Bryan Waterman (_waterman) SoulPancake Women Built London’s Waterloo Bridge, But It Took These Photos to Prove It For more than half a century, it was just a rumor. As London’s river boat pilots passed by Waterloo Bridge (“The Ladies’ Bridge,” as some of them called it) they’d tell a story about the women who had built the bridge during World War II. But the idea that women had been largely involved in building Waterloo Bridge wasn’t included in any official history of the structure, or detailed in any records. During the new bridge’s opening ceremony, on December 10, 1945, then-Deputy Prime Minister Herbert Morrison had declared that “the men that built Waterloo Bridge are fortunate men.” It wasn’t until 2015 that the hard work of these women could be confirmed, by the historian Christine Wall, thanks to a series of photographs she found. Eight years prior to her discovery, Wall had collaborated with the filmmaker Karen Livesey on a documentary called The Ladies Bridge. Rebuilding Waterloo Bridge was a crucial project.
Is That An iPhone Toaster Inspired By Rams? Not Quite “The way we see it, waking with a standard alarm is pretty sadistic. The loud, disembodied sounds they engender create an environment of chaos and panic, driving us from a state of tranquility and rest into one of fright and confusion. Though we must admit that they’re functionally effective, sadly they’re also very traumatic--and any form of trauma has a way of negatively affecting our mood.” That’s Michael Kritzer, who with designers from Habitco, wants to change the way we wake up every morning (an idea we ourselves have been a bit obsessed with as of late). Their Kickstarter solution is to take what most of us are using for an alarm these days--our iPhones--and packaging it in a manner far too adorable to ever be bummed about waking up. The Day Maker works much like you’d expect. As simple as the device appears, the fact that the dock has a series of mechanical components means it’s more expensive to produce than a lot of typical Kickstarter projects.
The Feature Cuba’s National Art Schools Are an Unfinished Masterpiece Ricardo Porro had just two months to design five buildings for five different art schools—ballet, modern dance, visual arts, music, theater. It was 1961, and he had only recently come back to Cuba after a few years in Venezuela, where he had fled after his anti-Batista politics had become a problem back home. He knew he would need help to finish the schools, and he recruited two Italian architect friends to help him complete the task. Together, they would design Cuba’s National Art Schools. The idea had been dreamed up on a golf course, at a once-luxurious and exclusive country club. Porro, along with Vittorio Garatti and Roberto Gottardo, came up with a few principles that would unify the campus. The timeline for building the schools was fast, but their designs fell out of favor nearly as quickly. Still, students used the partially completed campus for decades, even as the more incomplete corners fell into disrepair and were taken over by jungle.
Conference Bites » Big Ideas for Short Attention Spans Can pre-fab shipping container apartments house the homeless? In late July, trucks pulled up to a vacant lot in Berkeley, California, carrying shipping-container-sized studio apartments, each already fully built inside. It took four days to stack the Lego-like apartments into a new building. In total, preparing the site and finishing the building took four months. With traditional construction, the same project might take a year. The new 22-unit building will be leased to the University of California and used for grad student housing rented at market rates. A version of the design called the MicroPad–with even smaller studio apartments, at 160 square feet versus the 300-square-foot student apartments–is “the most efficient way to provide housing for the homeless,” says Patrick Kennedy, the owner of Panoramic Interests. The MicroPad, like the student apartments, is designed to come fully furnished (in the case of the student apartments, even the coffeemaker was installed in the factory, and a built-in sofa converts to a bed at night).