Middle East Part 3

In 1999, I crossed the border from Turkey into Syria and spent my first night in Aleppo at a hotel with dirty, blood stained sheets, dormitory style rooms and a filthy communal squat toilet (My travelling companions were keen to pay the absolute minimum for accommodation).

Despite this, travel in Syria was very safe and the people were friendly and hospitable.  We were invited by local Kurds to a wedding celebration at a neighbourhood hall and later explored the Citadel and the Great Mosque (both damaged in the current civil war).

View from the Citadel, Aleppo

From Aleppo, we travelled on to Hama and Homs, cities battered by the horrific ongoing conflict.  From Homs we took a dilapidated 1950's taxi in torrential rain out to Krak Des Chevaliers, a Crusader castle near the Lebanese border.

Krak Des Chevaliers, Syria

Then into the desert to the ruins of Palmyra, a city first established about 4000 years ago, but with artefacts found dating to 7500 BCE.  ISIS took control of Palmyra last year, destroyed many of the sites and looted the museum before the Syrian government recaptured the city in March this year.

Tower of Elahbel, Palmyra.  Destroyed in August 2015.

Palmyra, Syria

At the time (1999) I remember thinking how precarious these ruins were to earthquakes.  Little did I know that people would want to intentionally destroy them.  The physical destruction pales however, when compared to the human.  Palmyra's retired 81 year old antiquities chief Khaled Al-Assad was tortured for a month, then beheaded because he would not reveal the location of antiquities hidden from the conflict.

Palmyra, Syria

Where does the heat go?

We have a relatively new (2011) timber framed house.  It was built to comply fully with the current New Zealand Building Code and has glass fibre wall and ceiling insulation and double glazed aluminium joinery - not particularly noteworthy when compared with colder parts of the world but quite suitable for New Zealand's temperate climate.  

Here were the outside and inside temperatures last night at about 10pm:

Our only source of heating is a 20kW wood burner, which we light on most winter evenings for about four hours.

Under the concrete floor I used 50mm of black polystyrene, which is slightly warmer than the standard white variety.

When designing the house I was aware that it was also good practice to insulate the vertical face of the perimeter foundations, however this is difficult to construct for a few reasons and is not often done in New Zealand.

Last night I used an infrared camera attachment on my phone to take some photos.

Here you can clearly see heat radiating from the non-thermally broken door and window frames, but also from the small exposed strip of foundation wall.

From the inside of the house you can also clearly see heat escaping around the perimeter of the floor.

The path for the heat loss is as follows:

This issue is going to be addressed in the near future.  We have a very comfortable home, but there is always room for improvement.

Incidentally, we have a concrete wall behind our wood burner which I designed as a form of heat storage.  This slowly heats up from the fire and then radiates the heat after the fire goes out.  This infrared photo was taken the next morning, about twelve hours after the embers had died.  The wall and tiled hearth are still radiating heat into the room despite the wood burner being cold.  

Middle East Part 2

While travelling across Turkey towards Syria, we stopped in Cappadocia.  Towns like Goreme and Nevsehir are carved out of the surrounding soft volcanic rock.

The region was a refuge for people fleeing political turmoil right back to Roman times.  Then, it was Christians fleeing Roman persecution.  The area has many churches built into caves.

Currently there are about 2,700,000 Syrian refugees living in Turkey, compared with about 600,000 in Germany and less than 10,000 registered in the United Kingdom.

Another break in transmission

More hand surgery and more plates and screws to fix the remainder of a very complex problem:  A 30 year old injury and surgery combined with spontaneous fusing of the wrist bone, coupled with another fracture of the thumb bone.  Fortunately I had an extremely good surgeon.

All going well I should be back to bike riding, woodworking, digging in the garden etc in six months or so.  In the mean time it's back to one handed typing.

Middle East Part 1

In 1999 I travelled through Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Israel and Egypt on busses, boats and trains.  In Turkey, the lira was suffering severe inflation and I became a millionaire for the first time.  

