Happy New Year! Wrapping up 2024.
A wrap-up of another year, the last half of which saw me writing a historically limited amount, which is a
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YIMBY 101: Elevators, Point Access Blocks, And More
Whether we’re thinking about costs or spatial geometry, elevators (and the regulation thereof) are an important concept behind the question of how to facilitate development of more multifamily and missing middle construction in the United States. A new report from the Center for Building in North America considers the role of the elevator in construction, looking at both the historical evolution of the technology, the safety of operations and installation, and the spatial efficiencies of European vs. American configurations.
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Tour Ford’s New Michigan Central Project With Matterport
Ford’s Michigan Central Station is finally finished. It opens to the public on June 6th, 2024, but since tickets are sold out, you can still take a virtual tour here.
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How Modular Construction Can Help Fix The Housing Market
Industrialized and modular construction have a lot of potential to help fix the housing market. The value proposition is pretty simple. Realizing it, however, is a much heavier lift.
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Better Living With Robots: Scanning Buildings For Energy Efficiency
Fraunhofer, Signetron, RMI, and ADL Ventures talked about energy efficiency in building retrofits at a recent webinar.
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Fire Code Reform, The Vital Housing Solution You’ve Never Heard Of
Housing abundance advocates have set their sights on a relatively esoteric hindrance to development that, they say, unnecessarily drives up costs without improving occupant safety: fire code.
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NREL Prizes for Energy Innovation
The Department of Energy and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory are teaming up to produce a series of competitive prize programs to facilitate innovation in energy and decarbonization.
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Cities, Unsurprisingly, Have Far Lower Per Capita Energy Footprints.
Energy data show that cities, as we already know, allow for far more energy-efficient uses of land and space than their suburban and rural counterparts.
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People Deserve Beautiful Things
The SDBA program introduced an interesting discussion about design standards in renovation. It happens to be something I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about.
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The Ilitch Crusade Continues: When Is Enough Enough?
The latest Ilitch demolition has us all scratching our heads and wondering when we will deserve a better city– for buildings, for historic preservation, and, of course, for Detroiters.
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