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yeah so hopefully now you can see the fundamental impedance mismatch: alexander was never trying to make a "statement" with his work like his contemporaries do, he was primarily trying to build something that worked for his clients—he didn't give a shit about getting in magazines
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Which is also fine by me. If innovators weren’t willing to try new things on clients’ dimes we’d never get anything new. Faster horses etc. Frontiers always have both fraud and novel shit people didn’t know they wanted until somebody decided to give it to them,
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alexander's contract stipulated he could unilaterally reorganize the construction budget; indeed a big chunk of the cost of the mary rose museum proposal was an innovative design for piles so the structure could be built on clay for under £10M
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Okay that’s the sort of thing I’d lead with if I were trying to convince people convinced he was trad that he wasn’t…it’s the buried lede If you turn this thread into an essay, I’d open with that. Took a conversation buried 15 replies deep to get there.
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Replying to
yeah arguably the economic/contracting stuff is his most important contribution, but he was using finite element analysis to design roof joists that were shot with gunite
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