12 ms·

Construction is life

• Rerarom 4y ago
  What if you hate the noise though?
  • LegitShady 4y ago
    wear noise cancelling headphones
    • eimrine 4y ago
      Yo dawg I've heard you don't like noise? Put headphones with counter noise so you will not listening noise while not listening noise...
      • LegitShady 4y ago
        He said he dislikes noise, not all sound. If he hates all sound he's out of luck in life in general.
  • micromacrofoot 4y ago
    start tearing up your house and soundproofing (sorry renters)
    • wwweston 4y ago
      Sounds like construction! Seriously, though, I do think soundproofing is significantly underused and even undertaken in most residential construction. And at times have thought anyone for increasing density needs to start there.
  • titanomachy 4y ago
    Go live somewhere that’s dying, but doing so slowly enough that it doesn’t bother you (e.g. most suburbs).
  • t0mmyb0y 4y ago
  • nathanvanfleet 4y ago
    You become a nimby. Everything is an assault to you and can just have to constantly fight.
  • refurb 4y ago
    Gary, Indiana is pretty quiet when it comes to construction! Gunshots? Not so much.
• bombcar 4y ago
  There are two seasons - winter and construction. But constant tearing up of streets isn't necessary for life - you can have construction going in stages without a permanent state of constant construction. Construction is a sign of growth usually, which is not entirely the same as life.
  • DeathArrow 4y ago
    >Construction is a sign of growth usually, which is not entirely the same as life. And unlimited growth is followed by resource exhaustion and death.
    • deleted 4y ago
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    • tdehnel 4y ago
      > unlimited growth is followed by resource exhaustion and death. This is only true in the physical sense if the universe is singular *and finite. Which it appears not to be. It is never true in the sense of technological, economic, and societal progress. There is an infinite amount of growth possible in those areas. Because that kind of growth leads to more efficient use of resources, or the discovery of new resources and knowledge which extends how far we can go. And this repeats in an endless cycle. Take virtual reality (metaverse) for example. That would allow for massive expansion of the virtual space in which we can operate and massive reduction of the physical space we need to occupy. As another example, we could eventually learn how to gather up all the raw material (hydrogen) in so called “empty space” and use it to manufacture a new planet. There is nothing in the laws of physics preventing us from doing this. The only thing we lack is the knowledge of how to do it. So there really is no rational basis for the kind of pessimism you are advocating. So long as people are allowed to critique existing ideas and develop new ones, we have an infinity of progress ahead of us.
      • paulryanrogers 4y ago
        > This is only true in the physical sense if the universe is singular *and finite. Which it appears not to be. Laws of physics aren't negotiable. Barring very unlikely breakthroughs humans will remain a single planet species until the sun goes supernova. And with that constraint we face a nearly closed system of resources, except for solar energy and maybe a few asteroids. > The only thing we lack is the knowledge of how to do it. Again even if more innovation is possible there are only so many people with enough resources to discover them. Those people have all the basic needs as well as years of education just to sustain today's innovation.
• nayuki 4y ago
  I have a similar experience. I used to live in the suburbs, disliking the mess of road and skyscraper construction in the city. I moved to the city, and what enabled that was that the target neighborhood was full of new buildings going up. Slowly, I realized that those two experiences are connected: Because those suburban houses have existed for 50 years and will probably remain unchanged for 50 more, all the big construction projects end up concentrated in a few areas downtown. It would fairer if the developments were spread throughout the city.
• Linda703 4y ago
  [dead]
• h2odragon 4y ago
  A European buddy visiting the states commented to me, some years ago, about how flimsy American construction was. "Back home we build things to last 500 years," and so on. Part of that difference is that we don't want things to last that long. Expectations are that within 50 or 100 years this building will no longer be wanted in anything like its current form, so why build for longer? Just makes the teardown effort that much more expensive. There's argument to be made for investing more in infrastructure like roads; but again there's a counter argument to be made in favor of the way things have evolved and are done now. Fresh roads are smooth and level and "fixing potholes" is never going to be cheaper or produce better results than occasional full refurbishments do. Kind of a Laffer curve: Durable, low frequency but expensive maintenance vs flimsy, cheaply and often maintained and often rebuilt.