One million Turkish lira was worth about NZ$10, although this had to be re-calculated daily over the month I was there.  It has since been re-denominated by removing six zeros.  Turkey was a pleasant and relatively safe country to travel through, with friendly people and some spectacular scenery.

New Zealand's Relative Size Part 2

Here's another interesting comparison from thetruesize.com - New Zealand and South Africa at the same scale:

South Africa is over four times the land area and nearly twelve times the population of New Zealand, yet it occupies just the southern tip of this huge continent.

New Zealand's Relative Size Part 1

As the UK looks to unhitch itself from the European Union, here is an interesting to-scale comparison of the size of NZ versus the UK and Ireland from thetruesize.com

New Zealand's Chatham Islands (east of Christchurch) are slightly larger than the Isle of Man (UK) but are about 680km from the mainland, or a little further than the distance between England and Switzerland.

The exclusive economic zone (EEZ) of NZ is approx 4.1 million km2, about five times bigger than the UK's, and we have the largest ocean in the world at our doorstep.

NZ Exclusive Economic Zone (NIWA)

UK Exclusive Economic Zone (Wikipedia)

The Royal New Zealand Navy has two offshore patrol vessels and four inshore patrol vessels to cover its entire EEZ against the likes of illegal fishing, drug smugglers and biosecurity threats.

In June smugglers were caught landing half a tonne of meth on remote Ninety Mile Beach at the northern tip of New Zealand - seemingly by keen eyed locals.

Thankfully we have not yet had to deal with the moral angst and the human carnage of people smuggling and refugee boats (yet).

What's wrong with this sign?

Or, more to the point, what's wrong with our relationship with cars?

Auckland Transport's Downtown Car Park

The message here is clear - pedestrians need to watch out, cars have right of way.  Which makes sense right?  It's a car park - you shouldn't be jaywalking down the ramps when there are perfectly good stairs available.  Albeit a little less convenient maybe, or maybe you just haven't noticed them and are walking where it feels natural to, in order to get where you are going to.  So watch out!  You're in the way!  Don't blame us if you get run over.

This is pretty much the generally accepted rule in New Zealand.  If it is a place for cars: car parks, the street you live on, the local shops; you had better watch out - scuttle across that pedestrian crossing, that's a car!  It has important places to go!

Sign reads: 'Caution Motorists Have Right of Way' - Takapuna Beach shopping area (Google Streetview) 

As a recent arrival to the UK, I was astonished that pedestrians merely had to hint that they wanted to cross a road or negotiate a car park and traffic would immediately stop to give way, regardless of what the rules actually said.  As it turns out, the Highway Code is not far different from ours, but people seem to interpret it in a very different way.

From the UK Highway Code

Others have reported similar attitudes in the USA, Europe and even our neighbour Australia.

But here in New Zealand the culture is still firmly that the car is king, and will remain so as long as councils and transport agencies keep putting up signs reminding us of the fact.  

In construction, some things change, some stay the same

In The Ten Books on Architecture (also know as De architectura), Vitruvius (1st Century BC) complains about construction cost over-runs:

In the famous and important Greek city of Ephesus there is said to be an ancient ancestral law, the terms of which are severe, but its justice is not inequitable. When an architect accepts the charge of a public work, he has to promise what the cost of it will be. His estimate is handed to the magistrate, and his property is pledged as security until the work is done. When it is finished, if the outlay agrees with his statement, he is complimented by decrees and marks of honour. If no more than a fourth has to be added to his estimate, it is furnished by the treasury and no penalty is inflicted. But when more than one fourth has to be spent in addition on the work, the money required to finish it is taken from his property.  

