61–70 of 155 posts
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I heard that these small holes are supposed to be Helmholtz Resonators. If tuned to the right frequency, they can help with noise reduction. https://hackaday.com/2023/12/24/absorbing-traffic-noise-with...
With holes like that, birds, bees and rats will nest in those bricks.
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I've seen similar things where I work. In a new building, the architects called for small air vents that would look nice according to some aesthetic criterion. Unfortunately, the vents were so small that, to maintain air flow, the fans inside them had to spin so fast they screamed. This made for a very unpleasant environment. This was where high-profile events tended to take place, to show off the bright new shiny th…
This is a negative outcome of the Town and Country Planning Act. We've mandated by law that all planning is done upfront and due to the possibility of construction fraud provide detailed designs to building contractors that disallow them from substituting any materials or design choices without it being explicitly requested by the employer. In theory, there can be conversation between individual subcontractors and th…
Building control require that an architect sign off on things like the size of the beam holding the roof up. If you change that, the architect will have to sign off on the building as constructed before building control will approve it.
Planning permission is given on the basis of external appearance, so you can't change too much in that area - but go look at some planning applications, they're very light on details.
But other than that? If it's your project and you tell the electrician putting in a socket to put it somewhere else, he'll tell you if it's legal under the wiring regulations, and if it is, he'll move it.
The main reason that in large projects builders are required to build exactly to the plan is to stop them substituting cheaper materials. They're under great pressure to do that, because if you allow your builders to replace expensive zinc cladding with cheap ACM cladding, and you ask several builders to tender and choose the cheapest builder, you'll always choose the builder who quoted on the basis of the cheap ACM cladding.
Used to have grease spots on the living room wall adjacent to my dad's computer, where 6yr old me and my 4yr old brother were leaning against the wall while watching dad play Duke Nukem and Quake. (mom didn't allow us to play these games)
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What is hostile about the architecture here? The armrests?
If the (quite useless) armrests weren't there to prevent the homeless from sleeping on them, people wouldn't be sitting in the exact same spot every time, causing a light smear instead of defined person-like shaped on the wall.
> One would be to replace all the seats with new designs with backs to lean on, but that would be expensive Hmm indeed, how could a rail line that makes a mere £1 billion in yearly revenue afford such an egregious expense.
Whilst the Elizabeth line makes a lot of money, TFL doesn't and currently is missing around half its funding needed for maintenance, trying to justify new benches on a line that's only 2 years old would be hard to justify when other parts of the network need funding much more that the core stations on the Elizabeth line
What funds TfL is basically fares and city and central government taxes. Ideally the taxes fund the improvements and fares fund the operations.
But fares are down since COVID, while the service kept operating.
I noticed some other weird design choices in the new tube stations as well. Eg air vents that are very fine and visibly clog up. It’s like they designed it to look shiny for day one but ignored decades of practical experience
I have seen stations refurbished less than 10 years where the new benches had to be replaced because they were already falling apart after that time outdoors... On my commute they are fitting new cladding to hide a brick wall on an outdoor, not covered, platform. All the studwork is standard timber screwed into the wall. Any water ingress and this will rot quickly. Oh well.
Option C to hose down the peasants as they entered the tube station so they didn't scuff the walls was not used.