  • deleted 4y ago
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  • hermitcrab 4y ago
    Making cheap, flimsy stuff that you trash (or worse, abandon) and rebuild every few years is very wasteful of resources and terrible for the environment though.
    • seoaeu 4y ago
      Using buildings constructed before the invention of modern insulation is terrible for the environment too.
      • tener 4y ago
        You can totally insulate old buildings. Not super cheap, but cheaper than heating, perfectly doable.
        • seoaeu 4y ago
          Sure, in many cases that's the right thing to do. From the outside, however, major retrofits like that are going to look a lot like the construction that the article is taking about
• andsoitis 4y ago
  there's also the obvious parallel to software. they're never done. or, rather, if they no longer get changes or improvements, they've probably reached EOL.
  • goodoldneon 4y ago
    Depends on the purpose of the software. If it's a focused library then the perceived stagnation might actually be feature completion
    • andsoitis 4y ago
      no bugs in the library? no new feature requests? I used to think more along those lines, but less so now. I cannot really think of a library I actively use that doesn't get any changes to it. But I also won't be surprised if this is true for some. Do you have a good example?
      • SnowflakeOnIce 4y ago
        zlib went more than 5 years without a release, and is heavily used.
• nathanvanfleet 4y ago
  San Francisco is dying
  • mistrial9 4y ago
    see History of Berlin
  • baby 4y ago
    It is... All my friends are moving away to cities like New York :[
• choonway 4y ago
  It's not about the continuous construction. It's about the speed. Construction is way too slow but the world is spending more money on faster compute instead.
  • examancer 4y ago
    You try 3D printing a house on a Pentium, or running inference models. We needed the compute. We need so much compute it boggles the mind and we don't know what to do with it. Only then, as we are drowning in compute, does it spill over into other areas and allow that compute to be used as leverage towards enhancing or automating areas compute has yet to break into. Only then are crazy ideas like having large clusters of transistors act as neurons in a neural net actually possible, and efficient enough. This is at least what I mean when I occasionally say something flippant like "(technology/computers/software) will eat the world". Maybe our relentless pursuit of more compute isn't the best way to solve complex problems, but it increasingly seems like it may be a way.
    • choonway 4y ago
      Whether you print a benchy using a tabletop 3d printer using PLA, or a using a gigantic gantry crane pouring cement, the compute power required is the same. 3D printing firmware and all of it's associated design software (CAD/CAM) would run fine on computing technology 10 years old. Construction speed is bottlenecked by the lack of investment in new techniques, not for the lack of compute power.
      • michelpp 4y ago
        Real buildings must take into account material costs, weight bearing, soil conditions, thermal cycling through various paths, and human and seismic induced dynamic loads. The larger the buildings get, the exponentially more compute is needed to solve these problems. “Anyone can build a bridge that stands, but it takes an engineer to build a bridge that barely stands.”
        • 4y ago
• photochemsyn 4y ago
  • andsoitis 4y ago
    > How did this living system die? Well, it became infested with parasites, didn't it? Parasites of the neoliberal globalization investor type, who sucked it dry, then fled overseas for riper pastures. Also: inflexibility, non-adaptation, and homogeneity.
    • photochemsyn 4y ago
      Let's be more explicit: Inflexibility: as workforces in the Industrial Belt were largely unionized, they refused to accept radical wage cuts (i.e. GM and Ford could pay $3 an hour in Mexico vs. $30 an hour in Detroit). Non-adaptation: is this the notion that a heavily parasitized organism could survive by delivering more of its resources to the parasites? Labor costs were cutting into profits and dividends, and labor costs could be reduced by writing trade deals that eliminated things like tariffs on cross-border capital flows. Homogeneity: completely unclear what this is supposed to refer to. The models of cars produced by GM and Ford in Mexico, or the types of steel and aluminum produced in China and imported to the US, seem to be more or less the same as was once produced domestically. Do you mean 'workforce diversity' perhaps (although I don't understand how that would factor in)? It's curious how the corporate media is so resolutely opposed to discussing the Rust Belt issue, and the related ongoing financialization of the US economy, even though that's the key deciding factor that gave rise to Trump's surprise victory in 2016.
