This is a real place. It is a housing estate called Les Espaces d'Abraxas, built near Paris in 1982.

And it's one of the most important buildings in the world...

Built from 1978-82 in Noisy-le-Grand, a suburb ten miles east of Paris, it was designed by the Catalan architect Ricardo Bofill, who died last year.

The mounds that certain species of termites build above their nests have long been considered to be a kind of built-in natural climate control—an approach that has intrigued architects and engineers keen to design greener, more energy-efficient buildings mimicking those principles. There have been decades of research devoted to modeling just how these nests function. A new paper published in the journal Frontiers in Materials offers new evidence favoring an integrated-system model in which the mound, the nest, and its tunnels function together much like a lung.

The famous Pantheon in Rome boasts the world's largest unreinforced concrete dome—an architectural marvel that has endured for millennia, thanks to the incredible durability of ancient Roman concrete. For decades, scientists have been trying to determine precisely what makes the material so durable. A new analysis of samples taken from the concrete walls of the Privernum archaeological site near Rome has yielded insights into those elusive manufacturing secrets. It seems the Romans employed "hot mixing" with quicklime, among other strategies, that gave the material self-healing functionality, according to a new paper published in the journal Science Advances. //

It was believed that the Romans combined water with lime to make a highly chemically reactive paste (slaking), but this wouldn't explain the lime clasts. Masic thought they might have used the even more reactive quicklime (possibly in combination with slaked lime), and his suspicion was born out by the lab's analysis with chemical mapping and multi-scale imaging tools. The clasts were different forms of calcium carbonate, and spectroscopic analysis showed those clasts had formed at extremely high temperatures—aka hot mixing.

“The benefits of hot mixing are twofold,” Masic said. “First, when the overall concrete is heated to high temperatures, it allows chemistries that are not possible if you only used slaked lime, producing high-temperature-associated compounds that would not otherwise form. Second, this increased temperature significantly reduces curing and setting times since all the reactions are accelerated, allowing for much faster construction.”

It also seems to impart self-healing capabilities. Per Masic, when cracks begin to form in the concrete, they are more likely to move through the lime clasts. The clasts can then react with water, producing a solution saturated with calcium. That solution can either recrystallize as calcium carbonate to fill the cracks or react with the pozzolanic components to strengthen the composite material.

Masic et al. found evidence of calcite-filled cracks in other samples of Roman concrete, supporting their hypothesis. They also created concrete samples in the lab with a hot mixing process, using ancient and modern recipes, then deliberately cracked the samples and ran water through them. They found that the cracks in the samples made with hot-mixed quicklime healed completely within two weeks, while the cracks never healed in the samples without quicklime. //

mgsouth Seniorius Lurkius

DJ Farkus said:
So many questions... Did they pour the hot-mix, is it required to be poured hot? How high of temperatures are we talking here? I wonder how they heated batches on-site (or did they transport it for pouring)?

Thank you. Now I have a mental image of a wagon pulled by a brace of oxen, with a huge oak barrel slowly rotating in the back. Meanwhile, the drover is flicking a whip about, cursing the throng of people in the street, screaming he has a *!@#! load setting up and get out of the !#@!! way. (In Latin, of course.)

The ancient Romans were masters of building and engineering, perhaps most famously represented by the aqueducts. And those still functional marvels rely on a unique construction material: pozzolanic concrete, a spectacularly durable concrete that gave Roman structures their incredible strength.

Even today, one of their structures – the infamous Pantheon, still intact and nearly 2,000 years old – holds the record for the world's largest dome of unreinforced concrete.

The properties of this concrete have generally been attributed to its ingredients: pozzolana, a mix of volcanic ash – named after the Italian city of Pozzuoli, where a significant deposit of it can be found – and lime. When mixed with water, the two materials can react to produce strong concrete.

But that, as it turns out, is not the whole story. An international team of researchers led by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) found that not only are the materials slightly different from what we may have thought, but the techniques used to mix them were also different.

The smoking guns were small, white chunks of lime that can be found in what seems to be otherwise well-mixed concrete.

THE FIFTY-NINE-STORY CRISIS, The New Yorker, 5/29/95, pp 45-53
CITY PERILS
THE FIFTY-NINE-STORY CRISIS
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 29, 1995, pp 45-53
What's an engineer's worst nightmare? To realize that the supports he designed for a skyscraper like Citicorp Center are flawed---and hurricane season is approaching.

