Notes, 2025-03-03

Antonina Pirozhkova was one of those people, born around the turn of the twentieth century, whose life spanned a wild and almost ungraspable period of change.

Pirozhkova was a newly trained civil engineer when she was assigned to work at Kuznetskstroi, a metallurgical plant in Western Siberia. Her skills were so needed that the local stationmaster was forbidden to sell her a train ticket out. She stayed until the plant was built and then moved to Moscow, where she rose to chief designer at the Metroproekt, the institute responsible for Moscow’s metro system. There she led the design and construction of major Moscow subway stations. It was in Moscow that she met a Jewish writer from Odessa named Isaac Babel. She was introduced to him as “a construction engineer nicknamed Princess Turandot.” They lived together as common-law husband and wife, and had a daughter, Lidiya. 

Through the 1930s, as the Stalinist government’s campaign of repression escalated, they saw friends and colleagues arrested, with writers particularly at risk. Lidiya was instructed, when she answered the phone, to say that her father wasn’t home. When the N.K.V.D. arrested Babel, Pirozhkova was taken along in the car. After he was taken away, an interrogator advised her to forget him: “Regulate your life,” he said, a line that reminds me of this Adrienne Rich poem that’s been circulating. Babel was executed the day after a twenty-minute trial on fabricated charges of espionage. Pirozhkova was told for years that he was still living, imprisoned in a work camp in Siberia. She continued her career, planning tunnels through the Caucasus, teaching, and writing several chapters of the seminal textbook Tunnels and Subways. For many years she was the only woman in the Soviet Union employed as a subway engineer. And she spent the rest of her life making sure Babel wasn’t forgotten, securing his posthumous political rehabilitation, editing and compiling his unpublished works and publishing a memoir of their last years together. She left behind wonders on two separate planes: her own marks on the physical world, embedded in the massive infrastructural projects to which she lent her talents, and the legacy of another person, her beloved Babel, whose work she championed as she carried out her own. 

This intersection of personal knowledge and infrastructural legacy came up for me in the spring of 2023, when I took a tour of Cambridge’s bridges with Chris Burgoyne. An expert on prestressed structures and high-strength fibres, Burgoyne pointed out the subtle structural decisions that made each bridge work, and the places where their strength came from unexpected places. 

He had a theory that the timescale of large civil engineering failures aligned with the length of a working life. Things could fall apart after 40 or 50 years, or start to show signs of stress or impending collapse, but the people who had seen them fall apart that way before would be out of the workplace. I wanted to talk with him more about this idea, but he passed away unexpectedly before I got the chance. I only remember the rough outlines of the examples he gave (a dam, a bridge, a complex utility network) but none of their names or locations, and I can’t draw on his expertise to fill out the idea. Much of his life’s work, like Pirozhkova’s, will exist long into the future. But other pieces of their legacies—those that were never solidified, but existed as living thoughts and open-ended curiosities—go with them.

PLANNING & STRATEGY.

Florence Nightingale, the statistician known for her role in professionalising the practice of nursing, wrote extensively on the design and construction of hospitals. Her 1863 Notes on Hospitals pays special attention to the importance of ventilation, understandably. (I got onto this after reading a big essay about air quality in Asimov Press, chock full of interesting historical bits.) Nightingale wrote that the healthiest hospitals, in her view, had been those limited to one floor, because they were simpler to ventilate. “If another floor is added, a community of ventilation exists between the ward below and the ward above by the common staircase, and by filtration of air upwards through the floor.” 

I like the phrase community of ventilation. It describes the physical characteristics of the buildings, but also gestures toward the nature of clean air as a public good and the technologies that supply it indoors as key enablers of healthy communal life. 

Nightingale’s discussion of the ideal arrangement and geometry of pavilions in her 1863 Notes on Hospitals (page 56) pairs well with the entries on ‘Building Complex’ and ‘Circulation Realms’ from the classic planning and architecture guidebook A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, and Murray Silverstein. A building, they wrote, should be "a complex of still smaller buildings or smaller parts which manifest its own internal social facts,” laid out so that “one reaches a given point inside by passing through a sequence of realms, each marked by a gateway and becoming smaller and smaller, as one passes from each one, through a gateway, to the next.”

MAKING & MANUFACTURING.

What can you make using a microscope, a watchmaker’s lathe, and a toothpick?

