building
It leaves no sign of its past self behind
Anasazi dwellings
If you want to build an outrageous building
The grid and its difficulties
A timeless space
Quaker Square Inn
The Timeless Way of Building
A Book by Christopher Alexander- Mind of no mind
- The quality without a name
- An objective matter
- Bitterness
- The most precious thing we ever have
How Buildings Learn
A Book by Stewart BrandBuilder Brain
An Essay by Charlie WarzelThe Builder mindset often eschews policy completely and focuses on the macro issues, rather than the micro complexities. It is a mindset that seeks to find very elaborate, hypothetical-but-definitely-paradigm-shifting, futuristic technology to fix current problems, instead of focusing on a series of boring-sounding and modest reforms that might help people now.
…The worst version of Builder mentality is that their dreams become reality, but instead of maintaining their creations, they simply move onto the next Big Thing, leaving others to deal with the mess they’ve made.
A time to build and a time to repair
An Article by Elizabeth M. RenierisThere is a time to build and a time to repair. Repairing what is broken is difficult and important work that requires contextualizing technology and working within creative constraints…If we just keep building without repairing what exists or applying lessons learned along the way, we will continue to spin our wheels as the same problems accumulate and amplify. In this way, our technology may evolve, but our relationship to it (and to each other) can only degrade.
The joy of the humble brick
An Article by Tim HarfordThe brick is one of those old technologies, like the wheel or paper, that seem to be basically unimprovable. ‘The shapes and sizes of bricks do not differ greatly wherever they are made,’ writes Edward Dobson in the fourteenth edition of his Rudimentary Treatise on the Manufacture of Bricks and Tiles. There’s a simple reason for the size: it has to fit in a human hand. As for the shape, building is much more straightforward if the width is half the length.
The Maintainers
A WebsiteThe Maintainers, a global research network interested in the concepts of maintenance, infrastructure, repair, and the myriad forms of labor and expertise that sustain our human-built world. Our members come from a variety of backgrounds, including engineers and business leaders, academic historians and social scientists, government and non-profit agencies, artists, activists, coders, and more.
Are We Really Engineers?
An Essay by Hillel WayneFollies
A DefinitionFolly at Hagley Hall, Hereford and Worcester, built by Sanderson Miller, 1749–50
In architecture, a folly is a costly, generally nonfunctional building that was erected to enhance a natural landscape. Follies first gained popularity in England, and they were particularly in vogue during the 18th and early 19th centuries, when landscape design was dominated by the tenets of Romanticism. Thus, depending on the designer’s or owner’s tastes, a folly might be constructed to resemble a medieval tower, a ruined castle overgrown with vines, or a crumbling Classical temple complete with fallen, eroded columns.
On the "Building" of Software and Websites
An Essay by Dorian TaylorI’m beginning to suspect that software, and more conspicuously the Web, is fundamentally the wrong shape for the archetype of the construction project.
Open Transclude for Networked Writing
Not an accumulation of facts
Knowledge is not an accumulation of facts, nor is it even a set of facts and their relations. Facts are only rendered meaningful within narratives, and the single-page document is a format very conducive to narrative structure. The hypertext books that have gained popularity (I’m thinking here of Meaningness.com) have largely conformed to this in two ways: 1) there is an intended reading order, and 2) the longer essays within the project do most of the heavy lifting in terms of imparting the author’s perspective to readers.
On the other hand, the notion of the “document” that is intrinsic to web development today is overdetermined by the legacy of print media. The web document is a static, finished artifact that does not bring in dynamic data. This is strange because it lives on a medium that is alive, networked, and dynamic, a medium which we increasingly understand more as a space than a thing.
More that can be done
The web is still a very young medium, and it has been influenced more than anything else by print media design. There is so much more that can be done with text on a screen than is being done today. Citations, drawing, chat, speech-to-text. There are opportunities everywhere, and the bar is low! If we are serious about unlocking the value of knowledge we should consider how to improve every part of the knowledge production stack, and that includes reading. As Laurel Schwulst says:
Imaginative functionality is important, even if it’s only a trace of what was, as it’s still a sketch for a more ideal world.
Open Transclude
What you are looking at is an scroll-locked iframe that links to a quote I picked out of my blog post “Notes on Comparative Psychology.” You can use Open Transclude anywhere you can drop an
<a>
tag on your own site.Open Transclude:
- Works anywhere on your own domain
- Compatible with most static site generators / templating engines
- 12 lines of HTML, 80 lines of SCSS, 22 lines of JS (4.5 kb total)
- Has 0 dependencies — this is native web technology
Open Transclude is extremely simple, and the heaviest part of the code is the CSS, which you can simplify at your whim. That’s why I am referring to it as a UX pattern. This is not a protocol. The code is really a commodity. What’s interesting about it is the idea and the design, and this is just one viable implementation! Feel free to adapt it however you like.
The principal improvement over a block quotation is sense of context.