Now that I think about it, he said, spitballing for no particular reason, having a lot of art books of a certain sort is a political statement: if people suspects that your choice of subjects implies a rejection or at least a lack of interest in modernism or other cultures, they infer things.
My architecture books would be a rebuke to some, since they’re focused on particular eras and styles. I don’t have any books about other styles or cultures because I am not interested in them. At all. I know it’s a sign of a robust and well-rounded mind to be utterly fascinated by everything, but I’d rather spend the time knowing more about what I’m interested in. I mean, there’s no way I could begin to pretend I care as much about Japanese art as I do about Western art. I know it has its own complexities and meanings I don’t understand or recognize, but I simply don’t care.
Then again, my books are rebuke to my own culture, since the architecture and art they contain are better than the tiresome products of the contemporary art establishment. This remarkable article in Forbes – not recent, but recently discovered – contains some gas-inducing quotes about the function and purpose of modern architecture, and it’s basically this: the brightest minds of the profession believe it is the duty of the architect to startle, confront, unnerve, dissolve, destroy, and also whip out the willie to irrigate the fusty bourgeoisie notions like beauty and tradition.
The article discusses a piece that took modern architecture to the woodshed, where it said “look at this woodshed. It’s more humane than anything you design.” Someone wrote a defense, but had to be honest with himself:
Yet Betsky then admitted, “All those critiques might be true.” They are irrelevant, he claims, since architecture must be about experimentation and the shock of the new. (Why this should be the case he does not say.) And sometimes designers must stretch technology to the breaking (or leaking) point: “The fact that buildings look strange to some people, and that roofs sometimes leak, is part and parcel of the research and development aspect of the design discipline.” Ever brave, he is willing to let others suffer for his art.
[…]
The ongoing project to unmoor Western Civ from its roots can only be enabled by people who believe the world has to be remade with its core memory wiped. I don’t share their hatred; why do I have to be forced to experience it, over and over again?
James Lileks, The Bleat, 2019-01-30.
March 5, 2019
QotD: Modern architecture
March 3, 2019
Yet another “adventure” in modern architecture
Or maybe the photographer is that Russian guy who did the greatest blog post of all time, just dragging Ottawa over thirty miles of bad road. He’s come back for a sequel
— Colby Cosh (@colbycosh) March 2, 2019
Thread reader can’t piece together unrelated-by-Twitter-standards tweets, so here’s the rest of that thread in one go:
March 2, 2019
How Does it Work: Short Stroke Gas Piston
Forgotten Weapons
Published on 31 Jan 2019http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
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How Does it Work: Short Stroke Gas Piston
The short stroke gas piston operating system is common on modern rifles. It is defined as a gas piston which travels less than the distance of the bolt carrier (and is thus by definition not connected to the bolt carrier). This is in contrast to the long-stroke gas piston, which travels the full length of bolt carrier movement. The short stroke gas piston system was first made popular in the Soviet SVT-38/40 rifles, and was used in the Armalite AR-18, which formed the basis for many modern semiautomatic rifles.
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March 1, 2019
Development of the British Tank Arm, 1918-1939
The_Chieftain
Published on 5 Jan 2019Supporting the World War Two channel, https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCP1A…
The second in the series of videos discussing how various nations spent the time in between the two wars analyzing what did or did not work for their tank doctrines, how they were developed, and what they came up with. This video (obviously) looks at the British, where budgets and votes were far more important than tank capability.
References:
Mechanised Force, David Fletcher
The Challenge of Change, Harold Winton
Military Innovation in the Interwar Period, Williamson Murray
The Business of Tanks, G. Mcleod Ross
Men, Ideas and Tanks, J.P. Harris
February 26, 2019
How Does it Work: Operating vs Locking Systems
Forgotten Weapons
Published on 24 Jan 2019http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
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How Does it Work: Operating vs Locking Systems
To properly understand how firearms work, one must first recognize the difference between two fundamental mechanical systems in them. One is the locking system, and the other is the operating system. The locking system is what keeps the breech end of the gun sealed when firing (examples include tilting bolts, rotating bolts, flapper locking, roller locking, and others). The operating system is what allows the gun to unlock once pressure is at a safe level after firing (examples include long and short gas pistons, long and short recoil, and others). Blowback firearms are somewhat of an exception to this, as they use a single mechanical system to both lock and unlock (inertia of the moving parts).
