Schwarz
View current page
...more recent posts
mikano house
move to philly
barn conversion
nice one in zionsville pa in "on the market" for $380K
rollertoaster
via zars
bartok radio budapest 3
radio b.a.c.h.
via straight-up and the overgrown path and the well-tempered blog
american tin ceilings installation instruction video
my first exposure to python happened in dallas. live appearance (after a first season) in 1975 on kera - i distinctly recall the armadillo bit
via zoller
sailboatescape tells it:
BJC,
Sounds as if you have been a mostly silent but studious reader with real plans to do something of significance. It also is apparent you wish to do it in the best possibly way and I personally applaud your approach. Since you state you are designing it and then handing it over to an engineer, I assume you have a general knowledge of what might and might not work in a structure.
Re engineering of containers is a tiny business in the world of containers with only a handful of experienced firms such as TAW. I believe these firms are usually making modifications to containers that must then be recertified to be handled (and presumably stacked) in the world wide transport system—a hugely different undertaking than modifying it to be used in a dwelling structure. However, that’s not to imply that modifications made to use them in housing is easy to analyze and those modifying containers for use in housing is an even smaller group. I haven’t started building yet but I have also been studying and researching everything I can in preparation and will gladly share what I have learned. A lot of it is from this forum, most notably David Cross’s generous sharing of knowledge.
I know of four basic references: MIL-HDBK-138B which is the DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE HANDBOOK GUIDE TO CONTAINER INSPECTION FOR COMMERCIAL AND MILITARY INTERMODAL CONTAINERS. Next is Rules for Certification of Cargo Containers from the American Bureau of Shipping. I found both of these as downloadable PDF files on the internet. I apologize as I did not make a note of where I found them. I remember the military guide was easy to find and the ABS was buried on their website.
The more definitive reference is ISO 1496-1. As far as I know this is not available for download anywhere and a copy is about $90. However, some large libraries will have it and the one in my small town participates in a loan program where they were able to obtain it for me. Lastly and most importantly will be the reference books your engineer will have for steel structural members, as that is how he really should be looking at this.
Another thing to keep in mind is the prescribed specifications for cargo containers give some leeway in how those specifications can be met. The top rail on one container may be different than another but both work as long as the resulting container meets the specifications. However, the modifications to one container may need to be different than what you would do on a different container to get the same results. David Cross would be qualified to address this, but I think you are going to have to know the specifics of the containers you intend to use before your engineer can do the calcs.
As both David Cross and Greg La Vardera have pointed out here before, every house will be different. Most 40’ containers are designed to carry a load of just under 60,000 pounds. A residential structure is designed for a floor load of 40 pounds per square foot which is only 12,800 pounds for that 320 square foot container. That 40’ container is designed to carry that load on four corners, most conventional house designs can easily have piers or foundations supporting sections of the container as needed. David has pointed out before that much of the reinforcing he does at TAW on modified containers is so they can be transported. If you can set yours in place and modify them on site that will also increase your flexibility in making them strong enough to exceed the requirements of a residential structure. From a design standpoint, not making a lot of modifications (or adding reinforcements where you do) allows you to use them to do overhangs and cantilevers that would be difficult to achieve with conventional construction.
Based on the conversations I have had with structural engineers, we will not approach it from what a container is designed to carry (other than to recognize that it is an incredibly strong structure that can easily take a good bit of modification). The initial designs and proposed supports etc. will be my work based simply on a working knowledge of designing and building conventional structures, gained over years of experience. When I am designing a house and incorporate something that must have an engineers seal, I do not go to an engineer and ask them to design the structural portion. I design what I think will work and take it to them to for an analysis. Most of the time it is acceptable and if not, they tell me how to change or modify what I propose. For my house designed with IBUs, together we will then look at the structure as a dwelling and how strong does it need to be to carry the prescribed floor loads, perform under seismic and wind loads, etc. He will then make an analysis of areas that appear to be of questionable strength due to proposed modifications to see if they are adequate in how I propose they be supported, reinforced, etc.
The question that keeps getting asked on this forum is how much can you modify a container and the experts keep giving the same answer—each one is different. Ask an engineer how much you can modify a container and it still be strong enough would probably be a very expensive question (in engineering fees) as there would be hundreds of “it depends” answers. If instead you are taking him (or her) a design and asking, “will an opening of such and such a size, placed here, with a remaining corrugated steel plate of this thickness above, a steel beam of this size below and a reinforcing frame welding around the opening of this section, be adequate at this place in the structure considering the prescribed loading conditions?” He can sit down with his tables and computer and give you an answer. If he starts with the most questionable areas first he will quickly become familiar with what the parts of the container are and their capacities and move on through his analysis.
