Wrath Of Gnon
@wrathofgnon
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It is time for a thread on traditional urbanism, or town planning 13th century style. I will dispel some myths of modern dis-urbanism.
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Maybe one of the oddest professions in Japan is that of the bokka (歩荷). Porters who carry supplies to remote mountain guesthouses inaccessible to vehicles. A bokka uses customized wooden ladder frames to carry 100-165kg of supplies on day long marches (walk up, run down).
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Same city, same day, same time: two different streets.
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In Japan there is now a minor boom in falconry: crows are attacking solar power plants with stones, and the only effective way to keep crows away is to deploy falcons. One trained falcon making 60 attack sorties a day can protect 100,000 solar panels from vengeful crows.
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Sustainable forestry: lumber without cutting down trees. Daisugi is a Japanese forestry technique where specially planted cedar trees are pruned heavily (think of it as giant bonsai) to produce "shoots" that become perfectly uniform, straight and completely knot free lumber.
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Can we get a photo of the man who purchased, stored and maintained eleven snowplows in Florida? I want to see most righteous grin on Earth right now.
Yes, Florida has snowplows. But we also have well trained and dedicated FDOT snowplow crews who have been working around the clock to get essential segments of the state highway system cleared and safe for travel.
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The city of Ghadames on the edge of the Saharan desert in Libya is maybe one of the finest examples of desert urbanism still in existence. Inhabited since the 4th millennia B.C., many of its 1300 houses have been continually inhabited, improved, expanded, for over 3000 years.
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The strangest story in literature right now might be that of Tettyo Saito, a Japanese man born 1992 who basically never leaves his suburb outside of Tokyo, taught himself Romanian on Facebook and is now a published author of Romanian language novels and poetry. Respect.
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Japanese medical doctor moves to help Afghanistan, changes mission when faced with state of local agriculture. Brings with him a medieval Japanese manual for land restoration. Gets murdered for his troubles. Same spot: January 2017 and April 2023. Tetsu Nakamura, 1946-2019.
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Before the International Style (modernism) in architecture, our ancestors knew how to adapt the room heights according to the climate, achieving maximum effect (comfort) for the least effort (energy). Today we trust in the grid and so build 8-9 ft rooms from Bermuda to Reykjavik.
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The choir roof trusses of Notre Dame de Paris is up. All timber hewn by hand, with axes, 12th century style.
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Probably the most interesting book store in Japan right now is Passage, in Tokyo's Jimbocho district. It is divided into roughly three locations, and is run as a co-op by hundreds of people. Anyone can be a co-manager by renting/leasing a shelf in one of the 123 "rue" (street),
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The job is popular: not surprisingly veteran bokka routinely tests as fitter and healthier than elite athletes. Both men and women take on the job, the average weight of a bokka is 60-70kg.
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Wild animals in Japan cause agricultural losses of billions of yen every year and every year things get worse. But since 2005 Japanese farmers have begun to fight back with their oldest weapon and oldest ally: the "monkey dog."
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In a 2008 Japanese experiment, 323 children, 11 year olds and 13 year olds, were given a 30 minute math quiz. One randomly selected group in a regular class room, the other group in a room with tatami mats. The tatami room group out-concentrated the regular room kids every time.
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68% of Japan is covered in forests, and of this 49% is officially protected and can not be logged or cut. All protected forests belong to one or more of 17 nationally recognized classes, each with a different purpose, management strategy, and use. This thread will list them all.
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I might be mistaken but I believe nothing in this photo existed in 1995. We can do this everywhere we want.
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A story of inappropriate technology: in the 1970s it was decided to modernize the rice farming of Sri Lanka, whose system that had not changed much for 3000 years. The goal was to replace the water buffalo with the modern tractor, but the attempt had disastrous consequences.
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The Bavarian city of Nördlingen is maybe the only town in the world built using materials of extraterrestrial origin. Parts of a large meteorite that formed the crater it sits in was used for building the city walls, town houses, churches, etc.