      • andsoitis 4y ago
        > Homogeneity: completely unclear what this is supposed to refer to. Sorry, I should have been clearer. Their economies, as far as I understand, were not very diverse.
      • PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
        > Inflexibility What you mean here is that the hard-fought gains of the labor movement over 100 years or so were drastically cut or eliminated, because what used to be economically infeasible (using overseas labor, moving capital overseas and repatriating profits) became not just feasible but desirable, thanks to specific legislative and administrative changes enacted by the US government. Without those changes, the workforce of the Industrial Belt would not have been characterized as "inflexible", but rather smart employees who had negotiated a respectable cut of their employers profits and were able to enjoy life a little more because of it.
• FlyingSnake 4y ago
  I always felt the same way, that construction is a sign that the city is alive. Places devoid of new construction always had signs of urban decay, e.g. East Des Moines IA.
• projektfu 4y ago
  In NYC the scaffolding is eternal. Nobody gets to enjoy the street. It's better than having tools fall on the street and things like that, but the average age is over 7 months and many are there for years. https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/buildings/html/sidewalk-shed-map.html https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/buildings/html/sidewalk-shed-map... Construction is great, maintenance is important, but why have all of these architectural facades when all you get to see is painted wood and temporary lighting?
  • merely-unlikely 4y ago
    A handful of the larger buildings seem to have accepted the permanent scaffolding state of affairs and actually handle it quite well. Ie [1] where the supports for the scaffolding are built into the building itself leaving the sidewalk completely free of interference. Still not the best to look at if you look up, but doesn't impede foot traffic at all. And it's nice in the rain. Some others like [2] have spent a bit more money to make the scaffolding look nicer and cleaner. It's a fair intermediate solution imo that I hope becomes more widespread if we take as a given that eternal scaffolding isn't going away any time soon. [1]https://www.google.com/maps/@40.7630615,-73.9738617,3a,75y,237.94h,100.24t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1s-oK35uteGOP-c55C0ygZJA!2e0!7i16384!8i8192 https://www.google.com/maps/@40.7630615,-73.9738617,3a,75y,2... [2]https://www.google.com/maps/@40.7589834,-73.9748391,3a,75y,125.77h,84.26t/data=!3m9!1e1!3m7!1sCWGX-r14NiP8-PBClCR1bw!2e0!7i16384!8i8192!9m2!1b1!2i37 https://www.google.com/maps/@40.7589834,-73.9748391,3a,75y,1...
  • jacobolus 4y ago
    > In NYC the scaffolding is eternal You might enjoy the episode “How to Put Up Scaffolding” from the TV show How to with John Wilson https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13021528/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13021528/
  • jasode 4y ago
    >In NYC the scaffolding is eternal. Wendover made a short video about that: https://youtu.be/lphKvTqovHs?t=1m56s https://youtu.be/lphKvTqovHs?t=1m56s TLDW: It's the Law of Unintended Consequences -- The sidewalk shed (aka "scaffolding") is a hack to get around a law requiring building facades be inspected every 5 years. Instead of actually inspecting the building masonry and making any necessary repairs, just install a sidewalk shed and leave it there year after year.
• DrewADesign 4y ago
  Eh... If this is supposed to be an allegory to show that your convenience and aesthetic preferences don't dictate the greater good, then sure... However, there's a vast gulf of perfectly healthy states between constant churn and abject neglect. For example, many historically important yet populous areas are not under construction, yet their vitality withstood the test of time. Just because something isn't growing doesn't mean it's shrinking. Just because nobody's modifying something doesn't mean it lacks necessary modifications. Sometimes things just suit their purpose and a bunch of physical infrastructure churn wouldn't improve anything.
