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I was flipping through Owen Jones’s Grammar of Ornament a couple months ago, and my eye was caught by this handsome pattern I had not noticed before. This is Jones’s Plate XLII, in the chapter on designs from the Alhambra in Granada, Spain. He calls it, “Part of the ceiling of the Portico of the … Continue reading Constructing the Pattern on the Sala de la Barca Ceiling →
Nord de Guerre Here’s a survey plat made in 1919 by a US Army unit in France. In the aftermath of WW1, teams of American military surveyors produced these as they went around France mapping the grave sites of fallen soldiers. On this plat we can see a number of bearings and distances from the … Continue reading Transforming French WW1 Lambert Coordinates to WGS84 →
This story begins one day when I was assembling a map of the city of Edmonton, Alberta from OpenStreetMap data. It was going to be a big map, a 42″ (106 cm) wide poster for a wall. The data was good, but the standard OSM colours were not. They would work fine for a street … Continue reading Cartographic palettes and colour harmonies →
Just veering off into geometry here…. In November I was watching Eric Broug, an Islamic geometric design guru, give a talk online at an Islamic art conference, and I noticed that behind him they were projecting an interesting pattern on the scrim. I froze the video and grabbed a screenshot… What the heck is this? … Continue reading Constructing Bourgoin’s Figure 171 – Part 1 →
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Keeping on with the construction photos of the St. Regis Hotel under its temporary name “the Astor Building”… Unlike my previous dive into the construction photos of the Equitable Trust Building on Broad Street, the main sequence photos here (which are numbered and dated) begin with the superstructure steel being erected. There are two foundation […]
This just in: The U.S. Supreme Court today allowed construction of Trump's $400 million White House ballroom project to proceed indefinitely while legal challenges continue. In a 5–4 decision, the court blocked lower-court rulings that would have paused the aboveground portion of the project (Archinect reported on August 7). The challenge, brought by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, argued that Trump lacked unilateral authority to proceed without congressional approval. The court’s unsigned eight-page ruling found that the trust likely lacks standing to bring the case but stopped short of deciding whether the president actually has the authority to build the ballroom without Congress. "Today, we do not pass upon the legality of the government’s East Wing project," the ruling states. "We conclude only that, based on the submissions before us, the government is likely to prevail in showing that the Trust lacks Article III standing to challenge the project in federal cou...
