iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Neil Flanagan 🧱🗃️ @jgbollard.bsky.social · 5h

Obviously, the highlight of it was when he got a brick-glazed donut from the Procore truck.

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Neil Flanagan 🧱🗃️ @jgbollard.bsky.social · 5h

Not sure what I was expecting, but the best way to describe A History of Concrete is like doing a site visit on Ambien.

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Neil Flanagan 🧱🗃️ @jgbollard.bsky.social · 10h

Clearly, there is a lot to look at here. BUT—I bet it shifts them from chemtrails to calipers

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Neil Flanagan 🧱🗃️ @jgbollard.bsky.social · 10h

I would die laughing if this is what actually causes a D wave.

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Neil Flanagan 🧱🗃️ @jgbollard.bsky.social · 16h

While I like to compare Trump to Louis II of Bavaria for being obsessed with Versailles instead of ruling, Nicholas becomes the better analogy with every new day

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Neil Flanagan 🧱🗃️ @jgbollard.bsky.social · 16h

It’s all handled by the Dicastery for the Transfer of Moisture

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Neil Flanagan 🧱🗃️ @jgbollard.bsky.social · 16h

Just waiting for the Pope to weigh in on vapor-impermeable air barriers so I can have my public meltdown.

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Neil Flanagan 🧱🗃️ @jgbollard.bsky.social · 16h

Lockheed *Martin* might want to buy the division back soon enough.

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Neil Flanagan 🧱🗃️ @jgbollard.bsky.social · 17h

Also a great reminder that Martin Marietta survives as a gravel and asphalt supplier.

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Neil Flanagan 🧱🗃️ @jgbollard.bsky.social · 17h

The DC exurbs remain spectacularly American, for example this Islamic Cemetery, Vietnamese Buddhist temple, landscaper, and McMansion all on what looks like the same colonial land parcel. (Outside Frederick).

aerial imagery with a consistent rectangular plot of land with a railroad running through it

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Neil Flanagan 🧱🗃️ @jgbollard.bsky.social · 17h

The thing I learned from doing labor tourism in the concrete business is that cement is caustic and sticks to your body hair.

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Neil Flanagan 🧱🗃️ @jgbollard.bsky.social · 20h

Not sure about that. Steel took taller buildings first and light wood framing ended load bearing masonry in the low rise sector in the 70s. Countries with a lot of concrete construction usually have strong masonry workforces.

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Neil Flanagan 🧱🗃️ @jgbollard.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Part of the problem is that everybody but the right really likes particularity right now: place, culture, context. So you are going to end up with a more variegated aesthetic.

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Reposted by Neil Flanagan 🧱🗃️

70s Sci-Fi Art @70sscifiart.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Howard V. Brown did a lot of great 1930s pulp sci-fi magazine covers. Nevertheless, his June 1924 cover to "Scientific American" might be my favorite work of his, despite not actually being science fiction. I love the nonchalant surrealism.

Two guys carefully paint a scene of a harbor town surrounded by mountains - a scene which they seem to be existing inside, as giants.

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Neil Flanagan 🧱🗃️ @jgbollard.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Is the key to making Buzzard Point work a roof at Audi Field or does it need a bus and a grocery store? We polled the folks at MGM Sportsbook,

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Neil Flanagan 🧱🗃️ @jgbollard.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

There is a weird paralysis about the White House. Trump is not wrong to say it needed a lot of work, including the East Wing. The screening center is another thing that's just been in limbo for 30 years. I think in previous eras it looked bad to spend money on it.

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Neil Flanagan 🧱🗃️ @jgbollard.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

$2.2 billion for different sports venues but can't be bothered to make the city a nice place to live.

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Neil Flanagan 🧱🗃️ @jgbollard.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Merz doing a little house burping, naturally

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Neil Flanagan 🧱🗃️ @jgbollard.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Neat. Was the resistance to a permanent pad just aesthetic? It seems like another thing NPS should have done years ago if only to do it more tastefully.

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Neil Flanagan 🧱🗃️ @jgbollard.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Mush mush mush. So tragic so many have to suffer but we deserve the humiliation.

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Neil Flanagan 🧱🗃️ @jgbollard.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Can't tell if this is the reporter misunderstanding brain mush or reliably reporting the mush but, I doubt there is a Magneto containment level in the upper bunker.

Behind him rises a bigger renovation project: the new White House ballroom, its concrete skeleton consuming the former East Wing. Lawsuits have followed the endeavor, alleging that Trump demolished the historic structure and began building its replacement without congressional authorization or the required federal reviews.
He kept building anyway. Trump points to the walls, calling them "nuclear concrete" (the sort, he says, used in nuclear facilities), and describes a military complex beneath the ballroom that will plunge six stories underground. There will be five separate floors, he says, with one side made entirely of glass, 6 or 8 in. thick. He holds his hands apart to demonstrate. "The steel goes up next week."

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Neil Flanagan 🧱🗃️ @jgbollard.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

If your wife doesn't take your name they autoenroll you in DSA.