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In Gothenburg, Sweden, a 2019 university experiment in mixing child care with elderly care seems to have made fantastic results in a six week trial, reversing dementia etc. Can't wait for the trial results to be published and the documentary to be released in English.
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It is unknown why crows bombard solar panels, possibly it is a game. The stones seldom directly crack panels, but the crows are experts at placing stones or other garbage just so that they stay on top of the panel, soon causing overheating and destruction or permanent damage.
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Masks seems to be why Tokyo is business as usual without lockdowns or quarantines: “An 80% compliance rate [in wearing face masks] essentially eliminated the influenza outbreak.”
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The Italian city that beat the plague: Ferrara. Not a single plague death since 1576. How did they do it, and what lessons can we learn today? (TLDR the thread: early preventive action, vigilance, public funding, effective borders).
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You have no idea how nice towns without cars can be until you spend some time in them. It is like the difference between night and day: you can see, smell, hear, breath, move. You can let your thoughts and feet wander. The absence of cars and their infrastructure invites life.
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The old walled city of Shibam, Yemen, has been inhabited at least since the 3rd c., an example of perfect desert urbanism. A pop. of 7000 living on 0.03 square km (three times as dense as the the most crowded Wards of London), with houses clustered around the five public squares.
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Using only hand tools and exactly copying the work of medieval carpenters, it took 25 carpenters just ONE week to make a truss. Notre-Dame needs 36 of these. 36 weeks in total for a roof that will last 1000 years. That is far faster and cheaper than metal beams lasting 200 years.
VIDEO: Rebuilding the roof structure of Notre-Dame, destroyed in last year's fire, identically to the old one, is the aim of the Carpenters Without Borders building site in Normandy
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In the 80s a Swedish beekeeper created a local currency to see his little village through cash-strapped times. One Clover (the name of the currency) is worth the same as (and exchangeable for) a 0.7kg jar of honey. Honey stores forever and its value fluctuates extremely little.
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I always hear "It is too expensive to build nice things anymore!" which is getting things the wrong way around: what is actually too expensive is to keep building ugly things, places off no value or no meaning, disposable buildings. Nothing is cheaper in the long run than beauty.
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In 1914, a 29 yo engineer with the Ministry of Agriculture put an end to centuries of village feuding over water rights in rural Japan by inventing the Circular Water Diverter, "Entobunsui". A no-tech unmanned automatic cistern that fairly divided set amounts of irrigation water.
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One of the oddest but most widely held beliefs among people here on Twitter is that poor people should live in ugly places, and the poorer the uglier. When I make the claim that we should build more beautiful for our poorest, I seem to be making a heretical statement.
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I said: "Modernism is when it looks made by Mordor.".
Someone else said: . “Art Nouveau is when it looks made by elves. Art Deco is when it looks made by dwarves.”. And after looking into it, I think they’re a genius and 100% correct.
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Male bodies are designed for fighting: "Even with roughly uniform levels of fitness, the males' average power during a punching motion was 162% greater than females', with the least-powerful man still stronger than the most powerful woman."
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The—“It never used to flood like this in our town, never! It must be climate change! Guess it can't be helped until we all drive EVs to work”—explanation gif.
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The courtyard house can be found in almost any culture and climate where the summers can be uncomfortably hot. Here are some charming courtyard houses from Syria.
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The fastest growing tree in the world is the Empress Tree, Paulowina tomentosa, native to China and Japan, grows up to 6m in its first year and produces 3-4 times more oxygen during photosynthesis than any other known species of tree. It has many interesting characteristics.
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The summer heat continues. Let's have a look at how the ancient Romans built themselves a cool, breezy, indoor climate and supplied themselves with almost unlimited fresh, filtered, indoor water, miles from wells or aqueducts, at the same time: the impluvium.
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Daily reminder: Read old books. The older the better. Inoculate your mind.
