Image
Featured
This was the Rust Belt before it became the Rust Belt: The middle of the country was a sprawling laboratory not just for industrial processes to refine oil, make steel, beat aluminum, mine coal, and build cars for the world. It was also a giant experiment that gambled with human health in the face of toxic overload; set the immigration patterns for the U.S. and “sender” communities; became the lab for racialization, eugenics, and modern segregation; created world-destroying levels of energy consumption; and deemed a level of environmental destruction as necessary for “development.”
When Hurricane Zeta made landfall on the Gulf Coast in October, 2.6 million people in the southeast US were left in the dark. From the Mississippi coast to Atlanta to smaller cities like Anniston, Alabama, people waited—some for days, others for upward of two weeks—in living rooms and kitchens lit by candlelight for their power to return, reliant on the longevity of cellphone batteries and mobile chargers.
Building Information Modeling (BIM), at its simplest, is a “Google Docs” of architectural production. Allowing many hands to work simultaneously on complex building projects, BIM is an industry-strength digital modeling ethic that generates drawings, schedules costs and components, simulates construction sequences, and coordinates global teams—all from a shared information database.
