Jonathan Ochshorn

Plans for Wright's Larkin Building (1st floor) and Foster's Hongkong Shanghai Bank (upper level)

Rereading Banham's Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment (1969), seems like Wright's Larkin Building, which Banham discusses, shares some formal qualities with @fosterandpartners.bsky.social Hongkong Shanghai Bank, including articulation of exterior mechanical and stairs, central open space.

Physicist: After 33 billon years, universe ‘will end in a big crunch’ | Cornell Chronicle After expanding to its peak size about 11 billion years from now, the universe will begin to contract – snapping back like a rubber band to a single point at the end, according to a Cornell physicist.

Time to put your affairs in order...

news.cornell.edu/stories/2025...

The Myth of Clean Energy Is all the hope placed in renewables an illusion?

“After two centuries of ‘energy transitions,’ humanity has never burned so much oil and gas, so much coal and so much wood. Today around 2 billion cubic metres of wood are felled each year to be burned, three times more than a century ago.”

Interesting review:

www.thenation.com/article/cult...

Texas’s Gerrymander May Not Be the Worst Threat to Democrats in 2026 Nate Cohn, the New York Times’ chief political analyst, on a consequential Supreme Court case and why Republicans are registering so many new voters.

Four "that"s within a 5-word span in this New Yorker interview:

www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a...

"I think [that that suggests that that] person is more likely to back Republican congressional candidates..."

Not much an editor can do, I suppose.

YouTube video by Jonathan Ochshorn Jonathan Ochshorn — PSA Blues

To mark the seventh anniversary of my prostatectomy, I wrote a two-song cycle about my experience with prostate cancer. Both songs cover much of the same ground from slightly different perspectives. And both are embedded on my blog: jon.ochshorn.org/2025/08/two-...

On YouTube: youtu.be/3zH9SXUzzwE

I wonder if Trump knows that the Smithsonian's Arts and Industries Building was designed by architect Adolf Cluss, "a leading revolutionary, an early card-carrying Communist, a close associate of Friedrich Engels and an intimate member of Karl Marx's circle."
www.nytimes.com/1984/02/18/u...

Scrap of plywood with trigonometric figures and calculations scribbled on it.

Construction trash from McGraw Tower renovation at @cornelluniversity.bsky.social. On the one hand, I'm impressed that someone on the jobsite makes use of their knowledge of trigonometry; on the other hand, I'm wondering why such ad hoc on-site calculations are required in the first place.

YouTube video by Jonathan Ochshorn Papa Don't Preach

Amongst this serious crowd, there must be some Madonna fans.

@madonnatribe.com‬

Here is my cover of Papa Don't Preach (1986)

youtu.be/jlYjGfSybT0

YouTube video by Jonathan Ochshorn Jonathan Ochshorn — Baby Are You Happy (Basketball and Sex)

My new song is an inquiry into the nature of happiness in relation to certain quotidien activities of daily life.

youtu.be/6aLQILbM7_g

YouTube video by Jonathan Ochshorn Jonathan Ochshorn — Adaptation — at Center for the Arts of Homer Open Mic

This is a live version of my song, Adaptation, "adapted" from the movie, Adaptation, starring Nicolas Cage, Meryl Streep, and others. The movie was written by Charlie Kaufman, who inserts himself into the film as the screenwriter, played by Nicolas Cage.

youtu.be/jBxf-PQJZXw

From OMA's Milstein Hall: "...there is also an implicit conflation of a type of performative athletic movement—whether featuring trained dancers, "free runners," or skateboarders—with the type of movement in and around buildings that constitutes useful circulation."

jonochshorn.com/milsteinhall...

YouTube video by Jonathan Ochshorn Jonathan Ochshorn — Just Another Bad Dream — at Nocturnal Cafe Open Mic

I sang three songs at the Nocturnal Cafe Open Mic in Ithaca, NY, on July 2, 2025. Here's one of the songs I performed, "Just Another Bad Dream," which I wrote in 1980 thinking about the trauma of the Vietnam war: youtu.be/xybdyaB5AFk

File under: don't quit your day job...

YouTube video by Jonathan Ochshorn So Far Away (cover of the Dire Straits song) — J. Ochshorn

My cover of Dire Strait's 1985 "So Far Away" is also a tribute to Rand Hall at Cornell University, whose 1917 industrial-loft design—before the building was architecturally destroyed ("renovated") in 2017—serves as an imaginary setting for the performance: youtu.be/76CQYo2vayA

I talk about wayfinding in OMA's Milstein Hall in my open-access book of the same name. Here's a video update showing the continuing deterioration of floor-mounted signage for the auditorium (see ch. 6 www.jonochshorn.com/milsteinhall... in the book).