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"He built WHAT, in Guatemala?! Surely this is a gated community? Surely no one can just walk into this town? Right? RIGHT?!"
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Mackinack Island (Michigan, USA) where cars have been banned since 1898 and almost no modernist buildings exist. People are so desperate for this kind of community that they instantly turn into enclaves for the wealthy. The year round population is about 500 people.
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“To destroy a people you must first sever their roots.”.— Alexander Solzhenitzyn
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Almost everyone living today are between two and six generations away from their last ancestor to actually have had any sort of influence in how his built environment looked and functioned. For generations now we have been a race of consumers, and it shows in our town and cities.
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The reason we can't build cheap rail anymore is because we always want to start with the perfect, latest, cleverest and shiniest technology. Far more complex and far more expensive than what any town on Earth can afford today. The solution is to build only the most basic system.
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Back alleys, back yards, back streets. Lets build more back streams in our cities.
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Geneva as it looked in 1850 is a near perfect example of traditional European urbanism, before cars, chain stores, suburbs. Sharply defined: the city gives way to the countryside just across the street, respecting the integrity of both rural and urban ways of life.
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"It can be done."
A couple of weeks ago when I visited London I went to see the new classical houses that replaced the post war modernist building on Hereford Square. Rather good! It can be done.
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In Japan (like elsewhere), wells are considered holy. Traditionally, once dug they can not be filled in as it would trap the spirit (or god) of the well. Only the most foolhardy building crew would undertake such a task without proper precautions, from a prayer to a ceremony.
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The "falcons" don't actually hurt any crows because the crows are way too nimble to get caught but they do establish a territory letting the crows know who's the new boss. Falcons wouldn't stand much of a chance if a few crows actually wanted a fight and stood their ground.
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A village built to the human scale in the middle of an American town. Dan Camp's extraordinary Cotton District proves it can be done. Buying underdeveloped land in Starkville Miss. Dan started building the the kind of village he thought university students wanted to live in.
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"Abandon hopelessness, all ye who enter here." .— G.K. Chesterton
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This is idiotic. You get top talent if your country is lacking in something. Japan did this in the mid-1850s to ca. the 1890s: that is how we got silk factories, the Imperial Navy, armaments, trains, power plants, etc. But it took less than one generation for clever locals to.
The reason top tech companies often hire foreign-born & first-generation engineers over “native” Americans isn’t because of an innate American IQ deficit (a lazy & wrong explanation). A key part of it comes down to the c-word: culture. Tough questions demand tough answers & if.
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Still not much of a chore compared to what some farmers used to handle.
The standard weight of these "tawara" was 60kg, set so that anyone young, old, male or female ought to be able to lift and shoulder one. I doubt many moderns can do it. Farmers were supposed to be able to lift two at a time or climb ladders with one. Hundreds of times a day.
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"Those using wooden cutting boards were less than half as likely as average to contract salmonellosis, those using plastic or glass cutting boards were about twice as likely as average to contract it. Cleaning the board regularly after preparing meat made no difference."
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Japanese NGO makes a game of citizen collected infrastructure damage reports: “Guardians of Steel and Concrete”. The first task was called “Manhole Crusade”. By locating and taking photos of manholes players earn tokens. These tokens will eventually be redeemable in real life.
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Bonus: why do Japanese arborists (niwashi) and gadeners wear only natural blue dyed cotton? The dye in the cloth comes from a plant that is naturally insect repellant, keeping insects away without chemicals.
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Wood in schools reduce stress: "In an Austrian school classrooms equipped mainly with solid wood materials pupils exhibited a decreasing of heartbeats by an average of 8600 beats during the day and showed significantly higher vagal activity during wakefulness."
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The oldest private home in Japan was inhabited until 1977. Built in 806 A.D. most of its core timber frame remains in perfect condition. While officially known as the Hakogike-jūtaku, it is better knowns as the Millennium House, even though it is now over twelve centuries old.