Keep sight of the fact that I an starting with the premise that it is probably designed adequately and that my engineer is being engaged to examine that design, make recommendations if he finds areas that are not acceptable and then certify it.
Keep us posted and give us more details, not only on your design but your geographic area in terms of climate, building and zoning codes. Etc.
the elevators - your gonna miss me - dell is using this as advertising music n how do you make a psychedelic video in black and white?
via jschw
samuel adams ~ psychogeography
"Monochromes, from Malevich to the Present," recently on view at the Museo National Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, was described by its curator, Barbara Rose, as the first historically oriented museum exhibition conceived and presented entirely as a unitary installation. The 90 paintings and sculptures, which spanned the last 100 years and included works by 78 artists from North and South America, Western and Eastern Europe "and Asia, were grouped in six distinct contiguous "chromatic spaces" according to their predominant color, in an itinerary which began with black, moved through red, blue, gold and silver, before ending with white. In a small adjacent gallery were several paintings tracing a brief chronology of historical antecedents. These included Monet's Effet de neige a Giverny (1893), an early (1906-08) Monet-influenced landscape by Malevich, Rodchenko's three iconic monochromes from 1921, as well as works by Lucio Fontana, Hans Arp and Sophie Taeuber-Arp.catalog just released in october
9/11 photobucket images
remodeled dream home
via zoller
We skipped the light fandango
turned cartwheels 'cross the floor
I was feeling kinda seasick
but the crowd called out for more
The room was humming harder
as the ceiling flew away
When we called out for another drink
the waiter brought a tray
And so it was that later
as the miller told his tale
that her face, at first just ghostly,
turned a whiter shade of pale
She said, 'There is no reason
and the truth is plain to see.'
But I wandered through my playing cards
and would not let her be
one of sixteen vestal virgins
who were leaving for the coast
and although my eyes were open
they might have just as well've been closed
She said, 'I'm home on shore leave,'
though in truth we were at sea
so I took her by the looking glass
and forced her to agree
saying, 'You must be the mermaid
who took Neptune for a ride.'
But she smiled at me so sadly
that my anger straightway died
If music be the food of love
then laughter is its queen
and likewise if behind is in front
then dirt in truth is clean
My mouth by then like cardboard
seemed to slip straight through my head
So we crash-dived straightway quickly
and attacked the ocean bed
curbed found a corbu lobby chair heist
dark terry southern story (mp3) from here
Baudrillard’s rejection of art was all the more unexpected, and appeared all the more outrageous to those who believed he had crossed over. And yet he didn’t seem to notice the contradiction. The episode of the “simulationist school” (and of the “anti-simulationist” controversy) may have had something to do with it. In 1987 Baudrillard didn’t yet know much about the American art world and didn’t quite realize what was happening around his name. At best, he told me later, he sensed that “there was something fishy there” [Je me suis méfié] with a sound peasant-like distrust of sleek city talkers. So he flatly refused to play into the artists’ hands. He might as well have acceded their demand, the way he subsequently accepted the gallerists’ offer to exhibit his photographs because it would eventually have amounted to the same. What could anything one does ever be wrong coming “after the orgy”? If art ceased to matter as art, then what prevented anyone from joining in? Actually that he, who admittedly had no artistic claim or pedigree, would be invited to exhibit his work, amply proved his point: there was nothing special anymore about art. Groucho Marx once said that he would never join a club that accepted him as a member. Baudrillard did worse: he joined a group whose reasons to exist he publicly denied.
“Pataphysician at twenty – situationist at thirty – utopian at forty – transversal at fifty – viral and metaleptic at sixty – the whole of my history,”9 is the way Baudrillard once epitomized his own itinerary. Pataphysics was founded by Alfred Jarry, creator of Ubu, the brat-king with a paunch. It is the science of imaginary solutions, and this is precisely what Baudrillard reinvented in the circumstance. A pataphysical solution to a problem that didn’t exist. Because he certainly had no problem with it. Others may have, but it was their problem and it wasn’t up to him to solve it. Attacking art and becoming an artist all at the same time was perfectly acceptable in his book. He hadn’t asked to show his photographs, merely obliged. As far as he knew, they may have been trying to bribe him publicly, some kind of “sting operation” by the art squad. But they always implicate you in one way or another, so at least it was all above board. It was part of the "conspiracy" of art. Baudrillard didn’t have to feel any qualms about it, could even enjoy the ride for what it was worth. Early on he learned from French anthropologist Marcel Mauss that “gifts” always come with a vengeance. He knew he would eventually have to reciprocate, squaring the circle. And he did: he wrote “The Conspiracy of Art.”
