Sonia Vordermaier, Street Lamp Forest
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11,700 Free Photos from John Margolies’ Archive of Americana Architecture: Download, Use & Re-Mix

Your children may not be able to visit an orange juice stand shaped like an orange or the Leaning Tower of Pizza, but thanks to the Library of Congress, these locales can be pitstops on any virtual family vacation you might undertake.

In July 2017, the library selected the John Margolies Roadside America Photograph Archive as its “free to use and reuse” collection. So linger as long as you’d like and do with these 11,700+ images as you will–make postcards, t‑shirts, souvenir placemats.

Whatever you decide to do with them, the archive’s homepage has tips for how to best search the 11,710 color slides contained therein. Library staffers have supplemented Margolies’ notes on each image with subject and geographical headings.

Begin your journey through the Library of Congress’ John Margolies Roadside America Photograph Archive here.

by Ayun Halliday, Open Culture |  Read more:

Images: John Margolies/Library of Congress

Beating the Heat

Long before air-conditioning, people around the world came up with ingenious ways to beat the heat. But, really — wear dark, billowing robes? And drink tea?

The science can be surprising. As big chunks of the United States and Canada roast through the weekend, some of these ideas might be worth a closer look.

Water That Sidewalk

In Japan’s sweltering summer months, you might see storekeepers with a bucket of cold water, dousing hot pavement outside their stores.

The practice, called uchimizu, grew out of Japan’s tea ceremony tradition. It was originally a purifying ritual and an act of welcome for guests. But uchimizu also has an effect on temperature thanks to what’s known as evaporative cooling — when water evaporates, it pulls heat out of the hot ground.

A 2018 study in the journal Water found that uchimizu caused air temperatures to drop by as much as 10 degrees Fahrenheit near the ground, even with small amounts of water.

According to Shigenori Asai, director of the Japan Water Forum, the more neighbors join in and douse the pavement, the more effective it is. “You might even feel a cooling breeze,” he said. His group is sponsoring a global Uchimizu Day on Aug. 1.

Hang Screens of Fragrant Grass

Before air-conditioning, people in some of the hottest parts of India survived intense heat waves by weaving screens made from the spongy roots of a sorghumlike grass called vetiver.

The screens are kept wet and hung over doors and windows facing the wind for another version of evaporative cooling. Hot air blowing through is stripped of some of its heat. The grasses also smell good.

The process works so well, especially in dry environments, that some modern data centers are turning to a variation of this idea called indirect evaporative cooling.

If old-fashioned technologies like this can make a dent in the expected surge in air-conditioning use in India and other countries, that would bring great benefits, said Liza Raju Subhadra, an architect in Kerala, India, who works with alternative materials.

“It’s not just energy-intensive — when a neighbor uses an air-conditioner, the hot air gets passed onto me,” she said. “It makes a big difference if we can passively cool our homes.”

Wear Dark, Flowing Robes (or Seersucker)

It may seem counterintuitive to wear heavy, dark clothing in the desert, but communities in the Middle East and North Africa have done so for centuries.

A study published in Nature in 1980 found that dark robes can indeed create a cooling effect when worn in loosefitting ways. The robe absorbs heat and warms the air inside the garment, but as that hot air expands and rises rapidly, it escapes through the top. The upward flow acts like a pump, drawing cooler air from the bottom of the robe.

“The additional heat absorbed by the black robe was lost before it reached the skin,” the authors concluded.

For a different look, try seersucker. In the hot, humid summers of the American South, linen and seersucker, the thin, puckered cotton fabric, are staples.

Seersucker is woven in a way that causes some threads to bunch together, giving the fabric its distinct wrinkled texture. That prevents it from flattening and sticking to sweaty skin. It also creates tiny pockets that aid air circulation and cooling.

by Hiroko Tabuchi, NY Times |  Read more:
Image: The Yomiuri Shimbun, via Associated Press
[ed. And there are other options too, from architectural to personal/practical. My buddy Jerry was telling me about folks in Texas who used to, maybe still do, dig small pit caverns (like root cellars) a few feet below ground with an attached conduit routed upward into their house. The cool air from just a few feet below ground is enough. Another option would be design features that encourage air flow and ventilation, see also: How Old Dubai's historic streets beat extreme heat (BBC).]

Non-Technological Constraints to AI

Market manias have patterns. The most powerful ones are genuine technological revolutions pushed far beyond rational limits by crowd psychology.

By mid-1999 it was already clear to veteran investors and students of economic history that the dotcom bubble had reached parabolic insanity.

The speculative momentum was still unstoppable – and would run a lot further – but grown-ups knew by then that few of the high-flying start-ups were ever going to generate a viable revenue stream. The authentic success stories would have to fight each other in a cannibalistic struggle for survival.

We are nearing the same point today with AI, although this time for a different and overwhelming reason. The $20tn (£15tn) valuation of hyperscalers, chipmakers and the larger AI complex, has wildly outpaced the electrical infrastructure needed to run data centres and sustain the technology on anything like the projected scale.

The physical constraint is rock hard. “Our grid in the United States hasn’t had any meaningful upgrade since the 1970s,” said Bobby Majumder from the industrial law firm FBT Gibbons.

The threat to AI stock mania is not so much lack of energy – though that is serious – but rather the global bottleneck of transformers, substations, switchgear, transmission lines and all the unsexy stuff we rarely think about, leaving aside the acute shortage of skilled workers in the US able to install and run such kit.

A single big campus in the data centre hub of Hays County, Texas – an area where I once played a lot of golf (misspent youth) and know well – can use 10 million gallons of water a day for evaporative cooling and power generation, draining the Edwards Aquifer that also supplies the Austin-San Antonio corridor.

“Nobody is talking about cooling; nobody is talking about water,” said Majumder, speaking at the recent Marshall & Stevens forum on energy infrastructure. “The farmers are not going to be happy at all about you pumping down their aquifer for cooling.”

There are other obvious catalysts that could puncture the bubble. Stubborn US inflation – input prices are rising at the fastest pace in four years – may force the Federal Reserve to stop its “stealth-QE” via bill purchases. The bond markets may hold Kevin Warsh’s feet to the fire as he takes over the institution.

Inflation may stop Scott Bessent, the poacher turned gamekeeper now running the US treasury like a hedge fund, from using the $8tn money market to help soak up massive fiscal deficits at the peak of the economic cycle.

Cheaper “commoditised” AI from the likes of DeepSeek in China may start to undercut American rivals, threatening the implicit pricing model behind today’s equity valuations. If it is true that DeepSeek v4 can achieve 80pc-90pc of the performance of Anthropic’s Claude at 10pc of the cost, you start to see the problem.

Liaquat Ahamed, author of the wonderful Lords of Finance covering the Great Depression and now releasing his new book 1873, likens the AI boom to the American railway mania after the Civil War. Routes were duplicated in the rush for dominance.

Costly lines passed through sparsely inhabited regions where there would never be enough human traffic in time to justify the scale of debt issuance. [...]