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Thanks to Louis XIV we have a very good idea of how European cities looked in the 17th-19th centuries. About 260 models of cities and fortifications were built up until 1870. 100 of them have survived. We can start copying the best of these if we want to build sustainable cities.
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“The reconstruction of Frankfurt was so popular that on the opening day there were 100 000 people looking at 20 restored houses, because people love beautiful things, and they are fed up with the boredom of modernism.”.— Léon Krier, 2018
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"When Florence was the cultural and financial capital of the Renaissance, it contained scarcely 70,000 inhabitants. On foot, one could traverse this glorious city in twenty minutes from one side to the other." — Léon Krier, 1977
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In this historically cold winter, let's take a look at the two traditional ways of heating the Japanese home: the rural irori (囲炉裏) and the urban hibachi (火鉢).
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At its time the Indus Valley Civilization city of Dholavira, founded in 3000 B.C. might have been the most technically advanced city in the entire world. Here as it might have looked around 2100 B.C. With a population of 15,000-20,000 at 0.6km² a density similar to Manhattan.
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Yes the bird in the photo isn't a falcon I just used the term as a "catchall" since the actual falconers uses birds of several different species. Japanese falconers sometimes train with owl but not for this kind of job.
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How to build human scaled #GoodUrbanism:.1) Build to the edge of the plot. 2) Ban motor vehicles. 3) 3 floor limit. 4) Plots to owner builders only, no developers allowed. 5) Courtyards not park. 6) Profane bldgs. in the vernacular, sacred and public buildings in the classical.
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Nobody ever said: "this town has too many. fountains. squares. pocket parks. arches. gateways. spires. fruit trees. herb gardens. benches. canals. streams. children. statues. monuments. trams. kiosks. bandstands. gazebos."
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The arch is the most fundamental aspect of architecture. Build nothing but an arch—it would still be instantly recognizable as architecture.
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“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”.— Edward Abbey
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London as it looked on the 2nd of September in 1666, the first day of the Great Fire. By the incredible Spanish artist Rocío Espín. So much for "the dark medieval city huddled over alleys and mud."
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Almost all towns that erected cathedrals in the 11th, 12th and 13th centuries had a population of less than 5000 men, women, and children.
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This is also why we plant trees as windbreaks for cities, farms, rural houses, tree plantations etc., and why ivy and other vines can help protect building from rain and wind (i.e. waves). Beautiful video.
This scale model shows how mangrove forests protect the coast. Mangrove forests are an essential component of the coastal defense systems in many places in Vietnam. This simple model makes it very easy to understand [paper: [gif:
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One reason the Dutch suffered no deaths during the European flooding of 2021, while neighboring countries saw hundreds dead and missing, is that the Dutch have spent 800 years developing a parallel government system, with elections, laws, etc. only dealing with water management.
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Idiot Tech-bro: "Bro where's the Japanese Uber? Where's the Japanese AirBnb? Where's the Japanese Facebook?".Me: "Bro, those companies operate by wrecking a well functioning society and then looting the corpse. There is nothing worth emulating there, and only by being the money.
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Good things come from the fringes, the border lands, the edges, the fences.
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Thread of threads on how to reduce the urban heat island effect. #1: Plant more street trees to reduce heat accumulation in streets and buildings.
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Interesting things happen at the fringes, the periphery, by the borders, by the walls.
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In Japan crows are attacking trains by placing rocks from the ballast on the rail. As a response railway companies hire falconers and their hawks to patrol railway lines and attack the crows, in addition to putting gardening nets over the ballast (not ideal).
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One of the most disingenuous ways modernists, politicians and planners have to hamstring ordinary people wanting to live in beautiful places rather than ugly is that they demand "a definition of what constitutes beauty", as if this lack of metaphysical clarity requires the ugly.
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Three myths of cars: .1. Without cars we can't get around. It is because of all the space devoted to cars and car infrastructure that we need them to get around in the first place. Traditional cities are compact and usable by anyone on foot or wheel.
