Essays about buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. Click to read Construction Physics, by Brian Potter, a Substack publication with tens of thousands of subscribers.
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At last, we’re finally ready to put together the design for our house. A fully specified design, with every detail and system described, is well beyond the scope of this newsletter (not to mention the scope of my knowledge). But we can give a high-level schematic design, laying out the basic building systems and how…
When researching construction, you invariably discover that any new or innovative idea has actually been tried over and over again, often stretching back decades.
Nuclear power currently makes up slightly less than 20% of the total electricity produced in the US, largely from plants built in the 70s and 80s.
Today in the US, most houses and apartments are built using light framed wood construction. This system consists of load bearing walls made from 2x4s or 2x6s, which support a wood-framed floor or roof - usually either trusses, joists, or engineered i-joists. This system is a variant of a framing style known as balloon…
It’s become fairly common knowledge that Yellowstone National Park, in addition to being incredibly beautiful, is sitting on top of an enormous supervolcano that catastrophically erupts every few hundred thousand years.
One of the goals of this newsletter is to figure out ways to improve construction productivity and reduce the costs of construction, particularly residential construction (ie: housing) - if you could reduce the costs of construction, housing costs would fall as well.
(Note: the analysis below of floor plate size vs construction speed is incorrect due to autocorrelation effects.
This week we conclude our look at nuclear power construction costs. So far we’ve looked solely at conventional nuclear power stations that supply electricity to the grid for residential and commercial use. But civilian power stations aren’t the only sort of nuclear reactor that the US builds. The US Navy has been…
A recurring theme of this newsletter is the failure of prefabrication (building homes in factories instead of on-site) to revolutionize the housing industry.
Welcome to the Rise of Steel part II.
One of the defining characteristics of the modern world is the ubiquity of steel.
The housing shortage in the US is a perennially popular topic of conversation for the urbanist crowd (which online includes basically everyone.) The basic argument is that housing starts collapsed after the financial crisis and have never truly recovered.