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Hospitals are not fun places to work in, and they are not fun places to build and design or to fix and repair. The stakes are often high. Nothing is more sobering than when someone dies because of a… Read More

Spain gave Florida to the United States in exchange for the United States giving up any claims on Texas. We all know how that turned out. Nobody really wanted to live there except the Seminoles until… Read More

 Our story starts with a self-important politician taking a shower in a new home in Las Vegas in the mid 1990’s and ends with ten’s of thousands of houses with leaks and litigation. Our story will… Read More

After one hundred and fifty years the Illinois cottage1 is undergoing some pretty interesting changes and the ghosts of George Washington Snow and Augustine Taylor2 are cautiously eyeing the result.… Read More

General Limit States Design, Hygrothermal AnalysisAt a basic level a wall is an environmental separator.  It keeps the outside out and the inside in.  Easy to say, not always easy to do.To function… Read More

You have got to love salesmen. They figure things out way before physicists, usually before engineers and certainly before greenie weenies. Harry Tschumi and Les Blades,1 a pair of salesmen from… Read More

“gas separation processes and open cell low density spray foam”1Lots of attics insulated with open cell low density spray foam (Photograph 1, Photograph 2 and Photograph 3) are having problems – in… Read More

* Credit to architect Edward Mazria: I think he said this first, if he didn't say it first he sure says it well.Many “green” buildings don’t save energy (see “MIS-LEED-ING” sidebar). Why? They have… Read More

For a bunch of supposedly clever folks we sure do dumb things. One of the big ideas of the past couple of decades or so is to keep the heat out during cooling and keep the heat in during heating. The… Read More

The American Foursquare, a Sears, Roebuck & Co. kit home, was a staple of small American towns between 1908 and 1940. More than 100,000 of them were built in America. Homes built prior to 1980… Read More