Would to God that this were also a law of the Roman people, not merely for public, but also for private buildings. For the ignorant would no longer run riot with impunity, but men who are well qualified by an exact scientific training would unquestionably adopt the profession of architecture. Gentlemen would not be misled into limitless and prodigal expenditure, even to ejectments from their estates, and the architects themselves could be forced, by fear of the penalty, to be more careful in calculating and stating the limit of expense, so that gentlemen would procure their buildings for that which they had expected, or by adding only a little more. It is true that men who can afford to devote four hundred thousand to a work may hold on, if they have to add another hundred thousand, from the pleasure which the hope of finishing it gives them; but if they are loaded with a fifty per cent increase, or with an even greater expense, they lose hope, sacrifice what they have already spent, and are compelled to leave off, broken in fortune and in spirit.

From the translation by Professor Morris H Morgan (1855-1910).

New Vitruvian

For most of the twentieth century, architectural styles consisted of Modernism and Post Modernism.  Of course there were hangovers and hybrids from previous styles such as Arts & Crafts and Art Deco, and there were many variants such as Brutalism and Deconstructivism, but generally you can draw a line after WW1 and say 'This building is modern' (small m) or 'That building is old.'  Nobody is going to mistake a Baroque or Georgian or Victorian or Edwardian building for one built with the clean lines, curves and planes of the twentieth century.

St Pancras Railway Station (1868)
(Photo by Przsac)

Villa Savoye by Le Corbuiser (1931)
(Photo by Mary Anne Sullivan)

We could summarise Modernist and Post Modernist architecture as follows:

1. Modernism - 'Form follows function.'
2. Post Modernism - 'Function?  Who cares?' or perhaps 'The above, but with some decoration stuck on top.'

M2 Building by Kengo Kuma (1999)
(Photo by wiiii on Wikipedia)

This may sound harsh, because many architects still design in the post modern style (whether they admit it or not).  Post Modernism gives licence to designers to do pretty much whatever they want, which can be both good and bad.  Often it can leave the general public either in awe, or just deeply confused.  Here is a hotel I stayed at while in Abu Dhabi:

Hyatt Capital Gate (2010)
(Photo by FritzDaCat on Wikipedia)

Personally, I am generally 'in awe' of these sorts of buildings, but they can easily become a mess of awkward shapes and textures, aesthetically disjointed or with layouts that are impractical and inefficient.



Turning the clock a long way back, we come to Vitruvius (approx 80-70BC to 15AD).  He was an architect and engineer (civil and military) in the Roman Empire during the reign of Augustus.  We know about him primarily because of his book De Architectura, which was a 'how-to' guide written for Caesar on the nuts and bolts of building design but also town planning, music, civil engineering machines etc.

He is sometimes called the 'father of architecture', but this is mainly because his book survived.  Today he would probably be called a civil engineer rather than an architect, and definitely regarded as a polymath.  

He talks of the ancients (the Greeks) as the creators of the three orders of classical architecture (Doric, Ionic and Corinthian - yes, I know, there were five, but the other two came much later), so there must have been many people thinking about and designing buildings before him.

From Wikipedia

Classical architecture has been revived and revived again over the centuries.  Its elements only really disappeared with Modernism, and then made fleeting token appearances in Post Modern architecture (e.g. the M2 Building above, or those hollow round columns adorning McMansions and malls everywhere - more set scenery than architecture).  

The book itself is quite prescriptive; on materials, layouts, proportions, spacing of columns etc.  In some ways it is like a Roman building code.

But underlying De Architectura is a design philosophy summarised in three words: firmitas, utilitas and venustas or stability, utility and beauty.  They have at their root reflection of the natural environment (people, animals, the seasons etc).  The columns in a temple were based on the proportions of a standing person, and some buildings even had statues for columns.  This was a common theme in the religious beliefs of the time, when there was a strong link between the gods and the terrestrial, rather than the more ethereal concepts in monotheism that followed.

There is was also no prioritisation of these three values, as in Modernism - If you make it strong and useful it will be beautiful (hopefully).  Or as in Post Modernism - Make it beautiful (or weird, your choice), leave the strength and utility to the engineers to handle.

Maybe it is time for a new architectural style, post- post-modern.  One that values strength, usefulness and aesthetics equally, and fully.  One that is also integrally linked to the environment.  A New Vitruvian style!