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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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
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.
Tim the Architect retweeted
A German princess was born in 1915 with Down syndrome and her family did something quietly radical for the time...
Princess Alexandrine Irene of Prussia (1915-1980), affectionately called "Adini," was the eldest daughter and fifth child of Wilhelm, German Crown Prince, and Duchess Cecilie of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, and a great-great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria. She was diagnosed with Down syndrome shortly after birth.
In the early 20th century, European aristocratic and royal families routinely institutionalized or hid children with intellectual disabilities. Her parents chose the opposite path, openly embracing her, including her in family life, and allowing her to appear in official family photographs and public events.
. . .
Princess Alexandrine Irene of Prussia, raised closely under the care of her dedicated nurse, Selma Boese. As a teenager, she attended the Trüpersche Sonderschule, a pioneering residential school for children with special needs, from 1932-34. In October 1934, she celebrated her Protestant confirmation alongside her sister Cecilie.
Following the death of her long-time nanny Selma Boese in 1936, Alexandrine moved to Niederpöcking in Bavaria. She spent the WWII years living in Bavaria under the care of another dedicated nurse, Ericka Strecker, as she required lifelong support. As Nazi Germany rose, disabled people became targets of one of the regime’s most chilling programs: Aktion T4, the organized murder of people deemed “unworthy of life.” Alexandrine’s place inside her family circle mattered. She was not abandoned to the institutions that became so dangerous for vulnerable people. She was kept close, protected, and cared for.
Her life was not loud. It was not filled with crowns, speeches, or political power. But it carries a different kind of weight. She lived through the fall of empires, the brutality of the Nazi era, WWII, and the shrinking of her once-powerful royal family. Through it all, Alexandrine remained loved. Her mother, Crown Princess Cecilie, stayed devoted to her.
Throughout her later life near Lake Starnberg, she was visited regularly by her family, particularly her brother Louis Ferdinand. She died in 1980 at the age of 65 — an extraordinary lifespan for someone born with Down syndrome during that era, which community discussions and historians attribute to the steady affection, stability, and high level of private care she received.
History often remembers royal women for whom they married, what jewels they wore, or what scandals followed them. But Alexandrine’s legacy is gentler and, in some ways, more powerful.
#archaeohistories
Tim the Architect retweeted
This bottle was never opened. Roman bird flasks like this one were filled at the furnace and then sealed shut by reheating the tip of the tail, with no stopper and no opening anywhere.
To use the perfume you had to snap the tail off. An intact bird is an unused bottle, which is why there is still liquid inside this one after 2000 years..
Art matters.
A lot of funny movies may have been lost that day Bill.
Thanks for hanging around.
Early in his career, after a disastrous night on stage in Chicago, Bill Murray walked out into the street ready to end his life, and headed for the lake, thinking he might as well "float for a while" once he was gone...
Instead, he turned up Michigan Avenue and found himself in front of the Art Institute of Chicago. He walked inside without even stopping to pay, because, in his words, he felt he was already "pretty much dead," and there, in front of him, was a painting he had always loved:
The Song of the Lark, painted by the French artist Jules Breton in 1884. A young peasant woman stands barefoot in an empty field at dawn, a sickle in her hand, pausing in her work to listen to a lark somewhere above her, while behind her a huge orange sun is just rising over the horizon.
Murray looked at her and saw a girl with very little to hope for, and yet, as he put it, "the sun’s coming up anyway and she’s got another chance at it." That simple thought was enough to bring him back because it made him feel that he too was a person, with "another chance every day the sun comes up."
For every writer, creator and dreamer here on X, I want to leave you with this: think of this story the next time you feel your art is futile, or that your creative pursuit isn’t worth the effort. Somewhere, someday, someone may stand in front of what you made at the lowest moment of their life, and find in it a reason to see the sun come up one more time...
Priest said something at mass last week that stuck with me.
He said he often says this prayer, “Lord lead me where you need me…”.
My favorite Mennonite preacher,Russel Krabill told us when we were young to say this prayer. “Help me to do as you would have us to do”.
I’ve never forgot that.
Both are an acknowledgment of accepting guidance from God.
There real meaning of All Hallows Eve
aka Halloween
Catholics are required to attend Mass every Sunday and on specific holy days of obligation. In 2026, one of those days also falls on a Sunday, and itʼs happening this weekend. On Nov. 1, the solemnity of All Saints will replace the 31st Sunday of Ordinary Time.
On Saturday, Oct. 31, and on Sunday, Nov. 1, Evening Prayer 1 of the Liturgy of the Hours is for All Saints and the vigil Mass on Saturday will observe the Mass of All Saints.
Solemnities rank above feasts and memorials and are the highest liturgical celebrations in the Catholic Church. They honor significant mysteries of the Christian faith, including events in the lives of Jesus and Mary, as well as key saints.
The solemnity of All Saints celebrates all Christian saints — those formally canonized by the Church and those who are not but have attained heaven. It is typically a holy day of obligation.
The observance of the solemnity begins with evening prayer (first vespers) the evening before on Oct. 31 — known as All Hallows’ Eve or Halloween — and is followed on Nov. 2 by All Souls' Day, a day in which the entire Church prays for all of the dead.
Sometimes a solemnity that falls on a Sunday will be moved to a Monday.
For example, in 2024, the solemnity of the Immaculate Conception on Dec. 8 fell on a Sunday in Advent so the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) transferred the solemnity to the Monday.
The Vatican has clarified that Catholics in the United States must still attend Mass on holy days of obligation even when they are transferred to Mondays or Saturdays, correcting a long-standing practice in the U.S. Church.
More: ewtnnews.com/world/us/all-sa…
Picasso was a Communist. That should be the first thing taught about him and that needs no explanation. He should be erased from Art History Books for that reason alone.
