Monthly Archive for March, 2011

From Andrew Michler at inhabitat…

The US-Mexico border fence is one of the largest single construction projects in the country. Already measuring 600 miles long at a cost of $2.4 billion, the fence is as symbolic as it is utilitarian. Ronald Rael of Rael San Fratello Architects has taken those cues with a prodigious series of sustainable boarder fence proposals that not only create renewable energy and jobs but create a thriving economy and environment. His proposals are viable solutions to the environmental and social restraints imposed by the wall that has required multiple environmental act waivers to be built. Click through to see some of the groundbreaking proposals that re-envision how to spend the projected 49 billion dollars needed to complete the project.

As the nation plows an average of $4 million dollars into each mile of fence, the only benefit is the slowed pace illegal crossings. Rael imagines a border blockade that enhances the communities by providing clean energy and water as well as communications and local trade. More…

From the University of Illinois News Bureau…

The technical documents weren’t making sense to Heather Hyde Minor. Most researchers studying 18th-century buildings in Rome rely on the “measurements and estimates” logs kept on each construction site, but Minor, now a professor of architectural history at the University of Illinois, was missing the spatial component necessary to understand the logs.

“So this is a story of great failure,” Minor said, half-jokingly.

Frustrated by the files, she sought out a box of letters written by a pair of brothers involved in the construction of the buildings. “I had been hoping I would find something that would let me learn how a particular building came together, and instead, (the letters) just opened up a whole other world to me,” Minor said.

The correspondence between the brothers – nephews of Pope Clement XII – gave Minor a glimpse into the personalities and power plays behind Rome’s big building boom of the 1730s and 1740s, with the renovations of the basilicas of St. John Lateran and St. Mary Major, the restoration of the Arch of Constantine, the expansion of the papal complex on the Quirinal Hill, the creation of the Capitoline Museum, and many other projects. More…