Licensed Architect, Member of the American Institute of Architects AIA & Professor of Architecture since 2006. Owner of Architecture Firm since 2010.
Joined March 2024
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New York City.
Glad I lived there and glad I don’t live there now. I will admit there is nothing like walking around your home surrounded by history, happenings, people and endless potential and lots of great restaurants to visit.
I went to many of the best restaurants with my wife while I was there. Loved it and cherish the memory. You will grow simply by being there. Great place.
I see this painting of a couple walking across the street and it reminds me of a time gone by, a good one and a good memory. Make a memory. Good ones.
Tim the Architect retweeted
If your City of God isn’t worn, torn, raggedy, and heavily annotated, then friend you haven’t lived. Live well.
If I had excess money I’d buy storefronts in small towns and operate coffee shop/cafes at a loss just to provide the proper atmosphere in small towns. In Indiana we call it Brain Drain where the best and brightest goto college and leave home towns to head to the cities. Town councils need to understand they need compelling reasons to stay. This helps.
Three books that found me. I don’t seek them, they seek me. That is the way to grow a library. Let the book find you. Never take recommendations from others and I don’t like books as gifts for that reason. Never ask someone to recommend a book to you.
For example I just happened to listen to Jovan Pulitzers podcast and he was covering Frames of mind. I found it fascinating and hence ordered the book.
The complete Angler is a whole nother story. That I learned about from Barron Collier who founded Collier County Florida Naples area. He was very much influenced by it. I figure it it affected him that much there must be something to it.
And the Golden Ratio was mentioned in a book I was reading by sitting president who suggested it as a way to learn more about the facinating background of this phenomenon, The Golden Ratio which I use often in my building designs.
And that is how books 📚 “find you”. One curiosity leads you down the path, remember that path in life is made by walking my friend.
More about Barron from Grok
Collier was an avid fisherman. After buying Useppa Island near Fort Myers in 1911 (his entry point into Southwest Florida), he developed it into a luxury resort and established the Izaak Walton Club there. Multiple historical accounts explicitly note that the club was named for the 17th-century author of The Compleat Angler (also spelled Compleat). It became one of the most exclusive sporting clubs of its era, attracting wealthy fishermen and hunters.
This naming is the strongest direct link. Walton’s book, first published in 1653, is the classic celebration of angling as a contemplative recreation—exactly the kind of refined sporting lifestyle Collier promoted at Useppa and later at places like the Rod and Gun Club in Everglades City. His initial attraction to the area was itself a fishing vacation, and fishing remained central to how he and his guests experienced Southwest Florida.
Biking and habits you'd had all your life are the fountain of youth.
Meet Madam Jeanne Louise Calment, who had the longest confirmed human lifespan: 122 years, 164 days. Apparently, fate strongly approved of the way she lived her life. She was born in Arles, France, on February 21, 1875. The Eiffel Tower was built when she was 14 years old.
When she was 85, she took up fencing, and still rode her bike when she reached 100. At the age of 114, she starred in a film about her life, at age 115 she had an operation on her hip, and at age 117 she gave up smoking, having started at the age of 21 in 1896. She didn't give it up for health reasons; her reason was that she didn't like having to ask someone to help her light a cigarette once she was nearly blind.
Jeanne retained sharp mental faculties. When she was asked on her 120th birthday what kind of future she expected to have. Her reply, "A very short one."
Here are the Rules of Life from Jeanne Louise Calment:
"I'm in love with wine."
"All babies are beautiful."
"I think I will die of laughter."
"I've been forgotten by our Good Lord."
"I've got only one wrinkle, and I'm sitting on it."
"I never wear mascara; I laugh until I cry often."
"If you can't change something, don't worry about it."
"Always keep your smile. That's how I explain my long life."
"I see badly, I hear badly, and I feel bad, but everything's fine."
"I have a huge desire to live and a big appetite, especially for sweets."
"I have legs of iron, but to tell you the truth, they're starting to rust and buckle a bit."
"I took pleasure when I could. I acted clearly and morally and without regret. I'm very lucky."
“Being young is a state of mind, it doesn’t depend on one’s body. I’m actually still a young girl, it's just that I haven't looked so good for the past 70 years."
At the end of one interview, the journalist said, "Madame, I hope we will meet again sometime next year." To which Jeanne replied, "Why not? You're not that old; you'll still be here!”
I hope you enjoyed this little story and it inspires you to not take life too seriously, and live a little like Jeanne. And please remember growing old is mandatory but growing up is optional.