Hyperscalers can try to leapfrog the grid bottleneck by building their own power plants, but that will not solve the problem either, at least not in time to alleviate the burden of fast-mounting and opaque AI debt.

It took 17 years to plan, license and build the recent Vogtle nuclear plant in Georgia. Costs ballooned from $12bn to $30bn. Small modular reactors may be cheaper per gigawatt – don’t hold your breath – but none yet exist in the West, and there will be no serious supply chain until circa 2040.

Shale gas frackers can drill until they drop, but that makes no difference if there are no gas turbines available on the world market. The waiting list for heavy-duty models used in combined-cycle plants has stretched to seven years, although hyperscalers with the deepest pockets are jumping the queue for a fat fee with 2030 delivery dates. [...]

The AI revolution is real. The language models are fabulous. The technology will make economic life almost unrecognisable by mid-century.

But the internet revolution was also real in 1999 before the Nasdaq index dropped 77pc, flushed out the commercial nonsense and overshot in the other direction.

Don’t track Nvidia chip orders if you want to know where the AI market is heading. Track the metaphorical picks and shovels that make it all possible. 

by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, The Telegraph | Read more:
Image: Richard Newstead
[ed. See also: How bad is AI for the environment? (Yale Climate Connections).]

The Short, Swift Time of Gods on Earth

A Monument to Man’s Arrogance

Phoenix is in trouble. In 2024, the Arizona capital recorded 113 consecutive days of 100 degrees Fahrenheit or greater; the summers that were always hot but were still bearable are becoming more and more unbearable. As I write this in March of 2026, temperatures are already topping 100 degrees. While climate change explains some of the hotter temperatures, a bigger culprit is the endless concrete sprawl that traps heat in the daytime and doesn’t let it go at night. Phoenicians are long used to getting up at 5 in the morning to walk their dogs on concrete that doesn’t burn their paws; that time is getting earlier and earlier.

Then there’s the water. Phoenix sits on top of an aquifer and, like everywhere else in the west, they began draining that aquifer faster than they could refill it. So they supplemented. Phoenix sits at the confluence where the Agua Fria, Verde, and Salt Rivers all join with the Gila River; the Gila then runs west through the Sonoran Desert until it reaches the Colorado River some 200 miles downstream. Or, rather, it used to run west through the Sonoran. These rivers are completely used up by Phoenix, its suburbs, the Indian reservations in the metro area, and the farms in the exurbs. Waddell Dam, Horseshoe Dam, Bartlett Dam, Theodore Roosevelt Dam, Horse Mesa Dam, Mormon Flat Dam, Stewart Mountain Dam, and Granite Reef Dam create the lakes where Phoenicians go to escape the heat and ensure that one hundred percent of the rivers are available to Phoenix (less the millions of gallons that evaporate daily in the Arizona heat). West of Phoenix, the Gila runs dry until it reaches the Colorado.

But all that water is not nearly enough to sate the five million citizens of the Phoenician sprawl and the farms and the tribal communities. The rest comes from the Colorado River by way of the Central Arizona Project: a series of pumps, tunnels, and canals that every year move 456 billion gallons of Colorado River water 336 miles from the northwest. 5 billion of those gallons evaporate into the desert air before they ever reach Phoenix.

This water is, or rather was, guaranteed to Phoenix by the Colorado River Compact. The compact was signed in 1922 and assumed that the 1920-1921 flows of the river were representative of the river as a whole, but this turned out to be wrong in the worst possible way: those years had far more snowpack and therefore far more river water than average, decades before the effects of climate change began to be felt. The struggle to allocate the actual flow of the Colorado, not the paper flow, is a story of election fraud and bribery and lawsuits and gunfights and dynamite attacks involving states and militias and tribes and cities and feds and Mexicans, but that’s not the book I’m reviewing here. And to paraphrase Lord Palmerston, only three people have really understood the so-called Law of the River: the commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation, who is dead; a Navajo lawyer, who has gone mad; and I, who have forgotten all about it. So we won’t dwell on the Colorado. The upshot is that thanks to a lot of conservation efforts, Arizona has so far managed with the allocation it was given.

But Phoenix is getting more and more people and less and less snowpack. Arizona farmers are giving up more land and cities are instituting more stringent water restrictions, even as the population continues to increase and the thirsty data centers move in. In 2000, the seven western states in the Colorado River basin agreed to a set of guidelines to allocate the much-diminished river; those guidelines expire at the end of this year. The federal government gave a deadline of February 2026 for the seven states to come to a new agreement, and those states blew past that deadline without anything close to an agreement. The federal government is now in charge of determining how the river will be allocated.

This is a really bad time for the states to be arguing about river allocation; the winter of 2025-26 had the worst snowpack since the compact was signed and probably since much earlier, though records get shakier the farther back you go. This year we’ll avoid disaster by releasing years’ worth of water stored in a Wyoming reservoir. That won’t be an option next year. As the youngest state, Arizona has the weakest water rights; those rights would be the first to go in a crisis. Some of the options that the government has on the table involve cutting off the Central Arizona Project entirely, leaving Phoenix to drain the aquifer dry and collapse the whole metro area into a sinkhole.

This coming crisis has not passed unnoticed. Many people and publications have tried to explain these issues to a national audience, and a lot of them have hit on the same hook.

For example, the July 2024 cover story of The Atlantic tells the story of Phoenix. It opens with this:

No one knows why the Hohokam Indians vanished. They had carved hundreds of miles of canals in the Sonoran Desert with stone tools and channeled the waters of the Salt and Gila Rivers to irrigate their crops for a thousand years until, in the middle of the 15th century, because of social conflict or climate change—drought, floods—their technology became obsolete, their civilization collapsed, and the Hohokam scattered. Four hundred years later, when white settlers reached the territory of southern Arizona, they found the ruins of abandoned canals, cleared them out with shovels, and built crude weirs of trees and rocks across the Salt River to push water back into the desert. Aware of a lost civilization in the Valley, they named the new settlement Phoenix.

The Sierra Club’s cover story in 2022 described the coming Colorado River crisis. Their introduction ends with this:

No one knows exactly why, in the 14th century, the Hohokam abandoned Pueblo Grande and other settlements across the Salt River Valley. Two hypotheses (perhaps not mutually exclusive) are that the Hohokam were laid low by prolonged drought and that hundreds of years of relentless irrigation salinized the soil, which in turn led to a collapse in agriculture…The secret of the culture’s disappearance from the region may be encapsulated in its name. Hohokam derives from a word in the language of the Akimel O’odham, a contemporary Native nation. It means “all used up” or “exhausted.”

There are many more invocations of the Hohokam; I’ll quote just one more here to drive home the point. The ur-text of writing on the water crisis in the west, the book that all others cite as their inspiration, is the 1985 book Cadillac Desert. The chapter that discusses the Central Arizona Project begins this way:

The original 400,000 Arizonans were, for the most part, members of the Hohokam culture, a civilization that thrived uninterrupted near the confluence of the Gila, Salt, and Verde rivers for at least a thousand years, until about 1400, when it disappeared. The Hohokam, by A.D. 800, had already established a civilization that rivaled the Aztec, Inca, and Maya further south. They lived in small cities; the ruins of one of them, Pueblo Grande, occupied a large piece of land just about where downtown Phoenix is today. Superb flint and stone masons and excellent potters, they also worked beautifully with shells; they may have traded with people living on the Mexican coasts. For sport, they built enclosed ball courts very much like those of the Maya, who probably gave them the idea. When it came to irrigation, however, the Hohokam were in a league by themselves.