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February 17, 2019
Tank Chats #42 Elefant | The Tank Museum
The Tank Museum
Published on 18 Aug 2017Originally known as the Ferdinand, then later renamed Elefant, 90 of this heavily armed and armoured vehicle were built, seeing service in the Soviet Union, Italy and Germany.
Although deployed as a tank destroyer, the Elefant had its origins in Ferdinand Porsche’s attempt to build what became the Tiger tank.
This particular Elefant is part of The Tiger Collection at The Tank Museum, Bovington, on loan from the US Army Ordnance Training and Heritage Center, VA.
Support the work of The Tank Museum on Patreon: ► https://www.patreon.com/tankmuseum
Or donate http://tankmuseum.org/support-us/donateTwitter: ► https://twitter.com/TankMuseum
Tiger Tank Blog: ► http://blog.tiger-tank.com/
Tank 100 First World War Centenary Blog: ► http://tank100.com/ #tankmuseum #tanks #tigertank tiger tanks tank chat
February 11, 2019
How Does it Work: Blowback Action
Forgotten Weapons
Published on 10 Jan 2019http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
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How Does it Work: Blowback Action
The simplest for of firearms action is blowback, also called simple blowback. It is basically just an application of Newton’s 3rd Law; that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. As the bullet moves forward down the barrel, the slide or bolt of the gun moves backwards. The two move with the same energy, meaning that the light and very fast bullet is balanced out by the heavy and slow bolt or slide.
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February 10, 2019
A debate on the impact of Brutalism on British cities
In Prospect magazine, James Stevens Curl and Barnabas Calder disagree on how Brutalist architecture has influenced destroyed urban areas in so many British cities. This is Curl’s opening salvo:
20 Fenchurch Street in London has been nicknamed the “Walkie-Talkie” due to its distinctive design.
Image by Toa Heftiba via Wikimedia Commons.
Visitors to these islands who have eyes to see will observe that there is hardly a town or city that has not had its streets — and skyline — wrecked by insensitive, crude, post-1945 additions which ignore established geometries, urban grain, scale, materials, and emphases.
Such structures were designed by persons indoctrinated in schools of architecture in ways that made them incapable of creating designs that did not cause immense damage and offend the eye, the sensibilities, and the spirit. Harmony with what already exists has never been a consideration for them, as it was not for their teacher: following the lead of “Le Corbusier” (as Swiss-French architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret called himself), they have, on the contrary, done everything possible to create buildings incompatible with anything that came before. It seems that the ability to destroy a townscape or a skyline was the only way they have been able to make their marks. Can anyone point to a town in Britain that has been improved aesthetically by modern buildings?
Look at the more recent damage done to the City of London, with such crass interventions as the so-called “Walkie-Talkie” (which, through its reflectivity, has caused damage on the street below), or the repellent stuff inflicted on several cities by the infamous John Poulson and some of his bent cronies (from the 1950s until they were jailed in 1974). Quod erat demonstrandum.
How has this catastrophe been allowed to happen? A series of totalitarian doctrinaires reduced the infinitely adaptable languages of real architecture to an impoverished vocabulary of monosyllabic grunts. Those individuals rejected the past so that everyone had to start from scratch, reinventing the wheel and confining their design clichés to a few banalities. Today, form follows finance, when modern architecture is dominated by so-called “stars,” and becomes more bizarre, egotistical, unsettling, and expensive, ignoring contexts and proving stratospherically remote from the aspirations and needs of ordinary humanity. Their alienating works, inducing unease, are, without exception, inherently dehumanising and visually repulsive.
Semiauto M2 Hyde Reproduction: The Interim US WW2 Subgun
Forgotten Weapons
Published on 9 Jan 2019http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
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George Hyde designed the gun that would eventually be adopted as the M2 submachine gun in the late 1930s, and it was first tested at Aberdeen Proving Grounds in October of 1939. At that time, the gun had many good traits (weight, handlings, etc) but suffered from parts breakage and unreliability. Hyde went back to work on the gun at the Inland Division of GM, and came back with a much improved version in April of 1942.
