There is a small group of building materials that go round in a circle, and lime is the clearest.
The cycle is truly closed. A rock is heated to drive…
There is a common misunderstanding about coloured windows that makes the craft seem simpler than it was.
The assumption is that the glass is a canvas — clear material with…
There is a useful question to ask about any traditional material: what problem does the processing solve, and what happens if you skip it?
For leather the answer is unusually…
There is a useful principle in materials: if a substance behaves oddly in several unrelated ways, there is usually one structural feature responsible for all of them.
Wool behaves oddly…
Almost everything about how a book feels - whether it stays open, how it turns, how heavy it is for its size - was decided during manufacture rather than design.…
There is a small category of technologies where the modern industrial version does exactly what the original did, only faster, and paper is the clearest example.
Most processes have been…