They were more populous than any culture around. Why then should they disappear? Drought remains a possibility — perhaps a twenty-year drought the likes of which they had never seen — but an equally plausible explanation is that they irrigated too much and waterlogged the land, leading to intractable problems with salt buildup in the soil, which would have poisoned the crops. In either case, the mysterious disappearance of Hohokam civilization seems linked to water: they either had too little or used too much. And that is the exactly the problem that Arizona faces today.

It’s easy to see why the Hohokam story is used as a hook. It’s too good not to use. A people settle by the confluence of the Salt and Gila rivers and build a great civilization until the changing climate or their overuse of water forces them to leave. The writers of all these pieces start by saying the disappearance of the Hohokam is a mystery, but then make it clear that the answer to this mystery is the same as whatever they believe to be the biggest problem with modern-day Phoenix: climate change, irrigation overuse, poisoned crops, social conflict, etc.

But is it true that nobody knows why the Hohokam vanished? Archaeological investigations into Hohokam society have revealed several great houses, dozens of classic Meso-American ball courts, and a massive network of dams and irrigation canals. But archaeology tells us nothing about why the Hohokam left. Where else could we go to investigate this mystery? Where could we turn to see if Phoenix is heading down a well-trodden path towards destruction? How could we find out what happened to the Hohokam?

What if we asked them?

by Anonymous, Astral Codex Ten |  Read more:

Images: here and here 

[ed. Less about current water problems (and possible solutions) in the Phoenix area today and more about the history of Hohokam society that predated it. An interesting and detailed account of a unique and forward-thinking society quite advanced for its time. See also: Friday Book Club - Cadillac Desert (DS).]

Tension Instrument Concert Hall designed by Lihan Jin.
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Reflecting Pool Fiasco: 'Crazy Pro-Algae Protestors' Arrested

Most people don’t seem to be buying Trump’s excuses about the Reflecting Pool... Social media is flooded with jokes about “Sealant Team 6” and images of the reflecting pool as the Dead Marshes from the Lord of the Rings films or with the Creature from the Black Lagoon emerging from it. Upon hearing of the arrest of former Olympian David Hearn for destruction of government property after he touched the detached liner of the pool “but didn’t destroy or break or peel anything,” conservative commentator David Frum wrote: “If destruction of government property is a crime, I wonder what they’ll do to the man who tore down the East Wing without a permit.” [...]

Tonight Trump posted a picture of a person dressed in a pink inflatable frog costume with the word “AMPHIFA” written across the belly, carrying a sign that reads: “FIRST THEY CAME FOR THE ALGAE.” Trump called the activist “a crazy pro-algae (likely paid) protestor.”

“Who’s paying team algae?” social media poster The Volatile Mermaid retorted. “George Sporos?” [...]

Illustrating the degree to which Trump’s botched renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool has come to represent his botched war on Iran, as well as the degree to which Americans have turned against both, social media users have taken to calling the algae-choked reflecting pool the “Strait of Warm Ooze.” (The strait the Iranians have taken control of is called the Strait of Hormuz.) Yesterday the administration put fencing up around it to keep people away. [...]

Trump continues frantically to insist that the problems with the Reflecting Pool are the acts of vandals. As Rachel Kahn of The New Republic reported, Trump insisted on Saturday that the pool had “worked perfectly” before vandals attacked, putting “a 250 foot long gash into the beautiful facade of what took so much work.” By Monday, the “gash” was 300 feet. By Tuesday it was 350 feet, according to Trump. There is, of course, no evidence of any such sabotage, and there are cameras on the Reflecting Pool.

Trump’s stories have gotten more and more elaborate, about how vandals used “a very sharp knife or razors,” “probably in the dark of night,” then added “chemicals.” He warned there could be a “10-year prison sentence for the destruction, or even the attempted destruction, of such things.” Asked for evidence, he claimed “we have pictures.” He told reporter Ed O’Keefe of CBS News: “[A]t the right time you’ll see it. You’ll see it in court. You’ll see it in court, but all you have to do is call the Parks Department, call the Department of Interior.” Tonight the Interior Department began to place fencing around the Reflecting Pool. [...]

Meanwhile, Trump has doubled down on the idea that the problems with the Reflecting Pool are the product of vandalism by “SICK, DERANGED PEOPLE,” and administration officials have stationed National Guard personnel around the Reflecting Pool. They appear to be handing out citations to individuals who touch the water.

A friendly media figure at the White House today noted that in April Trump said he was going to fix the Reflecting Pool “in a week for about a million dollars,” and wanted to know what was going on two months and sixteen and a half million dollars later. Trump answered: “Ok, ready? Barack Hussein Obama, have you ever heard of him?” Trump went on to lambaste what he said were Obama’s botched repairs to the pool.

by Heather Cox Richardson, Letters From an Amerian | Read more: here, here and here

Image: Reuters/Reflecting pool May 2 and June 18

[ed. The jokes almost write themselves... ; ) See also: President Narcissus and the Fetid Reflecting Pool (NYT):]

***

Bungling the $14 million-plus redo of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, concocting batty stories about what really happened — Knife-wielding vandals? Corrosive chemicals “illegally” dumped in the water? — and harassing innocent bystanders to distract from his own incompetence: These are not the most outrageous things the president has done since his return to office. But that is part of what makes this saga so irresistible and resonant. It is Trumpism made laughable — farce rather than horror or tragedy. [...]

Trumpian moves such as going to war with Iran and slashing Medicaid upend more lives, but those policy failures take a lot of intellectual and emotional bandwidth to process. And learning about the American military accidentally bombing an elementary school in southern Iran will make plenty of people want to turn away.

Some guy wasting a pile of money on a shoddy remodel? Everyone gets how pathetic and hilarious that is. [...]

With any screw-up, Mr. Trump ducks accountability by blaming nefarious enemies plotting against him. Only people mainlining the MAGA Kool-Aid will buy the idea that terrorist-vandals wielding magic blades (because please recall that Mr. Trump assured us last month that the pool’s fancy new coating was impervious to knives) sneaked past the surveillance cameras and security patrols around the National Mall to carve a 250-foot — Oops, make that 300-foot! No, better still, 350-foot! — gash in said coating. “WOW, who would do such a thing?” he raved in a Sunday social media post. “SICK, DERANGED PEOPLE.” [...]

Finally — and I cannot stress this element enough — this whole sorry episode is blessedly clownish. I don’t mean clownish like that bloody spectacle of a cage match birthday party Mr. Trump threw himself on the White House lawn this month. I count that among the legion of things this president celebrates that appall his critics but appeal to key chunks of his base.