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What do all great and sustainable neighborhoods and towns have in common across the world? What makes for a humans scale? Here's what I have found and it concerns these seven topics: Boundaries, Plots, Ownership, Materials, Height, Culture, Climate. All of this is common sense —>
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The Amish population doubles every 20 years despite living sustainably of the land, without welfare, insurance, usury, or social housing. Healthier, with longer lives. Clearly they are on to something.
“The Amish, who typically have large families and drive horse-drawn vehicles and farm equipment, are growing so strongly that they accounted for an estimated 41% of the county’s overall population growth last year.”.
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Roman engineering. How to build a stone bridge that could last two millennia without a drop of fossil fuels. From left: crane for ashlar stone, crane for clay & crushed stone infill, Archimedes' screw to pump out the water from the temporary cofferdam, barge mounted pile driver.
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Ciudad Cayalá, Guatemala, built during the last ten years. Design by Léon Krier and Estudio Urbano Guatemala.
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In Tampere, Finland, an architecture student drew an alternative to a proposed new apt. bldg. and a poll was held to see which the public would prefer in their city center. Same footprint, same size. The one on the left got 95.5% of the votes. Still right will get built. Because.
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A roji (露地) is a form of garden unique to the practice of tea ceremony. Its only purpose is to frame the path that leads to the inner sanctuary that is a tea house. It is a place whose only function is to set you in the mood proper to receive what follows.
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If we must have public transport in our cities make it as human scaled and low tech as possible. Small electric rolling stock running so often you do not need to bother with a time table (Sóller, Mallorca, population 14,148). #GoodUrbanism
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There are about 19,500 cities, towns and villages in the U.S. It would be interesting if at least one of them, as an experiment in urban revival, built a neighborhood with town houses like this. Just one, see how it works out. Or somewhere in Europe?
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When Disney builds it people will happily pay $126 to just wander around in it, but it is illegal to build it in a real town for real people.
The beautiful United Kingdom 🇬🇧 Pavilion at EPCOT! 🌐💕. Fish & Chips anyone?! 🐟 🍻 .#WaltDisneyWorld #EPCOT
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Before we had refrigerators we kept vegetables and fruit fresh by keeping them in fresh well water. Works just as well as or better then refrigerators but the electric bill is zero and a well lasts for many generations.
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Go outside. Take a walk. Just walk! Walk until you have figured out what is bothering you or until you are so tired you don't care about it anymore. Repeat as necessary. Bring a friend if you like, just go. Walk!
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Byudouin, Kyoto. Built by a few men with hand tools: saws, planes, mallets and chisels in 1052 A.D., and teams of oxen to transport the lumber. The only fuel was the grass the oxen fed on, and the sake, fish, rice, vegetables that fueled the men.
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Know your natural street stone (left to right):.1. Cobbles, any shape without six clear sides. 2. Setts, quarried stones with six clear sides. 3. Cubes, setts with six identical sides. 4. Flags, flat stone slabs, often cut.
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Cities with more beautiful street lights are better cities. Things for public use must be beautiful and because they are public they must be beautiful to a majority of people. Beautiful things last longer because people care for them. Things that last longer are more sustainable.
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I actually had "fortified cities making a comeback" on my 2020 bingo card.
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Tinder, but for farmers looking for customers and restaurants looking for healthy produce.
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The EU is planning to implement laws that make historic rebuilding illegal. “When new parts/elements are necessary, a project shall use contemporary design adding new value and/or use while respecting the existing ones.” EU is literally staffed by demons.
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Before elevators the classic 5+2 Parisian apartment house looked much the same as good apartment buildings have done since the days of ancient Rome. Far more economically diverse than today: shops on ground floor, the rich on top of that, then middle class, at top, working class.
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The shoots are carefully and gently pruned by hand every two years leaving only the top boughs, allowing them to grow straight. Harvesting takes 20 years and old "tree stock" can grow up to a hundred shoots at a time. The technique originated in the 14th century.
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