The Inland-Hyde SMG was chambered for .45 ACP ammunition and used standard Thompson magazines, and was poised to become the US Army’s new submachine gun, replacing the overly expensive Thompson. The Hyde passed a 6080 round endurance test with flying colors, and exhibited much better effectiveness in fully automatic than the Thompson. At the end of the April tests, it was formally accepted to replace the Thompson and given the designation M2.
A contract was given to the Marlin company (Inland being busy with other projects) to manufacture 164,450 of the guns, with delivery to begin in December 1942. However, Marlin had problems tooling up to produce the new gun, in particular with dies for several parts to be made using powdered metal sintering. Actual delivery of the first guns did not happen until May of 1943. In the meantime, Hyde and Inland had continued working on cheaper and simpler designs, and created the stamped sheet metal M3 “Grease Gun”. By the time the M2 was actually ready for delivery, the M3 had been tested and accepted by the Army as a better replacement than the M2. By mid-June, the M2 was declared obsolete and Marlin’s contract cancelled.
In total only about 500 M2 submachine guns were made, with (I believe) 6 surviving today. The example in this video is a semiautomatic-only reproduction made from scratch by a viewer of the channel, who graciously offered to loan it to me for this filming. Thanks, K!
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February 3, 2019
How Does it Work: Open Bolt vs Closed Bolt Firearms
Forgotten Weapons
Published on 3 Jan 2019http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
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How Does it Work: Open Bolt vs Closed Bolt Firearms
Most semiauto firearms fire from a closed bolt and most fully automatic firearms fire from an open bolt, but these are far from strict rules, and many exception exist. Open bolt offers better cooling and prevents any possibility of cookoff, while closed bolt offers better practical accuracy.
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January 21, 2019
M551 “Sheridan” AR/AAV | DESIGN DISASTER!
Matsimus
Published on 24 Dec 2018The M551 Sheridan was a light reconnaissance tank developed by the American company General Motors in May 1960 under the designation XM551. In November 1965 approval was given for the type classification of the XM551 as Limited Production and a four-year production contract was awarded to the Allison Motor Car Division of General Motors Corporation. In May 1966 the Sheridan was classified as Standard A and by this time production was well under way with the first production vehicle being completed in June 1966. Production continued until 1970 by when 1700 M551S (or General Sheridans) had been built, of which 1570 were still in service with the US Army in 1970. The role of the M551. as originally conceived, is to function as the main reconnaissance vehicle for armour, infantry and airborne operations and arms teams not employing main battle tanks. Late in 1978, it was announced that the M551 would be phased out of service and replaced by the M60A1 MBT, apart from those vehicles allocated to the 82nd Airborne Division (57) and Arkansas National Guard (12), 330 have been assigned to the National training Center at Fort Irwin, California. These are essentially basic M551s but with visual modifications to the outside to disguise them as “OPFOR force” vehicles such as BMP-1 and ZSU-23-4.
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December 14, 2018
Dreadnought: The Battleship that Changed Everything
Historigraph
Published on 24 Nov 2018So it’s probably worth noting here that when Dreadnought made all other battleships irrelevant, it didn’t do so equally. For example, Japan had constructed two ‘semi-dreadnoughts’ a couple of years earlier, with more 10-inch guns than was standard at the time. The Americans too were moving towards building an ‘all-big-gun’ battleship, but they were much slower at getting them built than the British.
If you enjoyed this video and want to see more made, consider supporting my efforts on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/historigraph
Sources:
Robert K. Massie, Dreadnought: Britain, Germany and the Coming of the Great War
Ben Wilson, Empire of the Deep: The Rise and Fall of the British Navy
November 29, 2018
The Royal Navy’s “Nelsol” and “Rodnol” – a battleship design driven by lessons from Jutland
One of my favourite quirky ship designs is profiled at Naval Gazing: HMS Nelson and HMS Rodney. These two ships, known derisively by the names “Nelsol” and “Rodnol” (because of their odd profile resemblance to a class of RN oilers, whose names all ended in “-ol”), were the first post-WW1 British battleships designed to incorporate the bitter lessons learned at the battle of Jutland in 1916. Their construction was also influenced by the round of naval treaty talks that aimed to stop a renewed naval arms race and limit the major navies in both number and size of ships.