Mr. Trump’s reflecting pool face plant, by contrast, is more Three-Stooges-meet-Bozo-the-Clown-ish. Getting bested by an algae bloom then throwing a finger-pointing tantrum about it doesn’t make Mr. Trump seem scary or threatening so much as petulant and inept. People are laughing at him, and that laughter undermines his image as a take-charge master of the universe.

This is the true gift of the reflecting pool meltdown. Mr. Trump looks foolish, with relatively minimal damage done to the nation. The economy will not crater. The global order will not be upended. No one will be deported to a foreign gulag. No one is likely to die. Aside from, perhaps, some poor little ducklings.

In Praise of Shadows

What incredible pains the fancier of traditional architecture must take when he sets out to build a house in pure Japanese style, striving somehow to make electric wires, gas pipes, and water lines harmonize with the austerity of Japanese rooms—even someone who has never built a house for himself must sense this when he visits a teahouse, a restaurant, or an inn. For the solitary eccentric it is another matter, he can ignore the blessings of scientific civilization and retreat to some forsaken corner of the countryside; but a man who has a familiy and lives I the city cannot turn his back on the necessities of modern life—heating, electric lights, sanitary facilities— merely for the sake of doing things the Japanese way. The purist may rack his brain over the placement of a single telephone, hiding it behind the staircase or in a corner of the hallway, wherever he thinks it will least offend the eye. He may bury the wires rather than hang them in the garden, hide the switches in a closet or cupboard, run the cords behind a folding screen. Yet for all his ingenuity, his efforts often impress us as nervous, fussy, excessively contrived. For so accustomed are we to electric lights that the sight of a naked bulb beneath an ordinary mild glass shade seems simpler and more natural than any gratuitous attempt to hide it. Seen at dusk as one gazes out upon the countryside from the window of a train, the lonely light of a bulb under an old-fashioned shade, shining dimly from behind the white paper shoji of a thatch-roofed farmhouse, can seem positively elegant. [...]

Whenever I sit with a bowl of soup before me, listening to the murmur that penetrates like the faroff shrill of an insect, lost in contemplation of flavors to come, I feel as if I were being drawn into a trance. The experience must be something like that of the tea master who, at the sound of the kettle, is taken from himself as if upon the sigh of the wind in the legendary pines of Onoe. 

It has been said of Japanese food that it is a cuisine to be looked at rather than eaten. I would go further and say that it is to be meditated upon, a kind of silent music evoked by the combination of lacquerware and the light of a candle flickering in the dark. Natsume Sōseki, in Pillow of Grass, praises the color of the confection yōkan; it is not indeed a color to call forth meditation? The cloudly translucence, like that of jade; the faint, dreamlike glow that suffuses it, as if it had drunk into its very depths the light of the sun; the complexity and profundity of the color— nothing of the sort is to be found in Western candies. How simple and insignificant cream-filled chocolates seem by comparison. And when yōkan is served in a lacquer dish within whose dark recesses its color is scarcely distinguishable, then it is most certainly an object for meditation. You take its cool, smooth substance into your mouth, and it is as if the very darkness of the room were melting on your tongue; even undistinguished yōkan can then take on a mysteriously intriguing flavor. 

In the cuisine of any country efforts no doubt are made to have the food harmonize with the tableware and the walls; but with Japanese food, a brightly lighted room and shining tableware cut the appetite in half. The dark miso soup that we eat every morning is one dish from the dimly lit houses of the past. I was once invited to a tea ceremony where miso was served; and when I saw the muddy, claylike color, quiet in a black lacquer bowl beneath the faint light of a candle, this soup that I usually take without a second thought seemed somehow to acquire a real depth, and to become infinitely more appetizing as well. Much the same may be said of soy sauce. In the Kyoto-Osaka region a particularly thick variety of soy is served with raw fish, pickles, and greens; and how rich in shadows is the viscous sheen of the liquid, how beautifully it blends with the darkness. White foods too—white miso, bean curn, fish cake, the white meat of fish—lose much of their beauty in a bright room. And above all there is rice. A glistening black lacquer rice cask set off in a dark corner is both beautiful to behold and a powerful stimulus to the appetite. Then the lid is briskly lifted, and this pure white freshly boiled food, heaped in its black container, each and every grain gleaming like a pearl, sends forth billows of warm steam—here is a sight no Japanese can fail to be moved by. Our cooking depends upon shadows and is inseparable from darkness. 

I possess no specialized knowledge of architecture, but I understand that in the Gothic cathedral of the West, the roof is thrust up and up so as to place its pinnacle as high in the heavens as possible—and that herein is thought to lie its special beauty. In the temples of Japan, on the other hand, a roof of heavy tiles is first laid out, and in the deep, spacious shadows creates by the eaves the rest of the structure is built. Nor is this true only of temples; in the palaces of the nobility and the houses of the common people, what first strikes the eye is the massive roof of tile or thatch and the heavy darkness that hangs beneath the eaves. Even at midday cavernous darkness spreads over all beneath the roof’s edge, making entryway, doors, walls, and pillars all but invisible. The grand temples of Kyoto—Chion’in, Honganji—and the farmhouses of the remote countryside are alike in this respect: like most buildings of the past their roofs give the impression of possessing far greater weight, height, and surface than all that stands beneath the eaves. 

In making for ourselves a place to live, we first spread a parasol to throw a shadow on the earth, and in the pale light of the shadow we put together a house. There are of course roofs on Western houses too, but they are less to keep off the sun than to keep off the wind and the dew; even from without it is apparent that they are built to create as few shadows as possible and to expose the interior to as much light as possible. If the roof of a Japanese house is a parasol, the roof of a Western house is no more than a cap, with as small a visor as possible so as to allow the sunlight to penetrate directly beneath the eaves. There are no doubt all sorts of reasons—climate, building materials—for the deep Japanese eaves. The fact that we did not use glass, concrete, and bricks, for instance, made a low roof necessary to keep off the driving wind and rain. A light room would no doubt have been more convenient for us, too, than a dark room. The quality that we call beauty, however, must always grow from the realities of life, and our ancestors, forced to live in dark rooms, presently came to discover beauty in shadows, ultimately to guide shadows towards beauty’s ends. 

And so it has come to be that the beauty of a Japanese room depends on a variation of shadows, heavy shadows against light shadows—it has nothing else. Westerners are amazed at the simplicity of Japanese rooms, perceiving in them no more than ashen walls bereft of ornament. Their reaction is understandable, but it betrays a failure to comprehend the mystery of shadows. Out beyond the sitting room, which the rays of the sun can at best but barely reach, we extend the eaves or build on a veranda, putting the sunlight at still greater a remove. The light from the garden steals in but dimly through paper-paneled doors, and it is precisely this indirect light that makes for us the charm of a room. We do our walls in neutral colors so that the sad, fragile, dying rays can sink into absolute repose. The storehouse, kitchen, hallways, and such may have a glossy finish, but the walls of the sitting room will almost always be of clay textured with fine sand. A luster here would destroy the soft fragile beauty of the feeble light. We delight in the mere sight of the delicate glow of fading rays clinging to the surface of a dusky wall, there to live out what little life remains to them. We never tire of the sight, for to us this pale glow and these dim shadows far surpass any ornament. And so, as we must if we are not to disturb the glow, we finish the walls with sand in a single neutral color. The hue may differ from room to room, but the degree of difference in color as in shade, a difference that will seem to exist only in the mood of the viewer. And from these delicate differences in the hue of the walls, the shadows in each room take on a tinge particularly their own. 

