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Why the Hell Would You Do That?

Peter VanderPoel

Feb 20, 2019
3 min

Why the Hell Would You Do That?

One of the assignments for sophomore architecture students was developed over three related projects. The first part was to draw a Roman letter, most often an initial from the student's first or last name. This letter would be drawn on a 10" x 10" sheet of heavy paper. The objective was perfection. Research online would reveal the geometric construction of the chosen letter based on a historical standard. There was little expectation of creativity at this point, but the stude

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Better Late than On Time

Peter VanderPoel

Jan 28, 2019
3 min

Better Late than On Time

In Support of Procrastination In professional baseball, when a batter would come to the plate and obliterate the back chalk line of the batter’s box with his cleats, the odds were good that the the hitter was a student of Charley Lau. He advised his hitters to stand back as far as possible in the box to give themselves a fraction of a second more to evaluate a pitch. That’s procrastination. They would still have to make the decision but they had a slight advantage over those

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Form Follows Function

Peter VanderPoel/ Viollet-le-Duc

Feb 13, 2017
1 min

Form Follows Function

I recently had a cup of coffee using a cup that provided some discomfort to what is often the most soothing event of the day. Referring to the drawings above, the loop for the finger was only large enough to allow the index finger (A). The weight of the coffee, being offset from its support at (A) is pulled by gravity and rotates around the index finger (B). To keep the coffee from spilling, the rotational force at (B) must be countered by an equal and opposite force- the knu

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Washington National Cathedral

22nd & I (or so)

Wyeth Smackdown

Peter VanderPoel

Mar 10, 2016
3 min

Wyeth Smackdown

A few years back, I visited the Wyeth Museum in Chadds Ford, PA. The Wyeths are a tremendously talented family with a museum devoted to 3 generations of painters: N.C., Andrew and Jamie, with a portion of the museum devoted to each. N.C. Wyeth, father of Andrew and grandfather of Jamie, is best known for his illustrations that appeared in such adventure books as Treasure Island and Kidnapped, among others. He also pursued fine art, but felt frustrated and condemned himself as

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It's Just a Game

Peter VanderPoel

Feb 16, 2016
2 min

It's Just a Game

I've noticed a subtle shift in some of the board games that have made their way into our house. But what seems subtle while we're playing, actually upends the paradigm of the way we think about games and subsequently ties into the discussion of "architectural" vs. "engineering" thinking. In engineering there is a "correct" answer and a metric to prove it. A solution can be the least expensive, the shallowest, the strongest, etc. All of these can be verified through calculatio

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The Lavender Button

Peter VanderPoel

Jan 21, 2016
3 min

The Lavender Button

My computer was completely black. The only exception was a small, lavender button. It was a "disk eject" on the face of a PC that I had in my office. It was about an inch and a half long and a sixteenth of an inch wide. The edge of the button was eased and had a dip in the center about the same radius as my forefinger. One day the disk drive stopped working. Several more jabs with my finger didn’t change the result. I was unable to find the small hole normally provided

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I Can Paddle, Canoe?

Peter VanderPoel

Dec 20, 2015
4 min

I Can Paddle, Canoe?

Years ago I visited the Adirondacks and met Caleb Davis. He conducted a class on making a wooden canoe paddle. I hadn't signed up for the class, but at breakfast the next day I had a chance to sit across from him and he explained why he did what he did in creating his paddles. His description struck me as a template for good design: A single piece of wood is shaped as a response to needs, both physical and environmental. The result is a tool that lets someone move a canoe t

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