h. Play

I had one today! I stuffed my nostril in the bottle and it smelled like innocence, vacation and high-pitched voices.

A bit obsessed with this jewel of a house in Texas (built in 2012):

• Small (130m², 1,400 square feet), check.
• Green roof, check.
• Passive, close to net-zero, ready for off-grid, check.
• Striking design, triple check.

It is the home for a couple and their kid. They survived the terrifying 2021 Texas Freeze just fine, as their house is well insulated and doesn’t require much energy to run. Healthy ass house.

My brother. Custom homes is the wave. Think small yet expansive, bro.

(I can see the French headline: “drunk, he tried to jump from roof to roof, impaling his chin in the steel structure in the process, triggering an investigation around architecture’s dangerousness, which is why architects and plumbers are in the streets protesting.”)

Ishod is the man. Those fakie flip and hard flip? Dang.

Ferociously reading. Almost done with all of these. It’s time-consuming? It’s also opening my brain like nothing else does.

Paupiettes de veau from the local butcher at the family home back in France. Classic dish, this is his version of it and it s l a p s. Ground meat with cheese wrapped in a veal envelope itself wrapped with lard, which is like bacon but totally not the same at the same time. I’ll explain later. It doesn’t matter. This is delicious beyond my own taste buds.

I kindly asked mom if she could get me some for when I visit, and she didn’t disappoint. They used to be bigger but pandemic-flation, I guess. I should have eaten four of these instead of one.

Architecture books are insane to read. People spend an absurd amount of energy on what a style encompasses or how to follow a technique or a trend. Dogma everywhere.

Building a home is not about that at all. It is about Quality of Life.

What is Quality of Life (QoL) in a home? There are basically a few parameters:

• Room temperature
• Air quality
• Soundproofing
• Maintenance

Throughout a year and seasons, you want to never be cold or hot, you want to breath clean, healthy air, and you don’t want to hear noises from others. And then, you don’t want to have to spend too much time or effort managing said home. Maintenance needs to be low.

That is, I believe, what every single human being on earth is trying to reach in their homes regardless of background and location.

Those four points are intimately connected: to achieve well-controlled room temperature, you need an airtight building. To get an airtight building that allows healthy air quality, you will end up with a few materials that can do that, and even fewer than also allow good soundproofing. And if you can use green material, even better, but that’s another constraint.

Nonetheless, there are an infinite amount of combination here due to local material availability, local zoning and building codes, local climate, etc. The devil is in the detail, always.

The thing that never changes is that Room Temperature, Air Quality and Soundproofing are the goals.

Maintenance is a side goal but is HUGE. People completely forget about that one when planning their dream home, which is why they end up with far too big houses and unsustainable utility bills. We don’t have to.

By using very old techniques and/or high tech ones, from designs allowing airflow to modern heat pumps, we can reach maintenance-free homes with $200/year utility bills. That is why I want to build new so much! Most people buy a home and are blind to their bills. It might be $90 this month and $356 the next. I don’t want that. I want very predictable bills.

I want Quality of Life. We can all have it. It’s all doable.

It’s beautiful.

Reading furiously, mostly about architecture. I’m onto something.

Recently learned about GFRC, Glass Fiber Reinforced Concrete. Extremely interesting material.

An earthquake hits Turkey and Syria killing 30,000 folks and it seems insane yet COVID has killed 130,000 in the world in the past month alone and we don’t care at all. Japan seems to be getting out of its worst stint right now, which is good.

I see Waymo cars everyday. My emails and chats write, correct themselves. ChatGPT is being tested left and right, which only makes it stronger every single time.

Meanwhile 3D printed homes are a reality and there’s a lot of BS going on around them, which means a lot of curation on my side to get to the actual meat.

At the same time layoffs are running wild, remote work really is transforming cities and automation is really taking over.

It’s hard to see the future.

Batman.

Titanic.

WWII.

Is that even possible?