Jonathan Ochshorn wearing N95 mask in Ithaca, NY, June 5, 2025.

Three reasons to wear a mask today in Ithaca, NY, not even including COVID:
1. Bad day for pollen
2. Dust kicked up by trucks that are entering and leaving construction site
3. Canadian wildfire smoke

I played two singer-songwriter sets at the Coffeehouse Plus in Cortland's historic Universalist Unitarian Church last Saturday, May 31, 2025 — the first set with guitar, the second with digital piano. These are unedited iPhone videos of 2 songs (with iPhone audio).

jon.ochshorn.org/2025/06/live...

YouTube video by Jonathan Ochshorn Jonathan Ochshorn — "Ticonderoga Moon" and "If I Could Sing Like That" — at Ake Gallery Open Mic

A sneak preview of my upcoming benefit concert at the Universalist Unitarian Church "Coffeehouse +," 3 Church St., Cortland, NY, on Saturday, May 31, 2025 (7–9 PM):

Here are two songs I performed two days ago at the AKE Gallery open mic, also in Cortland...

youtu.be/sPn9MQByZTE

I'll be doing a benefit concert of original songs (first set with guitar, second set with piano) at the Coffeehouse+, Unitarian Universalist Church of Cortland, NY, Sat., May 31, 2025, 7–9 PM.

More details: jonochshorn.com/music/music-...

View of oak floor boards lining up on either side of the saddle between the existing house and an addition.

When I designed and built an addition to my house, I took some pleasure in not only matching but also in lining up the red oak floor boards across the threshold between old and new.

From my photo archives, age 11: Freewheeling Bob Dylan for Christmas in 1963: supplemented by Google search and Photoshop's transform-distort mode.

YouTube video by BuildingScience-com Corporation What Does "Build Tight and Ventilate Right" Mean?

A short and interesting account of the building code logic underlying air-tight buildings from my favorite mechanical engineer (Joe #Lstiburek):

youtu.be/MEvcIj8ko-s?...

Jonathan Ochshorn playing piano (and harmonica) at Cortland Coffeehouse Plus, with two images labeled "One Life (Is All You Get)" and "When My Father Was My Age."

I posted two songs performed live at the Cortland Coffeehouse Plus on Feb. 22, 2025. These are piano-based, rather than guitar-based, and the audio is taken directly from the iPhone video clips, for better or worse: jon.ochshorn.org/2025/02/more...

I'm taking off my architect hat and putting on my singer-songwriter hat for a benefit concert this Saturday in Cortland, NY. All piano this time — no guitar. Details at jonochshorn.com/music/perfor...

Two images; the top one being PeakMade real Estate's rendering of an apartment proposal at 403 East State Street in Ithaca, NY, with an extra-wide "river" bordering the property; the bottom one superimposing the actual 6-mile creek on the rendering.

Real estate people have been known to use wide-angle lenses to inflate the apparent size of homes or to create plans that exaggerate the dimensions of certain rooms (always with a small-print disclaimer), but turning Ithaca's 6-mile creek into a full-blown river? Wow!
ithacavoice.org/2025/01/indu...

This is the excellent New Yorker article by @elizkolbert.bsky.social that I quote in my new song about the failure of human civilization to overcome war, poverty, and superstition during the 12,000-year Holocene.
youtu.be/z0CO69ChpkM?...

YouTube video by Jonathan Ochshorn Jonathan Ochshorn — We Only Had a Few Good Years

This is my new song about the failure of human civilization to take advantage of the conditions created during the Holocene: We Only Had a Few Good Years.

youtu.be/z0CO69ChpkM

Screen shot from music video of Ran Through My Mind, showing Jonathan ochshorn with guitar. Annotated with the song title (Ran Through My Mind) and venue (Jonathan Ochshorn live at the Cortland Coffeehouse Plus, Feb. 1, 2025).

This is a live version of my song, Ran Through My Mind, recently performed at the Cortland Coffeehouse Plus as an unplanned and unexpected guest of Colleen Kattau (singer-songwriter of Latin-influenced progressive eclectic folk).

youtu.be/FP__-Y-ovng

Richard Meier's Weill Hall bathroom at Cornell "reveals" an attention to detail and modularity that is almost pathological: follow the continuous reveal above wall tile, and note the way that toilet partitions line up precisely at tile joints. And this is just the bathroom...

My conversation with ChatGPT - Impatient Search ChatGTP is an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbox that purports to be able to understand and respond to human prompts. I decided to ask the chatbox to write a Bananagrams poem — this is a literary fo...

I asked ChatGPT to write a "Bananagrams poem" and was struck by the shameless self-confidence it projected as it consistently offered up incorrect responses. Read the entire verbatim transcript of our conversation, for your amusement or horror: jon.ochshorn.org/2025/01/my-c...