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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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.
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..
Tim the Architect retweeted
La France doit des excuses à Louis XVII.
Il n’avait que dix ans. La Révolution française l’a tué.
Tim the Architect retweeted
This is Kayla.
She has Down syndrome.
When she was born, her mother was told all the things Kayla would not be able to do because of her diagnosis.
Kayla was crowned Miss Delaware Teen USA in 2024.
She has been an honors student, a swimmer, and a cheerleader, and has worked as a model.
Kayla leads a beautiful and full life, regardless of her diagnosis.
Every human being deserves the same chance.
Tim the Architect retweeted
August 21, 1883. Just after six in the evening, the sky over Rochester, Minnesota turns the color of a bruise. Twenty minutes later, a third of the town is gone. Thirty seven people are dead. More than two hundred are bleeding in the streets.
Rochester had no hospital. Not one.
So a convent school on the edge of town emptied out. The nuns walked into the wreckage in full habits, and a woman named Mother Alfred Moes, an immigrant from Luxembourg who had come to America with almost nothing, sent word to the only doctor in town who could handle that many wounded.
His name was William Worrall Mayo. He was 64, an English country doctor, a hard skeptic on the subject of religion.
The sisters took over Rommel's dance hall and turned it into a hospital overnight. None of them had ever been trained in nursing. They learned it standing up, with Mayo giving orders and the injured laid out on the floorboards.
When the last patient was gone, Mother Alfred went to see him.
She told him Rochester needed a real hospital. A permanent one. She said she had seen it, a great hospital rising out of the cornfields on the west edge of town, and that she wanted him to run it.
Mayo told her the truth. A building like that would cost $40,000. Well over a million in today's money. He said no congregation of school teaching nuns could possibly raise it.
She did not argue with him. She simply told him that if he would take charge of the hospital, the sisters would take charge of paying for it.
Then she went out and did it.
For six years, her sisters taught school and handed over their wages. Every dollar. She bought nine acres of farmland. She hired the builders. She oversaw the plans herself, and when the money ran short, she found more.
Saint Marys Hospital opened on September 30, 1889. Twenty seven beds. Thirteen sisters, none of them nurses by training. Dr. Mayo, now 70, walked in as chief of staff with his two sons, Will and Charlie, beside him.
Those two boys built their surgical practice inside her building. Patients started arriving from Chicago, then from every state, then from overseas. The brothers formalized the partnership in 1919 and gave it their family name.
Mayo Clinic. Today it treats more than a million patients a year and is ranked the best hospital in the United States.
Mother Alfred Moes died on December 18, 1899, ten years after the doors opened. She never saw what it became.
The Mayo brothers always said it plainly. Their father did not want the hospital. The nun did. She built it, and then she handed them the keys.
Millions of Americans have made the drive to Rochester with someone they love in the passenger seat. Almost none of them know that the whole thing started with a 54-year-old woman standing in tornado wreckage, refusing to accept a no.
h/t: Minnesota | FB
Tim the Architect retweeted
À Orléans, l’emblème de notre XIXe congrès ne pouvait être que Sainte Jeanne d’Arc.
Tim the Architect retweeted
Monet’s Iris sold yesterday for €50 million.
Art or speculation?
Art is treated as a financial asset, bought and sold for profit.
Is that fair?
Tim the Architect retweeted
John Cowperthwaite did more for human prosperity than any development economist drawing a government salary ever managed, and he did it by refusing to do almost anything at all.
As Hong Kong's Financial Secretary from 1961 to 1971, Cowperthwaite ran one of the most radically free economies the modern world has ever seen. He kept taxes flat and low (the top income tax rate sat at 15%), ran consistent budget surpluses, abolished import tariffs, and blocked nearly every subsidy request that crossed his desk. When British civil servants demanded economic statistics to justify intervention, he refused to collect them. Not out of laziness. He genuinely believed that giving planners numbers gave them excuses.
The results? In 1960, Hong Kong's per capita income stood at roughly 28% of Britain's. By 1997, Hong Kong had surpassed Britain. That trajectory happened without natural resources, without foreign aid, and without a single five-year plan drafted by well-intentioned economists from Oxford. Hong Kong had a harbor, people willing to work, and a bureaucrat with enough intellectual discipline to keep the state out of their way.
Capital flows toward secure property rights and reliable rules, and flees the moment politicians start allocating it. Every industry Beijing picked as a "priority sector" during those same decades burned through subsidies and produced junk. Hong Kong's industries emerged organically, serving real demand, building real wealth.
You benefit from this history whether you know it or not, because Hong Kong's success gave the world a controlled experiment that still embarrasses every advocate of managed development. The control group thrived. The planned economies didn't.