  • seoaeu 4y ago
    Physical things this need maintenance, repair, and eventually replacement. Needs change over time. If the buildings around you have a lifespan of 50-100 years and you aren’t replacing 1% or 2% of them every year, then you are falling behind. If population is growing due to births, increases in life expectancy, or an influx of immigrants/refugees then housing construction must account for that as well.
    • CodeSgt 4y ago
      This assumes the construction of these 50-100 year buildings were evenly distributed over a given time. If 90% of a towns or cities 100 year infrastructure if built in a decade, then it'll just lead to a lot of replacements starting in about 90 years, not continuous small replacements.
      • deleted 4y ago
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      • seoaeu 4y ago
        More likely once the 90 years expires the area discovers that it is not actually capable of doing the replacements required. Of course, pretty much only suburban areas have infrastructure/buildings built over that short an interval. Constructing 90% of a major city’s high rises in a decade would be a construction boom unlike anything the western world has seen in a lifetime.
• deleted 4y ago
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• aj7 4y ago
  Construction is simply an economic activity, not “life.” At least not any more ‘life’ than say music, or physics,machining, the Grateful Dead, etc. As an economic activity, it has fluctuating valuations in asset values, prices, profitability, etc. and is greatly influenced by financing. As we’re all aware, China has hugely over-constructed, is in the process of asset value decline, and has wiped out some speculators.
• yyy888sss 4y ago
  Very true, as construction is not just new builds but also renovation and maintenance. Even a theoretical city with completely stable population still needs to keep its structures up to date and renew infrastructure.
• dimitar 4y ago
  I wonder if it is possible to design buildings that are made to be changed and improved on without having to use jackhammers and raise a ton of dust. Same for the streets - have modern stone pavement that is rearranged when you need to dig under the street. There is a lot to be improved in construction - it is horrible for the environment, a lot of the buildings don't last, labor productivity has grown more slowly compared to other industries or even fallen.
  • jessmartin 4y ago
    Christopher Alexander theorized about this in a great short article entitled Specifications for an Organic and Human Building System: http://worrydream.com/refs/Alexander%20and%20Jacobson%20-%20Specifications%20for%20an%20Organic%20and%20Human%20Building%20System.pdf http://worrydream.com/refs/Alexander%20and%20Jacobson%20-%20... His key attributes: 1. A common pattern language 2. User design 3. Repair and piecemeal growth 4. A human-scale building system
  • syntheweave 4y ago
    With respect to the architecture there are many attempts at addressing slow and error-prone builds with modular or 3D print methods. The savings is not a clear win in all cases, however - it's not at the disruptive level we'd want(yet). There are also some material innovations taking place that ease the involved costs. Graphene has become available enough to be used in concrete mixtures for a substantial strength/weight improvement which can reduce material usage. On the streets, the big change going forward will be AVs and micromobility(e-bike, e-scooter etc.) - right now most cities are not Amsterdam, because they're locked in on the idea of providing space mostly for heavy vehicles that are unused 95% of the time; once you add AV rentals to the mix, it becomes substantially easier to cut down the size of the fleet, both in a vehicle dimensions sense and number of vehicles. This in turn makes it easier to use the lightest vehicles safely, so the streets will wear down much less quickly, even with no change in the builds themselves.
• mkl95 4y ago
  At the places I've lived, construction is a symptom of chronic architectural / civil engineering problems caused by lack of vision and poor maintenance. At those places construction is also life, but it is life that would have been more constructive (no pun) somewhere else.
  • dubswithus 4y ago
    In the third world sometimes the maintenance is just as bad as the construction. Does this person know what they are doing? Well, we are going to find out.
