Art

Architecture

Buildings and the rules — explicit or inherited — behind how they’re shaped.

Reference

Proportion (architecture) (Wikipedia) — the ratio systems architects have worked from: Vitruvius deriving proportion from the human body, medieval ad quadratum and ad triangulum layouts, and Le Corbusier’s Modulor, which grafted anthropometry onto the golden ratio around a 1.83 m man.

Comparing Flooring Systems (Article) — Brian Potter of Construction Physics sets the multistory floor systems side by side — wood joists and trusses, steel deck on joists, cast-in-place and precast concrete, SIPs, CLT — and scores each on structural depth, weight, and cost. Most options top out somewhere between 10 and 30 feet of span, with very little available past 50 feet outside of specialised buildings like parking garages. His conclusion is the useful part: wood stays the default because it is by far the cheapest, and the heavily prefabricated systems don’t reduce cost so much as move where it occurs, which is why they get value-engineered out of budgets they were designed into.