Posts Tagged ‘construction’
“Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand”*…
(Roughy) Daily has looked before at that most common– and essential– of substances, sand. (See here, here, and here.) Today, via Michaela Büsse, an update…
After water, sand is the second most used material in the world. Each year, approximately 40-50 billion metric tons of sand are consumed worldwide.
This accounts for 79% of all aggregates extracted and traded, making sand the literal foundation for global human infrastructure. Sand plays a vital role in the production of glass, steel, and concrete. Silica, one of the most common minerals found in sand, is the key ingredient in silicon chips and thus for the development of digital technologies. But sand is also fundamental to the creation and maintenance of land itself, rendering it constitutive to processes of urbanization. Artificial islands, port expansions, and beach nourishment projects consume vast quantities of sand. As the bedrock of urban infrastructures, sand is embedded in the very fabric of modern life. Yet, its ubiquity belies its complexity. As a sediment, sand is foundational for the functioning of ecosystems. The relentless expansion and intensification of cities is starving rivers and coasts of sediment, depleting sand at a rate that far exceeds its natural replenishment.
Intensive dredging of rivers and seabeds has fundamentally altered sedimentation patterns, disrupting the delicate equilibrium that governs ecosystems. Rivers, which once carried sand from mountains to coastlines, now struggle to replenish beaches and wetlands. This depletion has far-reaching consequences. Without sufficient sand deposits, coastlines are left vulnerable to erosion, rising sea levels, and the devastating impact of extreme weather events. In ecosystems already on the front lines of climate change—like deltas, wetlands, and estuaries—the effects of sand extraction are compounded. Delta regions, for instance, rely on continuous sediment deposits to counteract the natural sinking of land. When sand is removed faster than it can be replaced, these regions are exposed to subsidence, where land sinks at an accelerated rate, amplifying flood risk and increasing the salinization of freshwater resources. Such impacts are often delayed, manifesting years or even decades after extraction, making them challenging to monitor and mitigate effectively.
As global sand consumption surges to unprecedented heights, the profound and far-reaching consequences of extraction come sharply into focus. Numerous journalistic and scientific accounts warn of the “looming tragedy of the sand commons,” highlighting environmental concerns related to dredging and mining sand, such as pollution, biodiversity loss, and soil disturbance, as well as illegal practices in the sand trade. The reality of the sand trade is both dirty and messy, intertwining national and transnational politics. In regions like Southeast Asia, rapid urbanization and investments in large-scale infrastructure projects have spurred an unprecedented demand for this essential resource. Here, land reclamation has emerged as a flashpoint where extraction practices intersect with issues of sovereignty, livelihoods, and environmental justice, transforming sand into a highly sought-after and contested commodity. Building new land for some means taking old land from others. The exploitation of sand goes hand in hand with exploitative labor and geopolitical maneuvering.
Sand’s impending scarcity has fueled a black market, giving rise to “sand mafias”—criminal organizations that exploit extraction and trade through corruption, violence, and intimidation, often circumventing national mining and export bans. It is not uncommon for sand to become a matter of life and death for those who mine it as well as for those who seek to prevent it from being mined. Across the world, activists and local communities have mobilized against sand extraction and land reclamation, fighting the prevailing narratives of development and progress that often justify environmental exploitation. However, these initiatives are rarely successful, resulting (at best) in compensation payments to the affected communities. A transboundary governance of sand would require international standards, which many researchers and organizations have requested. Even so, it is nearly impossible to control the natural flow of sand.
As sand transitions from a sediment to a precious resource, it has become instrumental in urban ideals of late modernity. Cities like Dubai and Singapore epitomize how architectural ambitions is built on vast quantities of imported sand. Land built from scratch, towering skyscrapers, and sprawling infrastructure are testaments to sand’s transformative potential. Yet, these urban landscapes are haunted by their materiality: each grain is a silent witness to the ecological and social disruptions that enabled its journey. The sand in these structures embodies the persistence of environmental degradation, displaced labor, and the exploitation that made them possible. In this way, sand is both an architect and a specter of modernity’s unrestrained ambitions, leaving us to confront the shadows cast by our own constructions…
Eminently worth reading in full: “Granular Power: The Gritty Politics of Sand,” from @michaelabussey.bsky.social and @eflux.bsky.social.