Is modern architecture a “hideous cultural atrocity”? Is insisting on classical buildings the hallmark of a dictatorship? Readers engage in an aesthetic and philosophical debate.

Feb. 11, 2020

Everyone can admire the historical legacy of classical architecture, but its time is past. It’s as absurd to insist that every building wear classical dress as it would be to require public officials to don knee breeches and wigs. America is a country that has long embraced progress and freedom; conformity and a single official style are the hallmarks of dictatorships.

Inventive, socially responsible architects flourished in Germany and the Soviet Union in the 1920s, enriching lives and creating buildings that are now acclaimed as classics. Hitler and Stalin suppressed modernism as an alien assault on traditional values and required that all but a handful of buildings follow traditional models. Talent was suffocated or driven into exile. //

I recall the comment of Prince Charles about the plans for the modernist addition to the National Gallery in London: “What is proposed is like a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much loved and elegant friend.”

At the same time, I have been to enough Soviet-era “people’s palaces” to shudder at the prospect of official style. I agree wholeheartedly with those who are pushing back against any “official” architectural style, but at the same time I get that we can do better when designing our public buildings.

Enough of the starchitects? Form may follow function, but form also communicates a message. Buildings that resemble fortresses are not welcoming. Those that turn their backs to the street deaden the surrounding neighborhood. A courthouse designed to convey equal justice under the law and transparency might be preferred over one that looks Kafkaesque. //

There’s now hard science to support President Trump’s draft executive order. Today we know that modern architecture stresses the human brain. It’s actually harder for people to look at, take in or even make a memory of any modern building compared with a classical or traditional one. We also know that it is harder for people to walk down a modern street lined with glassy skyscrapers than a traditional one lined with four-story brownstones.

On Monday, President Joe Biden broke with a century of precedent by demanding the resignations of four members of the U.S. Commission on Fine Arts. //

Classical architecture is not a partisan issue.

President Thomas Jefferson, founder of the Democratic Party, was an enthusiastic champion of the Greek Revivalism thankfully still visible in both the capital and his Monticello home. When he designed the

May 24, 2021 By Christopher Bedford

President Joe Biden launched an unprecedented purge of the U.S. Commission on Fine Arts Monday, according to a letter reviewed by The Federalist demanding resignation letters by 6 p.m. from four of the seven members, including the chairman.

Those members include sculptor Chas Fagan, architect Steven Spandle, landscape architect Perry Guillot, and Chairman Justin Shubow, a writer and expert on architecture and civic beauty. //

The commission is an independent federal agency established by Congress that advises Congress and the White House on public (civic) architecture on federal lands and in the District of Columbia. Established in 1910, its seven members are chosen from “disciplines including art, architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design,” and are appointed by the president to serve four-year terms. No commission member has ever been asked to tender their resignation before their term was up.While classical architecture remains the hands-down favorite of the American public, its opponents are powerful in academia, elite architecture circles, and, it seems, in the Biden White House.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-10-14/classical-buildings-beat-modern-ones-in-u-s-poll

What was supposed to be a luxurious urban development for wealthy foreigners has become an eerie half-finished ghost town in Turkey

Imagine a rolling landscape of towering, pristine castles almost as far as your eyes can see. It sounds breathtaking — and it is — just probably not in the way you'd think. These Disney-esque villas are in a Turkish housing development called Burj al Babas, and it's completely abandoned.

Restoring genuine beauty in our cities goes hand in hand with any attempt to revive a spiritual nature amongst a people. //

There is no greater public expression of ideology, culture, or society than the architecture that we live with and see daily. President Trump acknowledged this with his executive order to “Make Federal Buildings Beautiful Again.” Britain also notes its importance with the inception of the “Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission.”

Surprisingly, such attempts to restore and revive classical architecture have spawned a culture war in the field of architecture. Within 100 days of taking office, Joe Biden has already rescinded President Trump’s executive order, striking a victory for modernist and brutalist architectural designs.

This battle, in which classicists argue for more Western-classical buildings instead of contemporary styles, is unique amongst other cultural struggles. Why? Because, at least in this case, “conservatives” are on the offensive.

In the field of architecture, traditionalists are the revolutionaries fighting against the entrenched beliefs and notions of modern architecture. Yet the classical traditionalists also, according to recent polls, can boast vast popular support.

Despite these advantages, however, those who argue for a return to classical buildings face legitimate questions and problems. Primarily, what does a practical program look like, and what benefits does it bring? I discovered such a program when I arrived in Budapest to work at the Committee of National Remembrance, an independent research institution established by the Hungarian Parliament in 2013 that researches Hungary’s communist period.

