A bunker in Wyoming? Now that’s channeling your inner petit bourgeois. That’s the prepper’s version of being mainstream.
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@j9c and @MerelyGifted - this conversation is so close to my heart. After college I got a fellowship to travel for a year studying traditional building methods and how it intersected with modern ecological design. It was fascinating. Before that I’d gotten really into straw bale and cob building in the us, even got to meet David Eisenberg of straw bale renaissance fame.
In my travels I got to see a lot of what you both mention - wind scoops in Tunisia, awesome stacked domes of mud brick (southern Turkey) and flat stones (southern Italy), thick walls and roofs designed to capture water, amazing timber frames designed to have failure points during earthquakes so they could be easily repaired (Japan).
And the completely illogical desire to want to move to “modern” materials. This was most evident in Southern Africa. I’d go through these small, rural villages with some of the most amazing plaster artistry (Lesotho) on the traditional mud brick homes with thatched roofs, and then you’d see where someone had come into some money and built a concrete block hut with a corrugated metal roof. The latter were SO uncomfortable.
It was a strange time to be there, too, because the whole “natural building” fad had just arrived, so there were all these relatively wealthy white people building cob and strawbale homes. Like seeing the whole cycle in real time, of how traditional materials go through abandonment and “rediscovery.”
Anyway, didn’t mean to write a tome, this topic is just fascinating to me.
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I know, right? Isn’t it just weird that every region has figured out how to construct buildings that work in their particular environment, and they didn’t even had help from space aliens?!?
Colonialism, the gift that keeps on giving.
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I live in a gingerbread castle
Its my lovely gingerbread home.
Everything’s made from gingerbread
Even, the phone.
But the roof is made from marzipan
And it lets the rain come in;
So I wear my liquorice wellies
With my chocolate pants tucked in!
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Notre Dame 2.0 is currently ongoing.
Exactly the same situation: the building is currently being renovated, which seems to have lead to a fire collapsing an iconic spire.
For those who haven’t been to Copenhagen: the spire on the Børse was a baroque masterpiece made up of dragons winding around each other.
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In 1923, the city of Turin unveiled a huge new car factory, with one very special feature: it had a high-speed circuit on the roof, complete with banked curves, and two 500m-long straights. The world had never seen anything like it before. But why would you put a racetrack on the roof of a factory? I travelled to northern Italy to see it for myself…
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It was featured to most amusing effect in The Italian Job (1969) - part of the police chase took place up there 
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I think Sergei Pavlovich Korolev had his own version of the team pep talk to settle discussions within his design team, along the lines of “Let’s solve this in a democratic fashion - we do it as I say.”
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