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Home » Columnists » Biographies »

Skyscrapers wouldn't exist without prime invention

By Arrol Gellner, Friday, August 15, 2008.

For centuries, the drudgery of having to climb long flights of stairs ensured that few buildings were more than four or five stories high. Even at that, the least desirable dwellings were usually those on the top floor -- just the opposite of our modern preference. This idea held true until the late 19th century, when elevators began to appear in multistory buildings.  more...

Double-hung windows on a Normandy?

By Arrol Gellner, Friday, August 1, 2008.

Can't distinguish a double-hung from a double-boiler? Then here in a nutshell are the most common window types, along with the architectural styles they're usually associated with:  more...

Are architects becoming lazy?

By Arrol Gellner, Friday, July 18, 2008.

In 19th century America, the only way an architect could view historic architecture was to go see it firsthand (usually on another continent), or else find engravings of it in books. Because architects of the era were much less likely to travel than their modern counterparts, engravings ended up being their usual reference.  more...

More architects designing homes with sun in mind

By Arrol Gellner, Monday, July 7, 2008.

Passive solar design is nothing new -- vernacular builders have known its principles for millennia. From the Middle East to China, both rich and poor alike have traditionally used the sun's free energy for comfort.  more...

Green credits would help recycling efforts

By Arrol Gellner, Friday, June 20, 2008.

(This is Part 2 of a two-part series. Read Part 1, "Salvaged fixtures often conflict with city codes.")

Last time we looked at a number of modern building-code requirements that make it either economically impractical or else flat-out illegal for green builders to use recycled building materials, even though the cities enforcing these codes officially encourage such reuse.  more...

Double standards hamper green building

By Arrol Gellner, Friday, June 6, 2008.

(This is Part 1 of a two-part series.)

"Green buildings use durable materials that are salvaged, have recycled content or came from rapidly renewable resources. These materials significantly reduce the environmental destruction associated with the extraction, processing and transportation of virgin materials."  more...

Most commonly misused words in architecture

By Arrol Gellner, Friday, May 23, 2008.

Homeowners these days are amazingly facile with architectural jargon, thanks no doubt to the gaggle of home-improvement shows on television these days, not to speak of the wealth of information on the Internet. But while lots of folks know their antae from their astragals, as it were, a few stubborn terms are still routinely confused -- sometimes even among architects. Here are the usual suspects:  more...

Debate over biofuels, food supply intensifies

By Arrol Gellner, Friday, May 9, 2008.

We Americans have happily given our cars the run of the country, paving over a good 40 percent of our cities so they can roam unfettered, and generously ceded a big chunk of our hard-earned homes to keep them warm and dry. But apparently that's not enough. Now some interests are suggesting that, in order to keep our four-wheeled friends tanked up at all costs, we share our food supply with them as well.  more...

Before choosing vinyl, think about environment

By Arrol Gellner, Friday, April 25, 2008.

The other day I came across a plastic house. Not the futuristic World's Fair variety -- this was just an ordinary old house that had been "improved" with a brace of glaring-white vinyl windows, lots of wavy vinyl siding, and some flimsy looking vinyl gutters and downspouts. As icing on the petrochemical cake, it was ringed by a white vinyl picket fence. If there were any termites left in the place, they must have been pretty hungry.  more...

Race is on to build world's tallest structure

By Arrol Gellner, Friday, April 11, 2008.

How many structures have qualified as the tallest thing ever built? Surprisingly, it's a pretty small club.

We don't know much about structures of the distant past, of course. But we do know that if you'd been hanging around Giza in 2570 B.C. or so, you'd have found the spanking-new Great Pyramid soaring some 481 feet into the sky -- high enough to hold the title of tallest manmade structure for nearly 4,000 more years.  more...

What happened to the mail-order house?

By Arrol Gellner, Friday, March 28, 2008.

A century ago, Henry Ford's canny use of mass production put the automobile -- a former plaything of the wealthy -- within reach of the average American. Since then, mass production has made complex products from clocks to computers affordable to pretty much everyone.  more...

Ugly truth about home renovation

By Arrol Gellner, Friday, March 14, 2008.

The word "renovation" implies that you're replacing something old and worn out with something new and better. Yet too many so-called renovations simply involve replacing things that are old and substantial with ones that are cheap and flimsy but just happen to be new. That seems less like renovation and more like ruinovation.  more...

Today's traffic engineering stuck in neutral

By Arrol Gellner, Friday, February 29, 2008.

Someday, when the history of our Petroleum Age is written and the internal-combustion automobile is considered a quaint and rather silly conveyance on par with the oxcart, scholars will have a field day examining the myriad aspects of our vanished autocentric society.  more...

Door fashions change with the decades

By Arrol Gellner, Friday, February 15, 2008.

Doors can carry all kind of mystical symbolic meanings, but sometimes a door is just a door. This is one of those times. Below is a simple rundown of the basic types of residential doors and their uses.

First, some general information. A standard residential door is 6 feet 8 inches high. Most exterior doors are 1 3/4 inches thick, while most interior doors are 1 3/8 inches thick. Standard door widths range from 24 to 36 inches in 2-inch increments.  more...

Architecture that screams for attention disappoints

By Arrol Gellner, Friday, February 1, 2008.

"It does not matter how badly you paint," said the English writer George Moore, "so long as you don't paint badly like other people."

The same might be said for architects, whose professional success hinges on novelty just as surely as it does for artists. In order to garner even a small measure of recognition, an architect must manage to stand out from a whole sea of colleagues equally starved for attention.  more...

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