Construction Physics

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This is Part III in a series comparing the construction of the Empire State Building and the World Trade Center. Part I covers the design and…
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Part II in our series comparing the construction of two Tallest Building in the World projects - the Empire State Building and the World Trade Center…
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The Empire State Building was completed in 1931. At a height of 1250 feet [0], it was the world's tallest building, exceeding the recently completed…
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Henry Ford famously said that customers could have the Model T in any color they wanted, as long as it was black. This restriction was largely driven by…
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Reinforced concrete is, by a large margin, the most widely used building material on earth - by mass, we use as much reinforced concrete as every other…
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Historically, most wind power has been built on land. But we're increasingly seeing turbines be built offshore, in the ocean. There are a few reasons…
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An idea I frequently encounter from urbanist folks is that a barrier to the efficient mass production of housing is the amount of variety people demand…
Brian Potter
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When we left off in the 1960s, what few wind power efforts that existed had largely stalled. Commercial manufacturers that supplied wind power to rural…
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Since the early 2000s, wind power has been a substantial fraction of new electricity capacity in the US. In 2020 wind power was 42% of new electricity…
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In general, large buildings aren’t much cheaper to build on a per-square foot basis than small buildings are. Why is this the case?
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If we’re going to understand why construction has so few economies of scale, it’s useful to know what causes economies of scale to occur in the first…
Brian Potter
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Producing goods and services is typically subject to economies of scale - as the volume of output rises, the unit cost of each thing being produced…
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