HMS Nelson profile drawing as she appeared circa 1931.
Image by Emoscopes via Wikimedia Commons.
At the end of WWI, the Royal Navy faced a crisis. During the war, it had suspended new capital ship construction except for a handful of battlecruisers, while the American and Japanese building programs had continued to churn out ships that were more modern than the bulk of the British fleet. Worse, the British battlefleet had seen hard war service, and many of the early dreadnoughts were in bad shape and essentially unfit for further service. New battleships would be needed, ships that fully reflected the lessons of the war.
HMS Nelson off Spithead for the 1937 Fleet Review. Anchored in the background are two Queen Elizabeth-class battleships and two cruisers of the London class.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.The most important of these was the need for an all-or-nothing armor scheme, as developed in the US. The war had seen major improvements in armor-piercing shells, and they required significantly more armor than previous vessels. However, the increased range gave designers a way out. Previously, the size of citadels had been set by the need to preserve stability and buoyancy if the ends were riddled. At long range, the many hits necessary to riddle the ends would not happen, and the citadel could be shrunk to thicken the armor. The British also looked to improve on the 15″ gun due to the proliferation of 16″ weapons in the American and Japanese navies. They investigated the triple turret, abandoned a decade earlier amid fears of increased mechanical complexity, and the 18″ gun under the cover name of 15″/B.
Two parallel design series were started, one for battleships, the other for battlecruisers. As this series was developed, the designers saw a serious problem with the battlecruisers. The boiler uptakes would leave large holes in the armored deck, and if the ship was headed towards the enemy, shells might be able to pass through the holes and into the aft magazines. The solution was to move all three turrets forward of the engines, on the basis of war experience showing that ships rarely if ever engaged targets directly aft.
November 5, 2018
French Tanks of World War 1 I THE GREAT WAR Special
The Great War
Published on 3 Nov 2018Check Out Supremacy 1914: https://www.supremacy1914.com/index.p…
French tank development started almost simoultaneously with the British. The French tanks were very different in design based on a different understanding of the role of the tank on the battlefield. Arguably, the first modern tank, the Renault FT was a result of this development.
October 28, 2018
Panzerschreck: Germany Makes a Bazooka
Forgotten Weapons
Published on 10 Oct 2018http://www.forgottenweapons.com/panze…
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The German military first encountered American Bazookas in Tunisia in 1943, and quickly put in place a program to copy and improve on the design. At that point, the latest German antitank weapons was the Raketenwerfer 43 “Puppchen”, which was a locked-breech rocket launcher built on a carriage like a standard AT gun. It had a substantial range and a very effective 88mm shaped charge warhead, but lacked the one-man mobility offered by the Bazooka. So, the Raketenpanzerbuchse 43 – shortly thereafter renamed the Panzerschreck – was developed in late 1943.
The Panzerschreck kept the 88mm bore of the Puppchen, so that the warhead could be kept unchanged. The rear half of the munition was redesigned to fit an open tube type of launcher. The early Bazookas captured by German forces were at that time fitted with a battery-powered firing system, which the Germans opted to replace (as would the Americans, in later versions). The Panzerschreck trigger used a small generator, where a heavy spring pushed an iron core through a copper winding and magnet, this creating an electrical charge to fire the rocket.
One shortcoming of the Panzerschreck compared to the Bazooka was that the German rockets did not burn completely within the launch tube – the motors continued to fire for about the first 2 meters of flight. This meant that the shooter would receive substantial burns to the face and hands if protective gear was not worn when firing. Initially, troops were instructed to wear filter-less gas masks and winter gloves when shooting, but it was quickly recognized that this was an impractical burden. Soldiers in the field began to craft protective shields to mount on the tubes, and these were formalized in a windowed shield was introduced in 1944 as standard on new production launchers and as a kit to retrofit existing weapons in the field.
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