  • prionassembly 4y ago
    Or having built a city on a precarious place that shouldn't have been for human dwelling by any conceivable reason, and yet it is. That people insist on living in these places is a testament to the value of human occupation as such. (I live in a city that's mostly built on what was the ocean two hundred years ago (sometimes fifty years ago) but won by civil engineering. It's a big empty country otherwise. We're basically below the sea level and maintaining underground infrastructure (electricity, fiber optic, heating gas, what have you) is a constant source of noise -- even the cable company has to have its draining machine vans. But by golly do we want to live here whatever the costs.
• wly_cdgr 4y ago
  Tell that to a guy who's been living next to a piledriver construction site for the last year
• amelius 4y ago
  I always wonder how they make those postcard images of cities, where no crane is visible in an entire city.
  • burntoutfire 4y ago
    Photoshop?
• deepsun 4y ago
  I wonder if there are urbanistics designs / architecture that would accommodate that permanent state of construction.
• stakkur 4y ago
  What an oddly romanticized view of construction. I like Kevin's writing, but this is just fluffy nonsense.
  • Barrin92 4y ago
    I don't think it's that romantic. When I moved between Europe and China for work every few months you could see this in action. There was a building close to my apartment that I think got rebuild three times in just a few years with a new business every time. My hometown in Europe basically looks (and feels) like a museum. And it shows in the people. There's a dynamism, young people moving in, upwards mobility, low cost of living, jobs that you lack in many of these static, affluent places.
• deleted 4y ago
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• thinkingkong 4y ago
  Life is life. Construction is correction.
• dustractor 4y ago
  To each their own, I guess. I guess if your whole life has been in cities where construction often involves de-constructing already-built structures, you might hear the sound of a jackhammer and think "ahh the sounds of life..." Having grown up in the countryside, where most construction involves killing all the trees on a site by scraping off the top layer of soil, the sounds of construction only makes me think of death.
  • whatshisface 4y ago
    Ironically, it's the city where construction is the hardest to get permission for.
  • vivekd 4y ago
    I work in construction and I notice this attitude is becoming more common, even among my coworkers. The reality is the western world is falling behind in essential infrastructure in every capacity. And I think our attitudes towards construction have a lot to do with that. Its hard to build roads, highways, sewers these days without some pushback. We need to start changing our views and start seeing constriction as an essential human need and return to the old view of infrastructure as something we take pride in
    • deleted 4y ago
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    • kiba 4y ago
      We don't need more urban sprawls. Heck, new road construction is probably the easiest thing we can get build. The problem is the immense cost imposed on society to implement an automobile based architecture. Instead, we should build up what we already have and encourage density. This is not a call for less infrastructure spending, but a reconfiguration of our urban design patterns.
      • Grim-444 4y ago
        Do you believe that automobile based architecture never worked, or that it worked before but no longer works? How could it ever work if we refuse to invest in the infrastructure to make it work?
• lbrito 4y ago
  Back in early 2010s Brazil, I remember seeing cranes lifting up new buildings everywhere in my city. Not as much new public sector infrastructure, but private sector was booming. This came with a 100-1000% housing inflation that never corrected later. The country started its slow but sure descent into the gutter in mid 2010s, and by 2016 basically everything stopped. Only pre covid did I start seeing new apartment buildings rising again at snails pace, but then came covid.
• UncleOxidant 4y ago
  > Jackhammers removing the old are the sound of a city’s metabolism. Neighborhoods that have construction in them are alive; those without it are ill. But go to an old European city and you're not going to see much construction. And they're not tearing down old stuff to build new. And yet many of those cities are very vibrant and full of life.
  • sgt 4y ago
    Full of life, yes. But lower metabolism. Kind of like an aging actor.
  • deleted 4y ago
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• baby 4y ago
  Related, I learned when I moved to San Francisco that the golden gate is continuously being painted in red throughout the year, every year.