Of course the Japanese room does have its picture alcove, and in it a hanging scroll and a flower arrangement. But the scroll and the flowers serve not as ornament but rather to give depth to the shadows. We value a scroll above all for the way it blends with the walls of the alcove, and thus we consider the mounting quite as important as the calligraphy or painting. Even if the greatest masterpiece will lose its worth as a scroll if it fails to blend with the alcove, while a work of no particular distinction may blend beautifully with the room and set off to unexpected advantage both itself and its surroundings. Wherein lies the power of otherwise ordinary work to produce such an effect? Most often the paper, the ink, the fabric of the mounting will possess a certain look of antiquity, and this look of antiquity will strike just the right balance with the darkness of the alcove and room. 

We have all had the experience, on a visit to one of the great temples of Kyoto or Nara, of being shown a scroll, one of the temple’s treasures, hanging in a large, deeply recessed alcove. So dark are these alcoves, even in bright daylight, that we can hardly discern the outlines of the work; all we can do is listen to the explanation of the guide, follow as best we can the all-but-invisible brush strokes, and tell ourselves how magnificent a painting it must be. Yet the combination of that blurred old painting and the dark alcove is one of absolute harmony. The lack of clarity, far from disturbing us, seems rather to suit the painting perfectly. For the painting here is nothing more than another delicate surface upon which the faint, frail light can play; it performs precisely the same function as the sand-textured wall. This is why we attach such importance to age and patina. A new painting, even one done in ink monochrome or subtle pastels, can quite destroy the shadows of an alcove, unless it is selected with the greatest care. 

A Japanese room might be likened to an inkwash painting, the paper-paneled shoji being the expanse where the ink is thinnest, and the alcove where it is the darkest. Whenever I see the alcove of a tastefully built Japanese room, I marvel at our comprehension of the secrets of shadows, our sensitive use of shadow and light. For the beauty of the alcove is not the work of some clever device. An empty space is marked off with plain wood and plain walls, so that the light drawn into its forms dim shadows within emptiness. There is nothing more. And yet, when we gaze into the darkness that gathers behind the crossbeam, around the flower vase, beneath the shelves, though we know perfectly well it is mere shadow, we are overcome with the feeling that in this small corner of the atmosphere there reigns complete and utter silence; that here in the darkness immutable tranquility holds sway. The “mysterious Orient” of which Westerners speak probably refers to the uncanny silence of these dark places. And even we as children would feel an inexpressible chill as we peered into the depths of an alcove to which the sunlight had never penetrated. Where lies the key to this mystery? Ultimately it is the magic of shadows. Were the shadows to be banished from its corners, the alcove would in that instant revert to mere void. 

This was the genius of our ancestors, that by cutting off the light from this empty space they imparted to the world of shadows that formed there a quality of mystery and depth superior to that of any wall painting or ornament. The technique seems simple, but was by no means so simply achieved. We can imagine with little difficulty what extraordinary pains were taken with each invisible detail—the placement of the window in the shelving recess, the depth of the crossbeam, the height of the threshold. But for me the most exquisite touch is the pale white glow of the shoji in the sturdy bay; I need only pause before it and I forget the passage of time. 

The sturdy bay, as the name suggests, was originally a projecting window built to provide a place for reading. Over the years it came to be regarded as no more than a source of light for the alcove; but most often it serves not so much to illuminate the alcove as to soften the sidelong rays from without, to filter them through paper panels. There is a cold and desolate tinge to the light by the time it reaches these panels. The little sunlight from the garden that manages to make its way beneath the eaves and through the corridors has by then lost its power to illuminate, seems drained of the complexion of life. It can do no more than accentuate the whiteness of the paper. I sometimes linger before these panels and study the surface of the paper, bright, but giving no impression of brilliance. 

In temple architecture the main room stands at a considerable distance from the garden; so dilute is the light there that no matter what the season, on fair days or cloudy, morning, midday, or evening, the pale, white glow scarcely varies. And the shadows at the interstices of the ribs seem strangely immobile, as if dust collected in the corners had become a part of the paper itself. I blink in uncertainty at this dreamlike luminescence, feeling as though some misty film were blunting my vision. The light from the pale white paper, powerless to dispel the heavy darkness of the alcove, is instead repelled by the darkness, creating a world of confusion where dark and light are indistinguishable. Have not you yourselves sensed a difference in the light that suffuses such a room, a rare tranquility not found in ordinary light? Have you never felt a sort of fear in the face of the ageless, a fear that in that room you might lose all consciousness of the passage of time, that untold years might pass and upon emerging you should find you had grown old and gray?

by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, (Leete’s Island Books, 1977) |  Read more:

Image: Wikipedia

[ed. When I realized this famous Tanizaki essay was published in 1933, I thought surely it must be out of copyright by now. And here it is. From Wikipedia:]

***

In Praise of Shadows (陰翳礼讃, In'ei Raisan) is an essay by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki about Japanese aesthetics. Tanizaki's observations include cultural notes on customs and tradition, people, historical places and buildings, discussion of various materials and craft techniques, as well as food and even unusual recipes as seen through the author's metaphorical lens of light and shadow. [...]

The essay consists of 16 sections that discuss traditional Japanese aesthetics in contrast with change. Comparisons of light with darkness are used to contrast Western and Asian cultures. The West, in its striving for progress, is presented as continuously searching for light and clarity, while the subtle and subdued forms of East Asian art and literature are seen by Tanizaki to represent an appreciation of shadow and subtlety, closely relating to the traditional Japanese concept of sabi. In addition to contrasting light and dark, Tanizaki further considers the layered tones of various kinds of shadows and their power to reflect low sheen materials like gold embroidery, patina and cloudy crystals. In addition, he distinguishes between the values of gleam and shine.

The text presents personal reflections on topics as diverse as architecture and its fittings, traditional crafts, finishes, jade, food, cosmetics and mono no aware (the art of impermanence). Tanizaki explores in close description the use of space in buildings, lacquerware by candlelight, monastery toilets and women in the dark of a brothel. The essay acts as "a classic description of the collision between the shadows of traditional Japanese interiors and the dazzling light of the modern age".

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How Amsterdam is Reviving the Fine-Grained Courtyard Block

At Centrumeiland, a new district in Amsterdam’s IJburg expansion, the city is avoiding one of the great failures of contemporary urban development, the large-parcel megaproject. Rather than handing the 37 acres over to a few large developers to build massive, hotel-like buildings, Centrumeiland is subdividing the site into perimeter-block parcels, assigning each parcel a buildable role through a plot “passport,” and enabling many smaller actors to build within one coherent urban framework.

