day, and had taken back most of the spots within a couple of hours of the whitewashers hitting them. Personally, I prefer the billboards just painted white- I think they photograph better that way, and I don't like drawing an equivalency between illegal advertising and illegal art.