Cowperthwaite retired to St Andrews, received a knighthood, and gave almost no interviews. That restraint was entirely in character.
Tim the Architect retweeted
Merci à Christophe Clavé pour cet éclairage sur l’appauvrissement de la langue et la ruine de la pensée 🙌
"La disparition progressive des temps (subjonctif, passé simple, imparfait, formes composées du futur, participe passé…) donne lieu à une pensée au présent, limitée à l’instant, incapable de projections dans le temps.
La généralisation du tutoiement, la disparition des majuscules et de la ponctuation sont autant de coups mortels portés à la subtilité de l’expression.
Supprimer le mot «mademoiselle» est non seulement renoncer à l’esthétique d’un mot, mais également promouvoir l’idée qu’entre une petite fille et une femme il n’y a rien.
Moins de mots et moins de verbes conjugués c’est moins de capacités à exprimer les émotions et moins de possibilité d’élaborer une pensée.
Des études ont montré qu’une partie de la violence dans la sphère publique et privée provient directement de l’incapacité à mettre des mots sur les émotions.
Sans mot pour construire un raisonnement, la pensée complexe chère à Edgar Morin est entravée, rendue impossible.
Plus le langage est pauvre, moins la pensée existe.
L’histoire est riche d’exemples et les écrits sont nombreux de Georges Orwell dans « 1984 » à Ray Bradbury dans « Fahrenheit 451 » qui ont relaté comment les dictatures de toutes obédiences entravaient la pensée en réduisant et tordant le nombre et le sens des mots.
Il n’y a pas de pensée critique sans pensée. Et il n’y a pas de pensée sans mots.
Comment construire une pensée hypothético-déductive sans maîtrise du conditionnel ? Comment envisager l’avenir sans conjugaison au futur ? Comment appréhender une temporalité, une succession d’éléments dans le temps, qu’ils soient passés ou à venir, ainsi que leur durée relative, sans une langue qui fait la différence entre ce qui aurait pu être, ce qui a été, ce qui est, ce qui pourrait advenir, et ce qui sera après que ce qui pourrait advenir soit advenu ? Si un cri de ralliement devait se faire entendre aujourd’hui, ce serait celui, adressé aux parents et aux enseignants : faites parler, lire et écrire vos enfants, vos élèves, vos étudiants.
Enseignez et pratiquez la langue dans ses formes les plus variées, même si elle semble compliquée, surtout si elle est compliquée. Parce que dans cet effort se trouve la liberté. Ceux qui expliquent à longueur de temps qu’il faut simplifier l’orthographe, purger la langue de ses «défauts», abolir les genres, les temps, les nuances, tout ce qui crée de la complexité sont les fossoyeurs de l’esprit humain. Il n’est pas de liberté sans exigences. Il n’est pas de beauté sans la pensée de la beauté."
Christophe Clavé
Tim the Architect retweeted
Most people buy a Porsche 911 Turbo as a weekend prize, keeping it tucked away to preserve its resale value. You did the exact opposite. By treating a legendary 3.6L twin-turbo machine as a daily commuter braving brutal northeastern winters, everyday traffic, and rigorous track days you have proven what true automotive passion looks like.
Passing 784,000 miles (1,261,726 km) on the same car is not just a victory for meticulous maintenance and legendary German engineering; it is a masterclass in living life behind the wheel. While your physical odometer famously maxed out at 999,999 km, your dedication to the road hasn't skipped a beat.
Thank you for showing the entire car community that cars are meant to be driven, memories are meant to be made on the blacktop, and that the journey to one million miles is the ultimate destination. Keep rolling, Tom!
Tim the Architect retweeted
It’s not just what I write in my books that turns them into journals. It’s also what I put into those books. I try to add keepsakes and bookmarks between the pages. I like the idea of being surprised by these things when my future self takes books off my shelf.
booksoftitans.com/p/books-as…
Tim the Architect retweeted
I have an older gentleman who comes into the shop about once a week. He’s very quiet, says hello, browses books for half an hour or so, finds something he likes, leaves. Today he told me that he has spent years trying to rebuild his library after his wife decided she was
Tim the Architect retweeted
Fun family history moment: in the early 00's, my father owned and operated the Yule Marble Quarry in Marble, CO. Best white marble in the world, few cracks, beautiful gold veins. This is the quarry that provided the stone for the Lincoln Memorial and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
Speaking of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, there is a major crack going right across the middle of the stone there right now, clear through the entire thing. For several years, Dad worked on trying to provide a replacement stone. The stone was cut. It was to be donated, for free, to Arlington. The carvers were lined up, again for free. It would have been identical in form, but with no crack. After several years of meetings and calls, nothing was done. The stone still sits by the creek in Marble.
And that's why I know that painting a pillar is truly impressive for Washington, DC.
