How I look at buildings, with aphantasia
A photograph is not a substitute
buildings
The vacant building everyone complains about is cheaper to keep empty.
Have you talked about why?
The Forgotten Castles of the Garamantes • wild man life
The forgotten castles of the Garamantes lie buried beneath the Libyan Desert, the ruins of a civilisation that built cities, traded with Rome, and raised pyramids in the Sahara.
Constructing the World’s Biggest (Disassemblable) City
The largest peaceful human gathering in history took place in a megacity planned, built, used and dismantled in the space of five months.
The Grid That Doubles the Strength of the Ground — Practical Engineering
How ugliness helps NIMBYs
And how beauty could help get more homes built
The footprints of every building in NYC
The landscape of NYC changes so much that the New York City Office of Technology and Innovation updates a dataset of building footprint shapes weekly.
11,700 Free Photos from John Margolies' Archive of Americana Architecture: Download, Use & Re-Mix
Many connoisseurs of architecture are enthralled by the modernist philosophy of Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, and I M Pei, who shared a belief that form follows function, or, as Wright had it, that form and function are one.
Where Are the Economies of Scale in Homebuilding?
Over the last few months we’ve examined the extent of the construction industry’s productivity problem.
Why Spain has the world's greatest cities - Works in Progress Magazine
Why Spain has the world’s greatest cities
7,000 years of China stilted houses celebrate human ingenuity, offer insights
Elevated homes have been part of Chinese culture since earliest days, showcasing how intercultural interaction fuelled technology development.
Construction Costs Rarely Fall
Not long ago we looked at construction productivity trends for the US and for countries around the world. We found that in the U.S., and in most other large, wealthy countries, construction productivity is stagnant or declining. Unlike manufacturing and agriculture, or the…
Inside the Space-Age Bid To Build Millions of Homes in Factories
Operation Breakthrough, a 1970s federal moonshot to build 26 million homes using advanced manufacturing methods, has lessons for today’s abundance movement.
The wonder of modern drywall
How gypsum changed construction
Stop incentivizing surface parking lots
They are draining the economic potential of our cities. We need to make them financially unsustainable.
GlobalBuildingAtlas LoD1
Concrete’s Greatest Weakness
The challenge of cure time🌌Get Nebula using my link for 40% off an annual subscription: https://go.nebula.tv/Practical-Engineering🏙️Watch 17 Pages: https:/...
Features - How to Build a Medieval Castle - Archaeology Magazine - September/October 2025
Why are archaeologists constructing a thirteenth-century fortress in the forests of France?
From rebuild to replica, architecture has a double life | Aeon Essays
Architectural copies of lost structures require reckoning with history and heritage. At what cost is the past rebuilt?
Brian Potter on what he has learned writing Construction Phyics - Marginal REVOLUTION
Individual construction tasks have, on average, not gotten cheaper since at least the 1950s. Bricks haven’t gotten cheaper since the mid-19th century, despite massive improvements in brickmaking technology. Construction has a reputation for being slow to innovate, but…
The beauty of concrete
Why are buildings today simple and austere, while buildings of the past were ornate and elaborately ornamented? The answer is not the cost of labor.
Exit Strategy: The Case for Single-Stair Egress
Forum: Reforming U.S. building codes to permit single-stair apartment buildings would facilitate cost-effective and higher-density housing.
Wall cladding made from corn cob waste brings sustainable construction mate
Construction is something that we probably cannot do without as we continue to build houses, buildings, and other structures. The quest for coming up with sustainable construction is ongoing as we look for materials that are eco-friendly and the process in creating them to be as…
How building codes work in the US - by Brian Potter
Buildings must be built to the requirements of the building code, a set of laws that governs how a building must be built.
Where Are The Robotic Bricklayers? - by Brian Potter - Construction Physics
When researching construction, you invariably discover that any new or innovative idea has actually been tried over and over again, often stretching back decades.