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I’ve had a career in building science. And it is terribly unfinished. Fragments of building science lie around in old notebooks. My aim here is to try to wrap up some of these pieces of work. They point in all directions—buildings, calculations, details, history, speculation, physics, policy, people, associations, geometry, education, styles, problems… I hope this website can put a leash on some or most of these strays.

Downspout at the home of Louis Majorelle, Nancy, France. Designed and built by Henri Sauvage, 1901-1902.

Here’s a list of possible future topics:

Legacy practices in building science
White roofs. How your building relates to outer space.
How Columbo solved a child’s respiratory problem
Balloon framing. I may be the last remaining balloon framer. The construction sequence is similar to masonry. There is no tilt-up.
If a building loses power, how long does it take to decay to outdoor conditions?
Plate-type enthalpy exchangers don’t work, except (maybe) for ones that use my new idea.
Attic ventilation 1. Results of a 9-year experiment.
Flashing a building into the ground to keep the foundation dry
Suppose you’re drawing a 2-point perspective. How do you get the height right?
Attic ventilation 2. When vent devices don’t vent, that’s when the attic performs best.
ASHRAE was 8 hours old in 1895. Why did they spend their first day of existence complaining about architects?
Lucie’s eco-anxiety
Product recall on the Ionic order.
Knob and tube wiring. How did they lay it out? And who says that insulation on knob and tube could lead to fires?
Me and Gordon Tully, the last of the classicist building scientists
Attic ventilation 3. Oops, the insulation density is too low.
How did they move three limestone blocks, each weighing 800 tons, onto a podium? In 2500 BC. I think I know.
Measuring the dissipation of a gas bubble in the eye. Building science meets ophthalmology.
Building doesn’t perform and you think it’s the architect’s fault? Let’s review the process of educating and registering an architect.
Attic ventilation 4. Shingles? Ice dams?
Here’s how to deposit rainwater far away from your building foundation, with nothing in the way.
Mathematical derivation of zone pressure difference diagnostics.
Freeze-thaw—an urban legend?
Building science in the US, building physics in Europe: when Hugo taught complex geometry at summer camp.
The difference between architects and engineers in their codes of ethics.
“Look’d like it growed that way”—good joints in woodworking.
Weight versus mass. It’s not just w = mg. (What does air weigh?)
Inventing the enemy. Halitosis, condensation and those pesky terrorists.
Can you lay bricks in a 3-D mass without shear planes?
Viollet-le-Duc—my man 150 years ago. And his home at the University of Illinois.
Sleuthing a building science fraud
Sharpening woodworking tools with a microscope.
Moisture buoyancy and stratification. The Juneau roofs, hotel room mirrors and the compressed gas industry.
Attic ventilation 5. Attic ventilation comes with an energy penalty—up north and down south.
Me and Mr. Wright—a dialog on moisture performance in buildings. (Wright wins).
Stachybotrys chartarum, Nikita Krushchev, Saddam Hussein and the Cleveland drop.
Flash the building to the ground. Please.
Burst water pipes, and the surprising answer why it’s usually the hot water pipe that usually gets repaired.
What’s the air humidity over a swimming pool. And how did those natatoriums and YMCAs of the 1920s survive?
Attic ventilation 6. Resilience. Attics under hurricanes, firestorms and tornadoes.
The aggravations of tuning a homemade guitar, with input from Anton TenWolde and Pythagoras.
You know the golden ratio. How about the silver ratio and all the other semi-Fibonacci series? How did plants learn to take the square root of 5?
Why do we have parapets anyway?
Airtightening the wall roof junction.
Learning building science; teaching building science.
Attic ventilation 7. The incredible power of belief systems, and learning from B. F. Skinner.
The comfort zone. Using modifications to the comfort zone as the link between building operation and building occupants as we head into big climate change.
Resistance-capacitance modeling of heat transfer in walls.
Buckled gym floors, with the detailed mechanics of tongue and groove, thanks to Gordon Tully.
The town that said no to LeCorbusier.
Does science end when policy takes a stand? Reviewing radon and the Iowa Study.
When Oscar Wilde visited Jefferson Davis. (Building science?—well, no.)
Does fighting ecocide require agreements? Is the US agreement-capable? Who’s running this damn show anyway?
The exponential function is monotonic, right? Trig functions are periodic, right? Monotonic ain’t periodic, right? Tell that to Mr. Euler.
Tod Williams’ hinge, and denigrating climate concerns in the world of high design.
Rim joists and pest inspection.
The Wall and my student Maya Lin.
Going “beyond competence”. Do you get to brilliance via competence or by leapfrogging competence? Learning from Miles Davis.
e. e. cummings and the “naughty thumb” of science.
Buildings and the Dewey Decimal system: art or technology?
Corners are special.
Crawl spaces. Using a Fulbright grant to find a hundred year old decimal point—with astounding success!
Do we really want to humidify museums?
Studio culture, hazing, harassment and surviving architecture education.
Architecture is frozen politics: Jack Hartray
The Conservation Republicans, population, Richard Nixon, and the 1970 Environmental Council Report.
Does weatherization make homes wetter or drier? What is “wetter” and “drier” anyway?
Buckled basement walls and “ice lensing”.
I owe Joe.
What Mr. Wright teaches about retaining walls.
Teeth are fine; gums have got to go. Periodontics and architecture.
Remember to make monuments from the material of tombstones, not gun barrels.
It was Browning, not Mies van der Rohe, with “less is more”.
Is music melted architecture? Symmetry in Cosi Fan Tutti.
Product recall on the Ionic order.
Peace and prosperity
“Climate change is one big scam”