I never thought of the "brewing beer" excuse, that's a good one!
This is a 3200 year old attendance sheet from Ancient Egypt, and some of the reasons it gives for missing work are absolutely wild:
1. Drinking with Khonsu
2. The scorpion bit him
3. Brewing beer
4. Embalming his brother
5. His feast
6. Building his house
7. His wife is bleeding
8. With Khons making remedies
9. Strengthening the door
10. Making remedies for the scribe’s wife
The craftsmen who built and decorated the royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings lived in a village of their own, Deir el-Medina, and in the fortieth year of Ramesses II’s reign, around 1250 BC, someone drew up a register of their absences on a large flake of limestone. There are forty names, the dates each man was missing are written beside them in black ink, and above most of those dates, in red, is the reason.
The man who went drinking with Khonsu, probably a coworker, could hardly have imagined that his day off would go down in history, let alone that we’d still be reading about it more than 3000 years later. Somewhere along the way, brewing beer stopped getting anyone out of work, and nobody consulted the rest of us, although I doubt any boss would ask a follow up question if you called in and said, "Sorry, I’m embalming my brother."
All joking aside, what strikes me most is how little of this needs translating. Many of the entries I left off the list are about sickness and family, a mother who was ill, a man caring for a relative, and they could have been written yesterday.
Three thousand years have changed almost everything about the way we live, and almost nothing about what it means to be human...
Tim the Architect retweeted
Sales 101:
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
This video uses an AI-generated avatar from AIPBI (identifiable by the mic branding), which produces synthetic sales advice clips and discloses all avatars/voices are AI-generated.
youtube.com/watch?v=tlb7EP…
youtube.com/@aipbi
Tim the Architect retweeted
Thomas Edison Solved Housing But The Works Was Not Ready
Thomas Edison’s 1907 plan for affordable housing aimed to cast complete concrete homes—including bathtubs—in a single six-hour pour, but the outcome became a major logistical challenge.
In the early 1900s, the United States faced a working-class housing crisis. Urban tenements in places like New York were crowded, prone to fire, and unsanitary.
Having launched the Edison Portland Cement Company, Edison proposed a reusable cast-iron mold that could let contractors mass-produce identical, inexpensive homes.
These buildings would resist fire and insects and could be cleaned easily with a hose. Edison even promised to forgo patent profits to address the tenement problem.
His engineering vision overlooked economic and practical limits. The mold for one design used more than 2,300 interlocking nickel-plated iron pieces.
A contractor needed to buy at least $175,000 in equipment, a huge investment in 1907. Moving, setting up, and taking apart the apparatus demanded a large crew and heavy machinery, which reduced the expected savings from cheap concrete.
The pouring process was technically strict. The concrete had to flow well enough to move from the roof through complex molds and fill every space without gaps. If the mix varied slightly, the whole structure failed.
Edison also misread human attitudes. The homes were labeled as slum housing before construction began. People disliked the idea of living in a uniform concrete box like the neighbor’s, a sharp change from the era’s personal styles.
Only a few dozen were built—mainly in Union, New Jersey, and Gary, Indiana—leaving Edison with a multimillion-dollar loss on an idea the public rejected.
The original lace ups.
You can see how this person walked.
The oldest leather shoe in the world, from Areni-1 cave in Armenia, was worn and shaped to its owner’s right foot. The deformation sits at the heel and the big toe, which is exactly where pressure falls in a normal stride. Five and a half thousand years on, the leather still holds the shape of one person’s gait.
And it survived because of sheep dung.
The cave at Areni-1 stayed cool and dry, and a thick layer of accumulated dung sealed the deposit beneath it. The oldest leather footwear on earth reached us intact because livestock were kept in that cave for a very long time afterwards.
ALT A 5,500-year-old leather shoe from Areni-1 cave in Armenia, shown from above and from the sole. Made from a single piece of cow hide wrapped around the foot and drawn together with leather lacing along the top, with dried grass still packed inside. Two detail insets magnify the lacing at the toe and the heel. A scale bar shows the shoe is about 24.5 cm long.
Tim the Architect retweeted
I have always loved this picture, because it epitomises for me the Christmases of my childhood in Mount Kisco, New York. I have just discovered that it was part of an ad campaign dating to 1962. The illustrator was one Austin Briggs (illustrationhistory.org/arti…). Looking at other things he did, he caught the world of my childhood perfectly.