Begun in 2013 as part of Amsterdam’s IJburg land-reclamation project, Centrumeiland modernizes the old perimeter-block model for contemporary goals. It will be dense, but green; urban, but family-oriented; highly planned, but open to many builders. Amsterdam plans roughly 1,500 to 1,700 homes on the 37-acre island, or about 40 to 46 homes per acre. By American standards, that is serious density. But it is not being delivered as a monoculture of towers or double-loaded apartment blocks. Centrumeiland includes a mix of housing types and tenures: large family-sized homes, smaller rentals, social housing, mid-market housing, market-rate condos, individual self-build houses, collective self-build projects, housing-association buildings, and developer-led apartments.

The ambition is a dense urban neighborhood that can serve households across the lifecycle: singles, couples, families with children, older residents, renters, owners, and collective building groups. It also adapts the perimeter-block tradition to contemporary priorities: low-car living, accessibility, climate resilience, mixed tenure, family housing, and broader participation in development and ownership.

All of this depends on the subdivision and passport system. Amsterdam breaks the large site into many buildable pieces, assigns each parcel a role through a plot passport, and holds the pieces together through streets, blocks, party-wall conditions, courtyards, public-space rules, and environmental obligations. In this way, they have brilliantly resurrected the old urban formula that allows many builders to participate in the development of a large site, making a real neighborhood.

For American cities, the moral of the story is clear. On large brownfield and greenfield sites, cities should stop treating whole districts as single development packages to be handed to master developers. They should do the more civic work first of laying streets, subdividing land into buildable parcels, and issuing clear “parcel passports” that specify what each site can become. In existing neighborhoods, the same logic should operate at a smaller scale. Cities should create transit-oriented overlays that give ordinary private lots clear building rights that make great multifamily housing easier to finance, permit, and build.

Centrumeiland goes far beyond “build more housing.” It is more radical and more urbane. Divide the land, write good code, and let many hands build the city.

The Megadevelopment Trap

For the last half-century, large urban sites have met a sadly familiar fate. A railroad, port authority, public agency, hospital, university, or industrial landowner controls a vast tract of developable land. The master-planning process then carves it into a few enormous parcels and awards them to one or several major developers. After years of negotiation, public fights, redesigns, entitlement battles, and financing risk, the developer may finally build the megaproject, which is widely reviled by the public.

Megaprojects may be economically productive. They can deliver housing, offices, parks, retail, transit, and tax revenue. But the development model itself is thin. Too few actors control too much land. The parcels are too large, the buildings are too big, and the building code and underwriting norms push toward deep floorplates and double-loaded corridors. The buildings are dominated by small, expensive, hotel-like units that are poorly suited to middle-income families who need light, storage, bedrooms, outdoor access, and a sense of domestic permanence. These districts may be a success on paper (for now), but they make failed neighborhoods, lacking the social depths and street life that is the reward of fine-grained courtyard urbanism. [...]

The problem is the development system. A megaproject cannot make a great neighborhood. Neighborhoods require many actors, many front doors, many ownership structures, many building types, many ground-floor conditions, and many small adaptations over time. They need private yards. They need a public framework strong enough to coordinate many actors.

That is the old art of division and perimeter block planning Centrumeiland begins to recover.

Making Land Into City

Centrumeiland is part of Amsterdam’s IJburg expansion, a chain of artificial islands built in the IJmeer on the city’s eastern edge. IJburg extends Amsterdam outward into the water between the historic city and the open landscape of the Markermeer, turning what was once lakebed into new urban land. Centrumeiland sits within this larger archipelago, connected back to Amsterdam by bridges, cycling routes, bus service, and the IJtram to Amsterdam Centraal. It is therefore both peripheral and deeply urban, a new island neighborhood made from water, but tied into the metropolitan fabric of Amsterdam.

While the land reclamation is impressive, even more remarkable is the public framework that governs the development. The city divided the land into kavels, and created parcel-specific rules through kavelpaspoorten, or plot passports.

A passport can define the parcel boundary, buildable envelope, maximum height, frontage condition, access requirements, open-space obligations, water-management rules, parking expectations, program, tenure, sustainability requirements, and sometimes ground-floor use. It tells a builder not merely that “residential” or “commercial” is allowed, but what kind of urban contribution this specific piece of land is supposed to make: a row of townhouses, a small apartment building, a collective self-build project, a social-housing block, a mid-market rental building, a mixed-use corner building, or a larger perimeter-block parcel with shared courtyard space.

The subdivision and passport framework enables much broader participation in the development. Of the planned 1,500 to 1,700 homes, roughly 60 to 70 percent are intended to be self-build. But “self-build” here does not only mean one household designing one eccentric house. It includes individual self-builders, small groups, collective private commissioning, building groups, housing cooperatives, and other resident-led or small-group development structures...

Its lesson moral here is that parcelization broadens participation and creates more development pathways than the master-developer model. [...]

The American Application

For American cities, the lesson is to create a modern urban passport system.

There are two obvious applications: large-site development and existing-neighborhood overlays.

On brownfield and greenfield sites — former industrial land, rail yards, malls, hospital campuses, public land, waterfronts, and other large redevelopment areas — cities should stop defaulting to the megaproject model. They should lay out streets first, shape interesting blocks, design public spaces, subdivide land into buildable parcels, and assign parcel passports. Those parcels could then be allocated to many actors: small developers, cooperatives, housing associations, community development corporations, nonprofit builders, resident-led groups, and larger developers where appropriate.

Large developers may still participate. But they should not control the whole district. The city should not ask one actor to simulate the complexity of a neighborhood.

by Alicia Pederson, Courtyard Urbanist |  Read more:

Images: uncredited

Bridge Rapid Replacement System

Concrete is a technology... Ultra-high-performance concrete — UHPC — runs eighteen to thirty-five thousand psi, ten times the strength of the mix in American bridges today, tensile strength twice normal, chloride permeability under ten percent, freeze-thaw shrug. Machine-made sand concrete replaces river sand with precision-crushed aggregate engineered at the grain level and saved one Chinese province $3.19 billion on a single bridge program. Concrete-filled steel tubular arch systems — CFST — now span six hundred meters across Chinese canyons. Prefabricated modular bridge spans are stockpiled in fields next to the bridges they will one day replace, ready to be craned in when the live span is hit. Six bridges in seventy-two hours. The Iranians did this last week. The Chinese can do it at greater span than anyone has ever done it. 

Go ahead. Name an American cement company. The sentence doesn’t end. That’s the sentence-ending sentence. The country that cannot pour its own concrete is the United States of America. Meanwhile six Iranian railway bridges went down and came back up in seventy-two hours. The method is called the Bridge Rapid Replacement System. In 2019 somebody sat in Tehran and said what if they bomb the bridges, and somebody else said we should put another bridge next to every bridge, and somebody else said yes, and they did it. Six times. In concrete... 

Meanwhile in Guizhou there is a canyon and a bridge across the canyon, six hundred twenty-five meters of concrete, lifted into place with a hoisting system that did not exist fifteen years ago. The Chinese hold every world record for arch bridge span. Every single one. The seminary cannot pour a sidewalk in Baltimore that doesn’t crack in four years. The seminary had a harbor bridge in Baltimore and a ship bumped it and the bridge fell in the water. The seminary watched the ship coming for an hour.

