Both the ADA and the IBC stipulate that circulation paths must be accessible to people with various disabilities, but illegal protruding objects are still common. In this 90-second video, I look at a few examples in Ithaca, NY, specifically, problems with vertical clearance that often—but not always—result from sloping elements that protrude into the circulation path.
Find links to all the “Adventures” videos here.
Find links to all of the 90-second videos in this series.
This latest 90-second video in the “Adventures in Building Bad” series discusses the implications of column misalignment in E. Sibley Hall at Cornell University. After making the video, which is embedded below, I discovered a photo which seems to show that the column misalignment preceded the 2014 renovation of the third floor.
E. Sibley Hall, third floor, Aug. 21. 2013: inward sloping of the columns is visible in this photo.
So the origin of the problem, it seems to me, is probably either the original removal of attic joists to insert a skylight, or the underpinning of E. Sibley Hall around 2010 during the construction of adjacent Milstein Hall.
Find links to all my episodes here.
Episode 4 in my “Adventures in Building Bad” short-form web series has been posted (a new episode drops every Wednesday). This one concerns dangerous and noncompliant stairs in a fairly new residential building on College Avenue in Ithaca, NY.
Find links to all my episodes here.
Here, I look at the case of a glass guardrail, designed to span over two very different wall types—a basement wall and a retaining wall. And yes, the retaining wall moved, as a result of soil pressure, and the glass guard shattered. Of equal concern is that the repair doesn’t seem to have properly addresses the problem, so the trim at the top of the guard keeps popping up as the glass pushes against it.
Here are links to all the videos in this series.
Every year since I began documenting this Sisyphean cycle of failure and repair in 2009, thin stone pavers in Ho Plaza at Cornell University crack and dislodge, mainly due to vehicular traffic on this supposedly pedestrian street. This is followed by repairs that replicate the original conditions guaranteeing that future damage will occur and that this cycle will keep repeating.
Links to all the episodes can be found here.
I’ve decided to create a short-form web series of 90-second videos, released weekly on Wednesdays at 11:00 AM, called “Adventures in Building Bad.” The first episode was published today, and it concerns a peculiar instance of efflorescence in Milstein Hall, the flagship building designed by Rem Koolhaas/OMA for the College of Architecture, Art, and Planning at Cornell.
There’s efflorescence all over Milstein Hall, the result of bad detailing which has allowed rainwater to penetrate into the concrete. But the instance of efflorescence described in this video, at the entrance to the critique room, has no obvious connection to rainwater. Are sprinkler pipes that are embedded in the concrete dome leaking?
The web series will appear in YouTube (where the embedded video lives) as well as Instagram and TikTok.
I recently got a question on Bluesky from “Mike – Towards a Metric America!” asking about exit signs in the Crit Room in Milstein Hall at Cornell University, the architecture building designed by OMA.
Now I devoted an entire chapter in my book about OMA’s Milstein Hall to problems with fire safety and egress, but I didn’t say anything about exit signs. So, to answer Mike’s question about whether there was an exit sign for the stair leading up from the Crit Room, I walked over to Milstein Hall this morning to see what I could find, and created this video.
Check out my free open-access book about OMA’s Milstein Hall (and also my book-launch music video)!
Update (June 7, 2026): I just posted another video about exit sign problems in E. Sibley Hall at Cornell.
I made a video based on my 15-minute PowerPoint presentation at the 114th Annual Meeting of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) in Chicago (March 2026).
The full paper, “Revisiting Decorated Sheds and Ducks for Sustainable Building,” is online here.
Even twenty years ago, conventional wisdom, reinforced by building codes, held that a vapor barrier should be placed on the warm (in winter) side of exterior walls in places like New York that have cold winters. Well, it turns out that this conventional wisdom was wrong — by 2010, Joseph Lstiburek was writing in his essay on The Perfect Wall that in virtually all climate zones, “we would split the thermal resistance of the insulation on the exterior of the structural frame with this insulation within the structural frame at least 50:50. So in an R-20 wall—at least R-10 or more on the outside of the non-conductive structural frame. And no vapor barrier on the inside of the assembly. Repeat after me, no vapor barrier on the inside of the assembly. We want the assembly to dry inwards from the control layers—and to dry outwards from the control layers. Always. Everywhere.” (emphasis added)
In other words, even if a simple psychrometric analysis showed condensation within the wall — in places where the calculated interstitial temperature dropped below the dew point temperature — the in-wall water could dry out, either to the inside or the outside. The bottom line is that such simple analyses are most often superficial, as they don’t take into account the variable permeability of certain construction materials, or the risk of trapping moisture and causing mold and rot in hot humid seasons, especially when the interior spaces are air conditioned.
So, with the preceding paragraphs as a disclaimer, I think it is still useful — certainly as a teaching tool if not as a practical guide to construction — to understand how the R-value (resistance to conduction of heat) and inverse perm rating (resistance to the passage of water vapor) create gradients of temperature and dew point temperature within an exterior wall. If these gradients are plotted over a wall section, one can see where, and if, the temperature drops below the dew point temperature — a sign that condensation is likely. With this in mind, I have created an exterior wall psychrometric analysis calculator that finds values for temperature and dew point temperature within a user-defined exterior wall, given user-specified values for temperature and relative humidity at the exterior and interior.
Schematic wall section (left) showing interstitial temperature and dew point temperature gradients. Condensation occurs where the temperature falls below the dew point temperature. In this example, taken from the default values in the calculator, the dew point temperature — shown as a red line — crosses over the temperature between the batt insulation and the plywood sheathing, indicating the potential for condensation at this location. When a vapor retarder is added between the gypsum board and batt insulation, the dew point temperature — shown as a green line — is always below the temperature, so condensation does not occur. The psychrometric chart (right) plots the combination of temperature and humidity ratio and shows where the relative humidity rises above 100% (i.e., where condensation occurs — at point “C” in both diagrams). Images by Jonathan Ochshorn.