  • Balgair 4y ago
    You bring up a good point here. No matter what it is, there is a need for maintenance of that thing. Bridges need painting, streets need repaving, ballparks need sweeping. People are like this too. We all need sleep, the bathroom, food, etc. Yet with people we don't think of them during their maintenance periods. I think this is because we all do this during a certain period of the day, leaving the other parts of the day to enjoy our non-self-maintenance work with each other. Why can't we do this for cities too? I know it would be difficult. But declaring some sort of jubilee from maintenance would be pretty cool. Just for 1 month every 10 years or so, no more road construction, or bridge painting, or sheds on the sidewalk. Get the city to enforce it, make the fine big, coordinate it so that everything is clean and tidy, just for 30 days every decade or something. Make it a celebration, a party, a big time for tourists to come in and photograph everything. Like a height marker for a child on the door-frame. A pause, 'Look in the mirror, take it in, breathe, it won't last long, savor this moment'.
  • mistrial9 4y ago
    salt water and fog really tear up any exposed metals
• sitkack 4y ago
  This is nothing more than romanticism for the jack hammers of poor decisions. A vibrant arcology can take many different forms, but constant redecon isn't required.
• 2-718-281-828 4y ago
  well ... yes and no imo. the text sounds like what somebody realized during an acid trip. of course maintenance is required. but to equate incessant, disruptive maintenance with "life" is a bit over the top. properly constructed building won't need serious overhauls for decades. the constant building, ripping down, ripping up, building again is as I see it just as well correlated to an unhealthy pump and dump tendency of our hyper capitalist economy.
• FastMonkey 4y ago
  Where I grew up, they used the number of cranes visible on the skyline as an indicator of the strength of the economy.
• mavili 4y ago
  Fair point, but I still think ripping streets up only a couple of months after paving them is bad planning. Very bad planning. Sometimes I wonder if councils in the UK are deliberately badly planning highway work so some contruction companies can constantly have work to do. I honestly believe if you dig deep enough you will see part of this whole "always under construction" is a result of some sort of corruption. Otherwise who would, in today's age, build a road to only rip it up again to install some underground cabling?! What were they thinking when they built this only two months ago??
• uwagar 4y ago
  when they were restoring that taj mahal, all that scaffolding made it look ugly. thats when kate and prince william visited and still took a picture. hope they removed it now.
• Night_Thastus 4y ago
  I feel like this video on city growth is relevant, and was pretty interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IsMeKl-Sv0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IsMeKl-Sv0 It suggests that a lot of the construction/repair needs of major cities could be reduced significantly, but it's a flaw inherent to their design that needs correcting first.
• emmelaich 4y ago
  I immediately thought of Primo Levi's celebration of homo faber; you should make things. Not just read or write about them. I wonder how many current politicians and bureaucrats work solely in the world of letters and laws. I think it would be telling. The excerpt from Bernard Levin's review of The Wrench in The Times resonates: > This is not a book for journalists. Civil servants, too, will feel uneasy while reading it, and as for lawyers, they will never sleep again. For it is about a man in his capacity as homo faber, a maker of things with his hands, and what has any of us ever made but words. I say it is 'about' the man who makes; truly, it is more a hymn of praise than a description, and not only because the toiler who is the hero of the book is a hero indeed - a figure, in his humanity, simplicity, worthy of inclusion in the catalogue of mythical giants alongside Hercules, Atlas, Gargantua and Orion. He is Faussone, a rigger' https://www.amazon.com/Wrench-Abacus-Books-Primo-Levi/dp/0349100128 https://www.amazon.com/Wrench-Abacus-Books-Primo-Levi/dp/034...
• hcs 4y ago
  > Those who arrive at Thekla can see little of the city, beyond the plank fences, the sackcloth screens, the scaffoldings, the metal armatures, the wooden catwalks hanging from ropes or supported by sawhorses, the ladders, the trestles. If you ask, "Why is Thekla's construction taking such a long time?" the inhabitants continue hoisting sacks, lowering leaded strings, moving long brushes up and down, as they answer, "So that its destruction cannot begin." And if asked whether they fear that, once the scaffoldings are removed, the city may begin to crumble and fall to pieces, they add hastily, in a whisper, "Not only the city." - Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities