Five for Friday, No. 208
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LUMEN
NO. 208 · 12 SEPTEMBER
FIVE FOR FRIDAY
Five things the studio read this week, with the reason each one was worth the time. Nothing here is ours.
THE LIST
01
The building that cools itself
A Melbourne office dropped two thirds of its cooling bill using a ventilation idea from 1890s Cairo, and a facade nobody wanted to sign off.
Kernel · 9 min
02
Everything is a rounded rectangle now
A short history of the corner radius, from a 1983 patent to the curve on the bank card in your pocket, and why the maths changed in 2015.
Wide Angle · 6 min
03
What the fifteen minute city gets wrong about night work
Planning research keeps measuring daytime trips. Cleaners, nurses and bakers do not make them, and the bus timetable shows it.
The Understory · 12 min
04
We deleted forty percent of our design system
Eleven button variants, three of them pixel identical. An honest audit, what survived it, and the two components they were wrong to remove.
Marginalia · 7 min
05
Your train is late in a way the timetable predicted
Headway, dwell time, and the arithmetic that turns one stalled door at 08:12 into a two hour cascade across the whole line.
Low Latency · 5 min
FROM THE STUDIO
We spent most of this week on the cooling piece above, arguing about whether the facade would pass a British fire test. It would not. We are writing that up for No. 209.
Sent most Fridays by the studio. Reply with anything we missed and it will be read by a person.
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