* Jorge Luis Borges
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As we get grainy, we might send insightful birthday greetings to James Hansen; he was born on this date in 1941. An atmospheric physicist, he was Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (from 1981-2013). He is best known for his (June, 1988) testimony to the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee that there was 99% certainty the cause of climate change was known with 99% certainty to be the buildup of carbon dioxide and other artificial gases in the atmosphere– helping raise broad awareness of global warming– and for his advocacy of action to avoid dangerous climate change. (Hansen has since proposed a revised explanation of global warming, where the 0.7°C global mean temperature increase of the last 100 years can be to some extent explained by the effect of greenhouse gases other than carbon dioxide (such as methane).
Currently the Director of the Program on Climate Science, Awareness and Solutions of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, he remains a climate activist.
“Though these developments were sometimes linked to the word progress, the usage was ironic: ‘progress’ unguided by humanism is not progress”*…
Further, in a fashion, to yesterday’s post: from Stewart Hicks, a story of unintended consequences…
How did a humble piece of metal quietly reshape the American suburbs—and with them, our expectations for modern homes? This video explores the history and impact of the gang-nail plate, a simple yet revolutionary invention that transformed residential construction and accelerated suburban growth.
Originally devised to combat hurricane damage in places like mid-century Miami, the gang-nail plate allowed builders to quickly and securely connect multiple pieces of lumber at virtually any angle. By enabling the mass production of roof trusses in off-site factories, it led to stronger, cheaper, and more efficient construction. This efficiency opened the door to spacious open floor plans, complex rooflines, cathedral ceilings, and the sprawling McMansion aesthetic, all of which have come to define much of American suburban architecture.
Yet, the influence of this unassuming invention isn’t entirely positive. While it helped streamline building processes and cut costs, it also encouraged rapid housing expansion and larger, more resource-intensive homes. The result was an architectural shift that contributed to suburban sprawl, increased energy demands, and homes increasingly treated as commodities rather than unique, handcrafted spaces. These changes reverberated through building codes, real estate markets, and even family life, influencing how we interact with our homes and one another…
Via Jason Kottke, who observes…
The story of gang-nail plate illustrates an inescapable reality of capitalist economics: companies tend not to pass cost savings from efficiency gains onto consumers…they just sell people more of it. And people mostly go along with it because who doesn’t want a bigger house for the same price as a smaller one 10 years ago or a 75” TV for far less than a 36” TV would have cost 8 years ago or a 1/4-lb burger for the same price as a regular burger a decade ago?…
“The Invention That Accidentally Made McMansions”
* Steven Pinker
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As we practice restraint, we might spare a thought for Canvass White; he died on this date in 1834. An engineer and inventor, he worked as head assistant to chief engineer Benjamin Wright in the construction of the Erie Canal. Needy of a hydraulic cement to serve as mortar between the stones used to create the Canal’s locks, and unable to afford to import it from England, White developed and patented a locally-sourced waterproof cement– Rosendale cement— which was used to build the Erie Canal then host of major works in the US including the Delaware and Hudson Canal and Brooklyn Bridge. As Bill Bryson wrote (in At Home) “the great unsung Canvass White didn’t just make New York rich; more profoundly, he helped make America.”
“Lack of ornamentation is a sign of spiritual strength”*…
Why are buildings today drab and simple, while buildings of the past were ornate and elaborately ornamented? Samuel Hughes proposes an answer…
One of the unifying features of architectural styles before the twentieth century is the presence of ornament. We speak of architectural elements as ornamental inasmuch as they are shaped by aesthetic considerations rather than structural or functional ones. Pilasters, column capitals, sculptural reliefs, finials, brickwork patterns, and window tracery are straightforward examples. Other elements like columns, cornices, brackets, and pinnacles often do have practical functions, but their form is so heavily determined by aesthetic considerations that it generally makes sense to count them as ornament too.
Ornament is amazingly pervasive across time and space. To the best of my knowledge, every premodern architectural culture normally applied ornament to high-status structures like temples, palaces, and public buildings. Although vernacular buildings like barns and cottages were sometimes unornamented, what is striking is how far down the prestige spectrum ornament reached: our ancestors ornamented bridges, power stations, factories, warehouses, sewage works, fortresses, and office blocks. From Chichen Itza to Bradford, from Kyiv to Lalibela, from Toronto to Tiruvannamalai, ornament was everywhere.