President Joe Biden on Wednesday scrapped former President Donald Trump’s executive order that promoted classical styles for all future federal buildings.

The order, titled “Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture,” signed in December 2020, harshly criticized modern architectural styles and instead lauded Roman-Greco-inspired buildings. But while it criticized modern and brutalist buildings, it did not mandate that any future works be Greek or neoclassical in design. //

“Classical and other traditional architecture, as practiced both historically and by today’s architects, have proven their ability to meet these design criteria and to more than satisfy today’s functional, technical, and sustainable needs,” the order said. “Their use should be encouraged instead of discouraged.”

When the wind blows around Notre Dame these days, strange, whistling chimes fill the air. A ghostly harmony made by the gaping holes in the old medieval structure, left by the fire exactly a year ago.

For most of the past year, this quiet music was drowned out by the noises of construction work, the tourists and traffic around Notre Dame. But today this Gothic giant stands silent and empty.

The cranes hang awkward and frozen above its scaffolding, the usual flow of tourists queuing for selfies outside the freshly-built hoarding has gone.

Image caption Daylight peers through the damaged roof of the cathedral

The restrictions in place to deal with coronavirus have meant that all restoration work here has stopped.
'Alone, but not abandoned'

"Notre Dame is an 850-year-old lady," the rector of Notre Dame, Patrick Chauvet, told me. "She's an injured, old lady."

"And for all the elderly, the injured, those in quarantine, or isolated in retirement homes, I think there's a symbolic link. There's no-one around Notre Dame here either; she's has been left alone, but not abandoned."

In the late afternoon of 15 April 2019, Monseigneur Chauvet was enjoying a drink at a nearby cafe when smoke began rising from the spire of Notre Dame.

Media captionThere were gasps from the crowd at the moment Notre-Dame’s spire fell

He ran towards the building he knows so well.

The fire spread quickly, blazing through the mass of medieval rafters - known as "the forest" - and bringing down the iconic spire.

For a few critical hours, firefighters warned the French president that Notre Dame might not be saved.
Image copyright Windfall Films
Image caption The old scaffolding damaged in the fire needs to be taken down very carefully

One year on, wooden buttresses have appeared on the outside walls, and a vast web of new scaffolding is going up around the building.

Ironically, it is a set of old scaffolding, put up before the fire to restore some of the cathedral statues, that poses the immediate threat.

It burned and twisted in the heat, and now needs to be dismantled and taken down.

Patrick Chauvet says the building is not yet totally secure.

"It's still fragile," he told me. "It just takes a storm, a tornado, and it will move. When the old scaffolding that is welded together is removed, then we can say the cathedral is 100% saved."

Claudine Loisel, a glass specialist working on the restoration, has been painstakingly testing the lead and grime on each panel of the building's 19th Century stained-glass windows, to check it's safe for restorers to begin their work.

When you first see Michael Wolf’s photography, it takes a second to realize what you’re looking at.

Inside the Taipei 101, the second tallest building in the world (located in Taipei, Taiwan), you’ll find all the things you’d expect in a skyscraper of such magnitude as well as one surprising addition. Along with fantastic sky-high prime office space, restaurants, and the other trappings of modern mega-skyscraper design, you’ll also find a giant pendulum.

Let us dispense with the layman’s terms though: however much like a giant pendulum the enormous 728 ton stepped-sphere shape in the heart of the building might sway back and forth in an uncanny way like a futuristic pendulum, it has a more proper name. It’s a “tuned mass damper” and not just any tuned mass damper, mind you, but the largest in the world.

The device is carefully designed to offset the effects of wind on the enormous building.

Beautiful to some, a blot on the countryside to others, Didcot Power Station's monumental cooling towers have dominated the landscape of rural Oxfordshire for decades. But they will produce clouds of dust rather than steam when they are demolished on Sunday.

The power station's gigantic, concrete towers in the heart of Midsomer Murders country have stood in stark contrast to their surroundings for more than 50 years.

Public opinion is divided over the structure's good, bad, and ugly aspects. Some point to the jobs and communities it has created, while others highlight its 655ft (199.5m) smoke-belching chimney - one of tallest structures in the UK - and say it is part of dirty industry they want to abolish forever. //

Lyn Bowen switched the power station on in 1970 and turned it off in 2013

Lyn Bowen, who moved to the area to run the plant, said the "only thing missing" when he first visited Didcot was "tumbleweed".