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Stratos Data Center Gets Initial Approval

[ed. Can't be true, right? Well... from what I can tell, it's some kind of phased development (Stratos project) starting with a 40,000 acre 'data center campus" in Box Elder County, Utah. Local residents aren't happy. See: Massive Box Elder County data center could increase Utah’s carbon emissions by 50%; and, Hundreds cry out as Box Elder commissioners wave in massive data center (Utah News Dispatch). Excerpts below:]

The angry crowd’s jeers outweighed the voices of commissioners and guests, especially when they spoke about water rights and the county’s tax revenue prospects stemming from the project. Many in the audience asked to allow presenters to be heard, but shouts prevailed throughout the meeting.

No one was escorted out, but instead commissioners left the room and broadcast their quick vote on a screen available to the public.

“Cowards,” some in the audience yelled. Others repeatedly shouted “people over profit.”

The resolutions were required by state law to allow the Military Installation Development Authority, or MIDA, to move forward with the Stratos project. MIDA, an entity created by the Utah Legislature to advance economic development with a military focus, needed local consent since the data center would be located on private land without zoning regulations. [...]

The data center campus sponsored by Kevin O’Leary, a celebrity investor featured in the reality TV hit “Shark Tank,” is set to house its own natural gas plant to supply 9 gigawatts of energy to self-sustain the center, more than double what the entire state consumes in a year. That power generation will be isolated from the grid Utahns share, so it wouldn’t have any effect on utility rates, developers say.

Developers are also planning on using a closed-loop system to cool their equipment, using privately-owned water rights that are unsuitable for drinking or irrigation. But, without a definitive environmental study, the public remains skeptical. [...]

‘We can’t build anything in this country anymore’

Utah Gov. Spencer Cox said on Thursday, during his monthly news conference broadcast by PBS Utah, that at the rate in which machine learning and artificial intelligence is changing, building data centers has become a national security issue.

“We have an obligation, I think every state has an obligation, when it comes to this space, to allow for these types of data centers to be built in their states,” Cox said. “We have to do this. We can’t just say ‘no’ and shut the doors and go home and let China win this, this technology race, so that just can’t be an option.”

Data centers can’t be installed everywhere, and the government should be careful with its resources, but this site may be able to fulfill environmental standards and won’t be someone’s nextdoor neighbor, Cox said.

“If you can’t put this here, then we can’t put them anywhere,” Cox said.

He also fiercely disputed that the approval process has been rushed.

“I’m so tired of our country taking years to get stuff done. It’s the dumbest thing ever. We think that taking time makes things better or safer, it absolutely does not,” he said. “You get a chance to give your feedback, and then decisions get made. That’s how we have to do stuff in this country and in this state.”

The state denies many requests because of feedback, but it can’t say no to everything, Cox said.

“We’ve let the people against virtually everything, destroy our country, destroy our industrial base, destroy our mining base, destroy our housing base, because we can’t build anything in this country anymore,” he said. “And those days are over. We’re done with that.”

Drone Strikes on Data Centers Spook Big Tech, Halting Middle East Projects

A data center developer has paused all Middle East project investments after one of its facilities was damaged by an Iranian missile or drone attack. The decision comes as the Iran war is forcing Silicon Valley investors and tech companies to rethink a trillion-dollar plan to build more AI and cloud data centers in Gulf countries.

The damaged data center is owned by Pure Data Centre Group, a London-based company that is operating or developing more than 1 gigawatt of data center capacity across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. “No one’s going to run into a burning building, so to speak,” Pure DC CEO Gary Wojtaszek told CNBC. “No one’s going to put in new additional capital at scale to do anything until everything settles down.”

Data center developers are already eating the costs of uninsurable war damage from the conflict, which began with a US-Israeli attack on Iran on February 28. Iran primarily responded by attacking shipping to shut down the Strait of Hormuz trade corridor along with striking US military bases and energy infrastructure across the Gulf region.

Iran also directly struck two Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centers in the United Arab Emirates, while a near-miss from an Iranian one-way attack drone damaged a third AWS data center in Bahrain. The Iranian attacks caused structural damage, disrupted power delivery, and also triggered fire suppression systems that caused water damage, AWS reported through its service dashboard on March 1.

That led to widespread disruptions in cloud services for AWS customers like banks, payment platforms, the Dubai-based ride-hailing app Careem, and the data cloud provider Snowflake.

Crucially for Amazon’s bottom line, the company chose to waive customer charges in its Middle East cloud region for the entire month of March 2026, as reported by The Register. That decision cost Amazon an estimated $150 million—not including the damaged data centers—because existing civil law frameworks put the financial burden on data center operators to absorb costs and refund clients in the event of military conflicts, according to Tech Policy Press. [...]

Big Tech in the crosshairs

It has been clear for a while that tech companies cannot pretend to be mere bystanders in the ongoing conflict. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps directly threatened retaliation against US companies that it identified as having Israeli links and supporting military tech applications after an Iranian bank’s data center was hit by a US or Israeli strike on March 11. The Iranian military organization released a list of “Iran’s new targets” that included offices and data centers operated by Google, Microsoft, Palantir, IBM, Nvidia, and Oracle, and it reiterated a similar threat against tech companies on March 31 in retaliation for Israeli and US military strikes that resulted in the assassination of Iranian leaders.

The Revolutionary Guard attempted to make good on that threat by attacking an Oracle data center in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, on April 2, according to Data Center Dynamics. Although the Dubai Media Office initially dismissed the claim, it later confirmed that shrapnel had fallen on the facade of the Oracle facility after a “successful aerial interception” by local air defense systems. [...]

Silicon Valley investors and Gulf countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates may also need to rethink plans for making the Middle East into a hub for AI data centers alongside the United States and China, Rest of World reported. US tech companies have each announced plans for data center developments worth billions of dollars, while certain Gulf countries have each pledged hundreds of billions of dollars for investment in AI chips and data centers.

by Jeremy Hsu, Ars Technica |  Read more:

Image: Giuseppe CACACE/AFP via Getty Images
[ed. It should be obvious that ALL data centers everywhere are sitting ducks for terrorist attacks. Unless owners are ready to pay for military-grade defense systems, this will be an ongoing threat.]

What I Saw Inside the Kennedy Center

What I Saw Inside the Kennedy Center (The Atlantic)
Image: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post/Getty

[ed. An order of magnitude worse than I imagined.]

Aesthetics As a Housing Barrier?

Will Americans want more housing if it looks prettier?

Patrick Collison’s YIMBY credentials are unimpeachable. He is a major backer of California YIMBY, the organization that has passed a stunning array of pro-housing bills in one of the most anti-development states in the nation. So it was interesting to see him claim that the movement has made a big mistake — or even been downright dishonest — by ignoring the aesthetics of apartment buildings:

For reference, here’s Sejong City in Korea, whose residential districts do indeed look rather bland and oppressive:

Some urbanists agreed, calling for regulatory reform that would allow American apartment buildings to look like the famous Haussmann buildings in Paris (depicted at the top of this post). So did some conservatives, which is unsurprising; intellectual conservatism has always called for a return to classical architecture and a rejection of modern styles. In fact, the idea that ugly building styles are a key reason that Americans disapprove of housing construction has been around quite a while, and it even has a name — “QIMBY”, meaning “quality in my back yard”.

Chris Elmendorf protested Patrick’s framing, arguing that YIMBYs have been active in pushing for reforms that would allow more beautiful buildings to be built in America: [...]

YIMBYs have been pushing for single-stair reforms that would allow more "Paris-like" buildings…The municipal design standards & reviews that YIMBY laws allow developers to bypass did not improve designs. Per [Arthur] Stamps's studies (the only relevant empirical evidence of which I'm aware), they made things worse…[T]he problem of housing aesthetics deserves more attention -- and is receiving more attention -- but it's not like YIMBYs broke something that was working.

Elmendorf also pointed out that California YIMBY itself recently came out with a plan to encourage the building of more beautiful multifamily housing. The plan reads like exactly the kind of thing that Patrick might like: [...]

If California wants more European-feeling mid-rise development with courtyards, better daylight, shade, and balconies, it has to keep modernizing the [building] code…Too many building, electrical, and fire rules (in California and across the U.S.) [forbid] the buildings people actually like: bright cross-ventilated homes, true courtyard buildings, and mixed-use ground floors. All these requirements – egress, stairs, corridor, and elevator – often make projects bulkier and require much bigger lots, limiting where we can build new housing…[T]he web of building code regulations denies light, proportion, street connections, courtyards, greenspace – everything that makes buildings feel humane…Passing single-stair reforms and elevator reforms makes smaller mid-rise buildings possible, which fit on smaller lots, can be nestled into existing buildings, add variety to the streetscape, and reduce the pressure for larger, monotonous developments.

So at least one prominent YIMBY organization — the one that Patrick supports — is already answering the call to focus on building aesthetics. Others are likely to follow.

I think that’s a good thing. Eliminating onerous building codes and regulations will kill two birds with one stone, making it easier to build housing even as it also makes it possible to build more of the European-style ornamentation that commentators always call for. And allowing American developers to experiment with ornamentation and alternative styles will help break up the sameness of an urban landscape dominated by endless forests of boxy 5-over-1 buildings.

But that said, I highly doubt that this — or any stylistic change — would move the needle on public acceptance of new apartment buildings.

First of all, I’m skeptical that regular Americans actually like the kinds of building styles that intellectuals often yearn for. If you plunk down old-looking European-style buildings in the middle of Houston or Seattle, people tend to ridicule them as cheesy and inauthentic. The typical insult is “pastiche”, a derogatory term for a style that jumbles and mixes old European styles (even though, as Samuel Hughes points out, mixing and matching older ideas is exactly how classic European building styles were created in the first place).

Many local design standards explicitly discourage old-style buildings. For example, Los Angeles’ planning department, in its design guide for Echo Park, writes: “Do not imitate historic architectural styles; a modern interpretation may be appropriate if architectural features are borrowed and replicated to a simpler form.”

Nor is it just old European-looking buildings that leave many Americans cold. Pietrzak and Mendelberg (2025) find that although people tend to dislike tall buildings, traditional brick facades fail to move the needle on support for housing. Alex Armlovich points out that when New York City came out with new limestone skyscrapers, only three were permitted. And Brooklyn Tower, a recently built art deco style skyscraper in Brooklyn, has drawn tons of criticism for its style.

And Elmendorf cautions that no one has yet managed to find a specific architectural style that Americans like enough to move the needle on their support for new housing: [...]

All this suggests that while some American intellectuals may pine for the cornices and mascarons of Haussmannian Paris, most Americans just think that style — and any old style — looks cheesy when it’s transplanted to an American context. This may be because Americans consciously think of their culture as a young one, more suited to modern styles than traditional ones. Or it may be because America’s artistic culture has always focused on critique and fault-finding. But whatever it is, it suggests that allowing — or even forcing — cities to build ornamented buildings will not garner a wave of popular support for new development.

Conversely, the places that do build a lot of housing tend not to build it in old, ornate European styles. Texas, which is one of the best states when it comes to building new housing, mostly constructs single-family homes with lawns. When it does build apartment buildings, they tend to look like this:

Texas builds them anyway, for much the same reason that the Koreans built Sejong City — they’re cheap and efficient, and the state needs them to support its rapid population growth.1 You do see a little experimentation with slightly more European-style apartments in a few places, but overall it’s just boxy and functional. The fundamental driver of housing abundance in Texas isn’t architectural beauty; it’s a culture and politics that values and seeks out economic growth.

Nor is ornamental architecture necessarily what makes people love a city. Traditionalists may sigh over old European styles, and urbanists may salivate over the superilles of Barcelona, but the city that has captured the hearts of Americans in recent years is Tokyo. Downtown Tokyo is a forest of electric lights, strung up along the sides of stubby concrete mid-rises called zakkyo buildings. There’s nary a fancy cornice to be found; instead, the beauty comes from the bright cheery emblems of commerce:

Tokyo’s residential neighborhoods have even less ornamentation. They often feature flat brown or white or tan facades, hanging power lines, and bare asphalt streets with no setbacks or lawns or even trees:

And yet these are absolutely enchanting places to live. Why? Not because of the architecture, but because of the design of the city itself. The small curving streets make perfect walking paths, undisturbed by zooming traffic. Mixed-use zoning gives the neighborhood a communal, lived-in feel. Plentiful public transit makes it easy and stress-free to get around, while Japan’s peerless public safety makes it fun to hang out on the street or in a park at any hour.

Americans who go to Japan have definitely noticed this:

It’s no coincidence, I think, that Japan is one of the best countries when it comes to building plenty of housing. Yes, most of its apartment buildings look like crap when evaluated in isolation on their pure architectural merits. But the urban system made up by those buildings is a wonderful place to live, and so Japanese people have few qualms about building up that system. And Americans go there and love it.

And if America built a bunch of Haussmann buildings instead of boxy 5-over-1s, it would probably only marginally improve the feel of the country’s cities. [...]

If you want American cities to look and feel so nice that Americans are willing to build housing in them, I think you have to do a lot more than give the buildings fancy facades. You have to do the hard work of putting in train lines, making side streets safe for pedestrians, rezoning for mixed use, and — perhaps most important — policing cities in order to ensure robust public safety.  [prescriptions follow:]

by Noah Smith, Noahpinion |  Read more:

Images: Wyatt Simpson on Unsplash/X/Minseong Kim via Wikimedia Commons/ Kevin Doran on Unsplash/ Kentin via Wikimedia Commons/Karan Singh on Unsplash

[ed. I imagine people might feel differently if Japan's commercial ornamentation districts were exported to America and composed mostly of Taco Bell, McDonald's, and other corporate fast food signage. In fact, we already have that, and it sucks.]