Since the Second World War, this has changed profoundly. For the first time in history, many high-status buildings have little or no ornament. Although a trained eye will recognize more ornamental features in modern architecture than laypeople do, as a broad generalization it is obviously true that we ornament major buildings far less than most architectural cultures did historically. This has been celebrated by some and lamented by others. But it is inarguable that it has greatly changed the face of all modern settlements. To the extent that we care about how our towns and cities look, it is of enormous importance.
The naive explanation for the decline of ornament is that the people commissioning and designing buildings stopped wanting it, influenced by modernist ideas in art and design. In the language of economists, this is a demand-side explanation: it has to do with how buyers and designers want buildings to be. The demand-side explanation comes in many variants and with many different emotional overlays. But some version of it is what most people, both pro-ornament and anti-ornament, naturally assume.
However, there is also a sophisticated explanation. The sophisticated explanation says that ornament declined because of the rising cost of labor. Ornament, it is said, is labor-intensive: it is made up of small, fiddly things that require far more bespoke attention than other architectural elements do. Until the nineteenth century, this was not a problem, because labor was cheap. But in the twentieth century, technology transformed this situation. Technology did not make us worse at, say, hand-carving stone ornament, but it made us much better at other things, including virtually all kinds of manufacturing and many kinds of services. So the opportunity cost of hand-carving ornament rose. This effect was famously described by the economist William J Baumol in the 1960s, and in economics it is known as Baumol’s cost disease [see here].
To put this another way: since the labor of stone carvers was now far more productive if it was redirected to other activities, stone carvers could get higher wages by switching to other occupations, and could only be retained as stone carvers by raising their wages so much that stone carving became prohibitively expensive for most buyers. So although we didn’t get worse at stone carving, that wasn’t enough: we had to get better at it if it was to survive against stiffer competition from other productive activities. And so the labor-intensive ornament-rich styles faded away, to be replaced by sparser modern styles that could easily be produced with the help of modern technology. Styles suited to the age of handicrafts were superseded by the styles suited to the age of the machine. So, at least, goes the story.
This is what economists might call a supply-side explanation: it says that desire for ornament may have remained constant, but that output fell anyway because it became costlier to supply. One of the attractive features of the supply-side explanation is that it makes the stylistic transformation of the twentieth century seem much less mysterious. We do not have to claim that – somehow, astonishingly – a young Swiss trained as a clockmaker and a small group of radical German artists managed to convince every government and every corporation on Earth to adopt a radically novel and often unpopular architectural style through sheer force of ideas. In fact, the theory goes, cultural change was downstream of fairly obvious technical and economic forces. Something more or less like modern architecture was the inevitable result of the development of modern technology.
I like the supply-side theory, and I think it is elegant and clever. But my argument here will be that it is largely wrong. It is just not true that twentieth-century technology made ornament more expensive: in fact, new methods of production made many kinds of ornament much cheaper than they had ever been. Absent changes in demand, technology would have changed the dominant methods and materials for producing ornament, and it would have had some effect on ornament’s design. But it would not have resulted in an overall decline. In fact, it would almost certainly have continued the nineteenth-century tendency toward the democratization of ornament, as it became affordable to a progressively wider market. Like furniture, clothes, pictures, shoes, holidays, carpets, and exotic fruit, ornament would have become abundantly available to ordinary people for the first time in history.
In other words, something like the naive demand-side theory has been true all along: to exaggerate a little, it really did happen that every government and every corporation on Earth was persuaded by the wild architectural theory of a Swiss clockmaker and a clique of German socialists, so that they started wanting something different from what they had wanted in all previous ages. It may well be said that this is mysterious. But the mystery is real, and if we want to understand reality, it is what we must face…
And face it Hughes does: “The beauty of concrete,” from @SCP_Hughes in @WorksInProgMag.
* Adolf Loos (architect and polemicist of modern architecture)
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As we ponder plainness, we might send ornate birthday greetings to Sir Bertram Clough Williams-Ellis; he was born on this date in 1883. An architect who resisted the modernist trends of his time, he is best remembered as the creator of the Italianate village of Portmeirion in North Wales– the setting of the wonderful televisions series The Prisoner (and the Doctor Who arc The Masque of Mandragora).
“The materials of city planning are: sky, space, trees, steel, and cement; in that order and that hierarchy”*…
… problematically, the last of those is among the biggest sources of CO2 emissions on earth– between 7 and 8% of the total. Now, Casey Crownheart reports, there may be a way to produce that essential building material in a low- or no-carbon way…
Cement hides in plain sight—it’s used to build everything from roads and buildings to dams and basement floors. But there’s a climate threat lurking in those ubiquitous gray slabs. Cement production accounts for more than 7% of global carbon dioxide emissions—more than sectors like aviation, shipping, or landfills.
Humans have been making cement, in one form or another, for thousands of years. Ancient Romans used volcanic ash, crushed lime, and seawater to build the aqueducts and iconic structures like the Pantheon. The modern version of hydraulic cement—the sort that hardens when mixed with water and allowed to dry—dates back to the early 19th century. Derived from widely available materials, it’s cheap and easy to make. Today, cement is one of the most-used materials on the planet, with about 4 billion metric tons produced annually.
Industrial-scale cement is a multifaceted climate conundrum. Making it is energy intensive: the inside of a traditional cement kiln is hotter than lava in an erupting volcano. Reaching those temperatures typically requires burning fossil fuels like coal. There’s also a specific set of chemical reactions needed to turn crushed-up minerals into cement—and those reactions release carbon dioxide, the most common greenhouse gas in the atmosphere.
One solution to this climate catastrophe might be coursing through the pipes at Sublime Systems. Founded by two MIT battery scientists, the startup is developing an entirely new way to make cement. Instead of heating crushed-up rocks in lava-hot kilns, Sublime’s technology zaps them in water with electricity, kicking off chemical reactions that form the main ingredients in its cement.
Over the course of the past several years, the startup has gone from making batches of cement that could fit in the palm of your hand to starting up a pilot facility that can produce around 100 tons each year. While it’s still tiny compared with traditional cement plants, which can churn out a million tons or more annually, the pilot line represents the first crucial step to proving that electrochemistry can stand up to the challenge of producing one of the world’s most important building materials.
By the end of the decade, Sublime plans to have a full-scale manufacturing facility up and running that’s capable of producing a million tons of material each year. But traditional large-scale cement plants can cost over a billion dollars to build and outfit. Competing with established industry players will require Sublime to scale fast while raising the additional funding it will need to support that growth. The end of 0% interest rates makes such a task increasingly difficult for any business, but especially for one producing a commodity like cement. And in a high-stakes, low-margin industry like construction, Sublime will need to persuade builders to use its material in the first place…
A start-up is working to drive down the carbon footprint of cement production: “How electricity could help tackle a surprising climate villain,” from @casey_crownhart in @techreview.
See also: “We are closing in on zero-carbon cement.”
* Le Corbusier
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As we prioritize progress, we might note that it was on this date in 1942 that Henry Ford patented the Soybean car. Per Wikipedia:
… a concept car built with agricultural plastic. The New York Times in 1941 states the car body and fenders were made from a strong material derived from soy beans, wheat and corn. One article claims that they were made from a chemical formula that, among many other ingredients, included soy beans, wheat, hemp, flax and ramie; while the man who was instrumental in creating the car, Lowell E. Overly, claims it was “…soybean fiber in a phenolic resin with formaldehyde used in the impregnation” (Davis, 51). The body was lighter and therefore more fuel efficient than a normal metal body. It was made in Dearborn, Michigan and was introduced to public view on August 13, 1941. It was made, in part, as a hedge against the rationing of steel during World War II. It was designed to run on hemp fuel.
“Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand”*…
(Roughly) Daily has looked before at sand: as a scarce resource, thus as a valuable commodity and an object of theft, and as a metaphor. In this excerpt from his book, The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization, Vince Beiser makes the case that it is the most important solid substance on earth…
[Sand is] the literal foundation of modern civilization. … Sand is the main material that modern cities are made of. It is to cities what flour is to bread, what cells are to our bodies: the invisible but fundamental ingredient that makes up the bulk of the built environment in which most of us live.
Sand is at the core of our daily lives. Look around you right now. Is there a floor beneath you, walls around, a roof overhead? Chances are excellent they are made at least partly out of concrete. And what is concrete? It’s essentially just sand and gravel glued together with cement.
Take a glance out the window. All those other buildings you see are also made from sand. So is the glass in that window. So are the miles of asphalt roads that connect all those buildings. So are the silicon chips that are the brains of your laptop and smartphone. If you’re in downtown San Francisco, in lakefront Chicago, or at Hong Kong’s international airport, the very ground beneath you is likely artificial, manufactured with sand dredged up from underwater. We humans bind together countless trillions of grains of sand to build towering structures, and we break apart the molecules of individual grains to make tiny computer chips.
Some of America’s greatest fortunes were built on sand. Henry J. Kaiser, one of the wealthiest and most powerful industrialists of twentieth-century America, got his start selling sand and gravel to road builders in the Pacific Northwest. Henry Crown, a billionaire who once owned the Empire State Building, began his own empire with sand dredged from Lake Michigan that he sold to developers building Chicago’s skyscrapers. Today the construction industry worldwide consumes some $130 billion worth of sand each year.
Sand lies deep in our cultural consciousness. It suffuses our language. We draw lines in it, build castles in it, hide our heads in it. In medieval Europe (and a classic Metallica song), the Sandman helped ease us into sleep. In our modern mythologies, the Sandman is a DC superhero and a Marvel supervillain. In the creation myths of indigenous cultures from West Africa to North America, sand is portrayed as the element that gives birth to the land. Buddhist monks and Navajo artisans have painted with it for centuries. ‘Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives,’ intone the opening credits of a classic American soap opera. William Blake encouraged us to ‘see a world in a grain of sand.’ Percy Bysshe Shelley reminded us that even the mightiest of kings end up dead and forgotten, while around them only ‘the lone and level sands stretch far away.’ Sand is both minuscule and infinite, a means of measurement and a substance beyond measuring.
Sand has been important to us for centuries, even millennia. People have used it for construction since at least the time of the ancient Egyptians. In the fifteenth century, an Italian artisan figured out how to turn sand into fully transparent glass, which made possible the microscopes, telescopes, and other technologies that helped drive the Renaissance’s scientific revolution.
But it was only with the advent of the modern industrialized world, in the decades just before and after the turn of the twentieth century, that people really began to harness the full potential of sand and begin making use of it on a colossal scale. It was during this period that sand went from being a resource used for widespread but artisanal purposes to becoming the essential building block of civilization, the key material used to create mass-manufactured structures and products demanded by a fast-growing population.
At the dawn of the twentieth century, almost all of the world’s large structures — apartment blocks, office buildings, churches, palaces, fortresses — were made with stone, brick, clay, or wood. The tallest buildings on Earth stood fewer than ten stories high. Roads were mostly paved with broken stone, or more likely, not paved at all. Glass in the form of windows or tableware was a relatively rare and expensive luxury. The mass manufacture and deployment of concrete and glass changed all that, reshaping how and where people lived in the industrialized world.
Then in the years leading up to the twenty-first century, the use of sand expanded tremendously again, to fill needs both old and unprecedented. Concrete and glass began rapidly expanding their dominion from wealthy Western nations to the entire world. At roughly the same time, digital technology, powered by silicon chips and other sophisticated hardware made with sand, began reshaping the global economy in ways gargantuan and quotidian.
Today, your life depends on sand. You may not realize it, but sand is there, making the way you live possible, in almost every minute of your day. We live in it, travel on it, communicate with it, surround ourselves with it…
“Sand and Civilization,” from @VinceBeiser via @delanceyplace.
* Jorge Luis Borges
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As we muse on minerals, we might note that it was on this date in 1913 that a famous “sand castle” (concrete building) was opened in New York City, the neo-Gothic Woolworth Building. Located at 233 Broadway in the Tribeca neighborhood of Manhattan, it was the tallest building in the world from 1913 to 1930, at a height of 792 feet; more than a century after its construction, it remains one of the 100 tallest buildings in the United States.
The Woolworth Building has been a National Historic Landmark since 1966 and a New York City designated landmark since 1983. The building is assigned its own ZIP Code, 10279, one of 41 buildings in Manhattan so “honored” as of 2019.
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