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Pepper-spray drones, China’s chip Manhattan Project, Commonwealth Fusion’s fundraise, and a proposed Dulles Airport renovation.
A battery technology that’s getting a lot of attention is solid-state batteries, lithium-ion batteries that replace the liquid electrolyte with a solid material.
China’s EV subsidies, the future of aeroderivative gas turbines, a US-Saudi nuclear deal, defective roadway guardrails, and more.
Last time in our series on the nature of the construction productivity problem, we looked at economies of scale, finding that capturing economies of scale in homebuilding is difficult.
A setback for California Forever, a $500 million artillery shell plant not producing any shells, the difficulty of recycling EV batteries, manufacturing wire harnesses, and more.
An enormous amount of ink has been spilled (some of it by me) on the trials and tribulations of complying with the National Environmental Policy Act, better known as NEPA.
Adults living with their parents, Samsung’s profits, Native American data centers, Puerto Rico’s electricity grid, and more.
Households without homeowners insurance, crackdowns on AI chip smuggling, Japan’s two electrical frequencies, Meta’s AI compute business, and more.
Every spring, as sure as the seasons, and for generations unknown, screwworms began their annual march northward from their overwintering sanctuaries in Mexico and South Texas.
Trump refuses to sign a housing bill, the high cost of US-made doors, slow trucking, why we stopped making new land, and more.
I wrote the following piece for IFP’s Transit Abundance Playbook, a collection of 15 ideas to improve transit delivery in the US.
A new housing bill, General Motors joining the grid-scale battery game, skepticism about data center delays, solid-state air conditioning, and more.
For the better part of the last several hundred years, coal was the fuel of choice for generating power.
Homes being built on top of libraries, Patriot missile manufacturing, an effort to construct new US coal plants, a tunnel between the US and Russia, and more.
A few weeks ago we looked at a simulation of technological evolution by economist Brian Arthur, in which he was able to start with simple building blocks (such as a NAND gate) and evolve surprisingly complex circuits (such as a 12-way AND gate or a 4-bit adder) by randomly combining increasingly useful existing components.
Plastic price jumps, crypto-backed mortgages, a proposed AI data center pause, US battery manufacturing, and more.
Aluminum disruptions, the EV rust belt, the ongoing transformer shortage, SpaceX’s IPO, and more
Transformer steel manufacturing, textile engineering, bringing power plants online quickly, infrasound, and more.
Tokyo’s cheap housing and expensive land, the House response to the Senate housing bill, an IED near an Alabama dam, Fervo’s IPO, and more.
A California chemical leak, weapons-grade plutonium for nuclear reactor startups, a startup that will clean your house to get robot training data, Blue Origin’s rocket explosion, and more.
Chatbots replacing realtors, Chinese synthetic diamonds, Australian batteries, Meta’s data center tents, and more
Welcome to Construction Physics, a newsletter about the forces shaping the construction industry.
Plus: octagon houses, chart rooms, Soviet apartment blocks and truss-joist hybrids
Plus: The Easyframe system, ACI committee on 3D printing, and cinder slab construction
Today in the US, most houses and apartments are built using light framed wood construction. This system consists of load bearing walls made from 2x4s or 2x6s, which support a wood-framed floor or roof - usually either trusses, joists, or engineered i-joists. This system is a variant of a framing style known as balloon framed construction, and though it may not look particularly impressive, it’s one of the most important developments in the history of building technology.
When designing a multistory [0] building, there’s quite a few different options to choose for floor framing systems. Floor framing is more loosely coupled to the rest of the building than other structural elements - it’s often possible to swap out flooring systems while leaving the rest of the building unchanged. There’s some limitations - you can’t use a wood framing system in type I or type II construction for instance. And some systems have more natural synergies than others - if the rest of your building is cast concrete, it probably makes sense for your floor to be concrete too. But generally for a given building, there are at least a few different options for floor framing.
In general, when manufacturing something, the larger your production volume, the greater your efficiency and the lower your costs per unit.
World War II and Housing World War 2 era America was a time of massive upheaval in the residential construction industry. During the war, nearly 1 million people migrated to defense areas to work at munitions plants, shipyards, naval bases, and other areas of wartime production. The San Francisco Bay area, responsible for