A motor clocking in at 250 micrograms, if you’re Bill McLelland and working on your lunch breaks to meet Richard Feynman’s 1959 challenge to build an electric motor with dimensions below 1/64th inch cubed. McLelland’s motor fits through the eye of a sewing needle. Feynman had presented the challenge to the American Physical Society in a talk titled “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom.” He expected that anyone fulfilling its requirements would have to first invent new manufacturing methods. In this, he was disappointed: McLelland managed to do it with ingenuity, patience, and pretty basic tools.

Chronova Engineering attempted to replicate the feat in a recent video and found that the challenge remained… challenging.

MAINTENANCE, REPAIR & OPERATIONS.

Dharavi, a peripheral neighborhood in Mumbai, has sometimes been called the largest slum in Asia. It grew haphazardly through the colonial era around the village of Koliwada, and continued to densify post-independence. Today, Dharavi is largely urbanized and on the brink of colossal redevelopment. But years of civic neglect and lack of infrastructural investment have resulted in diminished feelings of safety for those living in the village.

In 2024, a collective of urban researchers and practitioners called Urbz initiated a street lighting pilot project that succeeded in making residents feel safer. But the prototypes were battered by monsoons, demonstrating a need for a more robust and weatherproof solution. So the planning team looked to a nearby shipbreaking yard in Alang, a “global hub where parts of recycled ships from around the world are redistributed into local economies.” Working with local electricians, Urbz are replacing the prototypes with repurposed bulkhead lights from retired ships. The glow emitted through their sturdy cages honors the maritime culture of the place, an urban fishing village with a long history of aquaculture. 

DISTRIBUTION & LOGISTICS.

It was once thought that radio transmission was bounded by the horizon. While high frequency radio waves travel in straight lines, getting lost out in space as the Earth curves beneath them, longer frequencies can ricochet off of the ionosphere, bouncing back and forth between the land and sky for thousands of miles and staying within the realm of reception. The first transatlantic radio signal, three clicks for the letter ‘S,’ was sent from Poldhu, Cornwall to St. John’s, Newfoundland on December 12, 1901. To receive the signal, Guglielmo Marconi and his assistants sent up a kite trailing 500 feet of antenna wire from a spot in St. John’s now named Signal Hill. The day the news was released, Marconi et al. began packing their equipment for a new location–the Anglo-American Telegraph Company held a communication monopoly in Newfoundland, and had threatened legal action.

There are at least eighteen Signal Hills around the world, named for their use as radio reception and transmission sites, as I learned in the first issue of a beautiful new audio magazine called Signal Hill. This feature by Hannah Sassoon about the Larzac plateau in South Central France goes deep into a landscape of sheep, rocks, and military testing grounds. It’s an example of the kind of ambitious and carefully produced radio pieces I look forward to from Signal Hill. I also really loved “Caterpillar Roadshow,” an audio essay about the penpalship between an esteemed American entomologist and a prodigious Japanese second-grader replicating and adapting her experiments at home on his summer break.

INSPECTION, TESTING & ANALYSIS.

If you want to make a strong slingshot out of wood, you need to find a good forked branch to start with. As a tree grows, its bifurcations naturally optimize for strength. The roundness of tree trunks in their original form also represents a huge strength advantage: comparing a structural element made of whole, round timber against the largest piece of dimensional lumber the same branch could yield, the former could be up to five times stronger. But modern lumber mills rarely keep round logs intact, and irregular wood—forked branches, or cutoffs with knots and kinks—is typically downcycled or landfilled despite its structural potential. The EPA estimated in 2018 that a typical harvest in the timber industry yielded 57% usable lumber and 43% waste material. And that waste doesn’t even include trimmings from maintenance of urban trees, which are abundant. It’s difficult to design and analyze a structure made out of nonstandard elements. 

In “Wild Wood Gridshells: Mixed-Reality Construction of Nonstandard Wood,” a group of researchers out of MIT’s Digital Structures group develop a computational interface and workflow for augmented reality-assisted fabrication of a structural gridshell built from natural forked branches. Branches are collected, scanned into a digital inventory, and assigned based on their geometries to an optimal placement on the desired structural network. Joints are drawn and cut with the help of a mixed reality workflow, and the final assembly is aided onsite with a digital projection to cue accurate placement and positioning of the elements.

SCOPE CREEP.

• A recent study, shared in the Scope of Work Members’ Slack, attributes startling acceleration in global warming in the last two years to the effects of a 2020 restriction on aerosol emissions...