The world becomes real to such a degree of reality that is bearable only by the way of a perpetual denial of the type :"This is not a world" (echoing the famous "This is not a pipe" of Magritte, as a surrealist denial of the evidence - Duchamp could just as well have said This is not a fountain). This double impulse of the absolute, definitive evidence of the world and of the equally radical denial of this evidence dominates the whole trajectory of modern art, but not only : all our perceptions and imagination of the world are affected. And it is not a question of moral philosophy or nos-talgia, as one would say : The world is not what it ought to be - or :The world is no longer what it was. No : the world is quite such as it is. Once all transcendance has been expelled, things are merely what they are, and such as they are, they are unbearable. They become immediately and totally real, without shadow, without comment. A giant ready-made. The reality is insuperable, but at the same time it doesn't exist anymore. It doesn't exist because it can no longer be exchanged for anything else. "Does reality exist ? Are we in a real world ? Such obsessive questions, which are the pervasive leit-motiv of our culture, simply expresses the fact that the world, trapped in the claws of reality, is bearable mow" only under the sign, in the shadow of the principle of Evil, that is in the form, whatever it may be, of a basic and radical denial. This is our double bind : since the world can no longer be justified in another world, it must be invested as real and released from all illusions (included, of course, the illusion of art, which no longer has any reason for being, except that of reinforcing this reality, as in the ready-made object), and at the same time we must go further and further into the denial of this reality, through the very impact of this negative countertransfer.
Hundreds of pieces of mail destined for the former trade center still arrive every day at a post office facing ground zero -- the relics of the unfinished lives of Sept. 11 victims.
Telephone bills, insurance statements, wine club announcements, college alumni newsletters, even government checks populate the bundles of mail. Each bears the ZIP code once reserved exclusively for the twin towers: 10048.
''I guess sooner or later they'll realize the towers aren't back up,'' said letter carrier Seprina Jones-Sims, who handles the trade center mail. ''I don't know when.''
Some of the nation's most recognizable companies and organizations, from retailers to research hospitals, are among those sending the mail. Much of it seems to result from businesses not updating their bulk mailing lists, said U.S. Postal Service spokeswoman Pat McGovern.
The postal service declined to identify the senders and recipients of the letters according to policy. Several companies formerly housed in the towers also declined comment.
The trade center mail meets varied fates once it arrives at the Church Street station.
A handful of companies pay for a service that forces the post office to hold the mail until a messenger picks it up. The rest of the mail travels various routes. Some will be returned to the sender, some will be forwarded to the company's current address and some will be sent to a Brooklyn recycling firm to be destroyed.
That the Postal Service is even forwarding mail from a nonexistent address five years later is rare. ''Normally we'd only forward mail for a year, but we're making an exception here,'' McGovern said.
The trade center's mail used to travel from the Church Street post office and up through the towers. It would start on the ground tucked in the letter carrier's bag and continue up higher and higher -- to the 68th floor, the 89th floor, the 104th floor.
The morning's mail never made it through the flames and smoke on Sept. 11, 2001. It stayed put with the letter carriers, who silently observed the chaos that unfurled outside the post office.
Flying debris blew out most of its windows. After a three-year restoration, its doors officially reopened in August 2004.
Rafael Feliciano delivered mail to floors 78 through 100 of the south tower for three years. He watched the tower collapse on television from a bar several blocks away with a co-worker.
''He turned to me and said, 'You just lost your route,''' Feliciano recalled. When the dust cleared, he spent weeks identifying office workers who came to pick up their mail, searching for familiar faces to see if they had survived.
upperbucks / real watch : reigelsville pa 18077 3 br, 2 Bath
1,600 Sq. Ft. 0.25 Acre asking $229,000.00 / Single Family Property, Area: Riegelsville Boro, County: Bucks County, Approximately 0.25 acre(s), Age: 106 year(s) old, Waterview, Waterfront property, Three story, Basement, Dining room, Laundry room, Hardwood floors
my container house designs are included on the habitainer links page
DENVER - What do remote-control garage door openers have to do with national security? A secretive Air Force facility in Colorado Springs tested a radio frequency this past week that it would use to communicate with first responders in the event of a homeland security threat. But the frequency also controls an estimated 50 million garage door openers, and hundreds of residents in the area found that theirs had suddenly stopped working.