The 79-year-old remembers the excitement he felt, flicking the switch in the control room as the power station was turned on.

"All the pieces had been put together and it works," he recalled.

From that day, its boilers consumed 185 tonnes of coal every hour, which was burned to raise the temperature of the steam so high - 568C - so that it powered four mighty turbines.

The turbines then spun a generator rapidly to produce 2,000 megawatts (MW) of electricity to power millions of homes. The steam, still roaring hot, was condensed and allowed to escape through the six giant cooling towers. //

The government plans to phase out the UK's last coal-fired plants by 2025 to reduce carbon emissions.

Dame Marina believes the architects of such stations should not be "vilified", but have their designs recognised as "achievements and a sort of human excessive, triumphalism over nature, which we must say goodbye to".

"The work these buildings were doing was for everybody," she says. "This was the engine of society - this kind of fuel consuming and fuel making machine."

Between 06:00 and 08:00 BST hundreds will watch on as the three northern cooling towers are blown down, leaving the giant chimney to stand alone until the autumn.

The Oxfordshire skyline will never look the same again.

It took staff at Notre Dame cathedral in Paris 23 minutes to discover the fire that gutted the historic 850-year-old icon. //

Professor Peter McPhee, a specialist in French history at the University of Melbourne, said he feared "that the sheer heat of that fire may have chemically compromised some of the masonry" in the historic building.

Likewise, the centuries-old timber within the building's internal structure, much of which was crafted into an intricate support structure by medieval artisans, may be irreplaceable.

"One of the extraordinary things about Notre Dame was that ... an estimated 13,000 trees had been felled to create this delicate timber infrastructure," he said.

"Those trees had been saplings in the 10th century, they were mature trees by the 12th century when they were felled. They're the beams that caught fire and then brought the lead roof down with them.

"Is it possible to recreate that kind of medieval artisan work with timber on that scale? Or in fact is that the great compromise you'd make?"

As fire ripped through France's iconic cathedral, stone vaults developed in the Middle Ages kept it from being destroyed beyond repair. //

According to architectural historians, the cathedral's medieval stone vaults — which served as a buffer for the fire after it burned through the wooden roof — had a hand in this.

Here's how an innovation developed in the 12th century held Notre Dame together, and what we can expect in terms of restoring the world's most famous Gothic cathedral of the Middle Ages.

Dr Robert Bork, an architectural historian at the University of Iowa, told the ABC the cathedral boasts some of the earliest six-part vaults used in the 12th century. //

Innovation and exploration in the Middle Ages resulted in the creation of wider vaults that would better allow for elaborate windows than previous Romanesque churches, he explained.

The general principle of a vault, Dr Bork explained, is the same as that behind an arch, which sees lots of stones that are relatively small work to span a large space.

"So, in Notre Dame, [these stones] cross the span which is about 14 metres across on the inside, and they're all essentially wedged together so that when gravity pulls down on each of those little stones, [the structure] is held into place by the friction of its neighbours in a kind of wedging action."

What this means, Dr Bork said, is that the complete arch or vault will weigh heavily down as well as pushing outwards, and this is where buttresses — which work to reinforce walls — come in to restrain the outward push.

Had Notre Dame not had these stone vaults, Dr Bork said it was "quite likely" we would be looking at an almost completely destroyed cathedral.

"The vaults are designed to be in dialogue with the buttressing system of the building … and if [Notre Dame] didn't have them, the buttresses would have just had brick walls and in cases where you just have a timber roof building and the roof burns off, frequently those walls will collapse."

the roof of the building was supposed to be made up of large concrete sails - a visually arresting but logistically very tricky plan. An even more ambitious design, with flatter sails, had already been ruled out.

What it needed was a strong arch that would be able to support exactly the amount of pressure from the concrete. So he set to work.

Bertony spent the next half a year working on the calculations for that arch support, solving 30,000 different complex equations by hand. Those notes, which are now on display in Sydney's Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, were all neatly and methodically laid out.

"He was a brilliant mathematician," Ms Pitt says. "He did those 30,000 hand-rendered mathematical equations in six months, which is a very short period of time - and that's all he did. He would eat, breathe and sleep the Sydney Opera House."

Ms Pitt says that occasionally, despite years having passed, he would still be in awe of what he had helped to create.

"The last time I drove with him across the Harbour Bridge, he glanced over to the right to the opera house as he was driving and said: 'I still can't believe I did that.'"