I traveled out to Stony Brook University to attend an astronomy lecture about the Sun this evening. The campus has grown so much since I first arrived on Long Island 46 years ago - I found there were whole new areas that I have never seen, and I ended up driving around quite a bit, looking for the lecture hall. At a stop sign I saw these new dormitories, and I was dumbstruck to see that they looked as if they were built from Legos! This is funny, right? The truth is they were constructed from prefabricated insulated aluminum panels, and these buildings are considered sustainable architecture, involving the use of recycled materials.
2 comments:
Insulated and aluminum are tough to think of as shared properties, given the high thermal conductivity of that metal. Aluminum, though highly recyclable, is always expensive to extract from the planet to begin with.
Sam recalls learning about the Hall Process when back in HS centuries ago.
Interesting observation about the insulating properties, which certainly makes sense. I *think* the alternate material they were considering, was brick. So the pre-fabricated aluminum can be erected faster. They did talk about using some recycled materials in these buildings.
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