5 Years

I started writing a blog because I’m not a great writer. Either I write quickly and incoherently or I write slowly and meticulously. Neither of which is good, and I use too many comma-and clauses. If I needed practice, I might as well have an audience.

I’m not sure I have anything novel to say about architecture, so this blog was also started with the idea that I would be translating a lot of Russian articles into English, reporting on Russian architecture. Unfortunately, I ended up in DC and the mission had to change. I found two issues to discuss: urban planning and Tenleytown. 

I’m particularly proud of the latter, which started out as research for a redesign of the Fort Drive area I was going to use to get into grad school. That never happened, but I feel like I the study drawings helped me understand some pretty important characteristics of cities.

So after 5 years and 18% of my life online, people have thought my thoughts were worth hearing 83,808 times. 2012 was my busiest year. June 2013 edges out a few other times as the busiest month, brought on by Terry McAuliffe’s use of my fantasy metro map in a political ad.

On a related note, that map is the single busiest post on the blog. Other sources of traffic, in order:

  1. A discussion of why the figure-ground “Nolli Map” doesn’t describe Tenleytown.
  2. Image searches for Richard Neutra’s Brown House in Forest Hills.
  3. The poorly thought through but radical McMillan Two project.
  4. The discovery of United States Bike Routes.
  5. Precedents for an Anacostia footbridge.
  6. The Soviet Pavilion built for the 1939 World’s Fair, which got linked by the New York Times.
  7. That time when I tried to make “Tobago” happen.
  8. Image searches for a horrendous graph made for Delaware’s ARRA application.
  9. My attempt to describe Forest Glen Seminary.

It’s interesting to me that these aren’t really my favorite posts and definitely not my best writing. That’s kind of what I was looking for when I started writing: an open journal that shows all of the mistakes made when trying to make sense of things.

Thanks for reading.

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