And the judge is a Trump hater, radical left Trump hater. His wife uses a different name. Said. "No, you can't do that. Well, why would I want to stick with something that's going to lose hundreds of millions of dollars, and I'm not even recognized? It's not me; it's the administration. So I have people. He works hard on it. I have people that work hard on that because it's a financial loser. Always will be. Always has been.
When I took it over, it was in extremely bad shape physically. The steel was rusted and rotted. The place was a dirty—like the White House. I fixed the White House, you know.
So, I get $550,000 a year as president. For the first term, I gave it. And I contributed to the White House renovation. I've done a great job. You would have come here a year ago, you would have seen walls that were falling off the outside of the White House. You would have seen beautiful ornamentation around the windows, where half of it was hanging off the window and the other half was up. Half of it, much of it, was actually gone. It was-it fell to the ground. It was removed. Fell to the ground, exploded, and it was removed. The place was in terrible shape. I made it beautiful.

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Neil Flanagan 🧱🗃️ @jgbollard.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Not particularly convinced that nobody had thought of building a helipad before Trump, tbh.

Can you explain to people who say that these building projects don't have a connection to Americans who are struggling to pay bills? Why is this important for the American people?
So the White House is a very special symbol. It's a symbol of America. It's a symbol of our greatness. It's, I think, maybe the most important symbol that we have. The White House was a dump. The moldings were falling off the outside of the building.
It hadn't been painted in...it was just a disgraceful dump. The doors were falling off.
The locks were broken. And I said, I got to fix it. And I do that better than anybody else. Maybe I do it better than anything I do, and it's easy for me. It's actually relaxing. You know, for a lot of people, it drives them crazy.
For me, it's relaxing. You see...And then the generals came. They said, Sir, they have new helicopters. I didn't buy them. Stupid Joe Biden, but they're very big and very powerful. They ripped the shit out of the grass, and I said—and they didn't know what to do, so they're going to use the old helicopters just for this one stop because they land on the grass. And I said, "Did you ever hear of building a helipad?" And everybody said, "Oh, what a wonderful idea. I never thought of that." I said, "Why don't you design a helipad that's appropriate for these large helicopters?" And I built it. You see how I built it ahead of schedule.

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Reposted by Neil Flanagan 🧱🗃️

The Great Pumpkin Papers 🎃🎃🎃 @professormusgrave.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

The secret is that, to paraphrase Feynman, we are all morons outside of, at best, a narrow niche, so it’s good to neither default to disbelief or credentialism

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Neil Flanagan 🧱🗃️ @jgbollard.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Funny but it doesn’t matter unless Section 107 of the NHPA gets repealed.

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Reposted by Neil Flanagan 🧱🗃️

Janeese4DC @janeese4dc.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

TAKE THE BUS! 🚌 It’s Week Without Driving. Join me and my friends from @ggwash.org in getting out of our cars and choosing public transit. Don’t forget to take the People’s Survey and tell us how we can make our public transit system even better!

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Neil Flanagan 🧱🗃️ @jgbollard.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Curiously this person used to post constantly about “ukronazis”

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Neil Flanagan 🧱🗃️ @jgbollard.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

The West Wing is a dump, but we can wait until after we make the president a ceremonial head of state to do the gut reno.

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Neil Flanagan 🧱🗃️ @jgbollard.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

For 60 years power over the built environment in DC was divided between two cosmic forces: norms around historic preservation and the paranoia of security agencies. Only one left now.

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Neil Flanagan 🧱🗃️ @jgbollard.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Far more people work in DC and live outside it than vice versa. But DC covers most components of a state budget that are captured by the same state from the suburbs of other metropolitan areas.

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Reposted by Neil Flanagan 🧱🗃️

Michael Lobel @mlobelart.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

I have never heard before of this department of the MTA but now I am extraordinarily curious about what exactly they do

Door of an MTA vehicle with the legend, "Track Geometry"

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Neil Flanagan 🧱🗃️ @jgbollard.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Apart from taxes (every firm I have worked for in DC was actually a Virginia company) I think this can be more directly attributed to the height act. Quality of office space is better over there.

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Neil Flanagan 🧱🗃️ @jgbollard.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

This seems to be MSA data, so I am not sure it supports this claim.

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Reposted by Neil Flanagan 🧱🗃️

Sarah Archer @sarcher.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Slightly delayed in posting this but if you’re in Los Angeles, go see “The Kitchen and its Discontents” at LACMA! I wrote about some of its treasures like this prototype kitchen designed by Charlotte Perriand and Le Corbusier for the T List 🫕 www.nytimes.com/2026/09/24/t...

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Neil Flanagan 🧱🗃️ @jgbollard.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Anyone who has built anything in the last 5 years knows that MEP costs went nuclear because of Covid supply shock and the data center boom.

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Neil Flanagan 🧱🗃️ @jgbollard.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Also don’t miss that Trump claims he could have renovated the Fed for $25M, or 1% of the budget, and kept the finishes too! House flipper brain.

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Neil Flanagan 🧱🗃️ @jgbollard.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Economists swagger into another field thinking they can do better, alas you cannot p-hack groundwater.

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Neil Flanagan 🧱🗃️ @jgbollard.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

The Federal Reserve handled its renovation the way many sophisticated clients do: assuming they’re so smart they don’t have to follow best practices.

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Neil Flanagan 🧱🗃️ @jgbollard.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Great illustration of how massive this project is.

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Neil Flanagan 🧱🗃️ @jgbollard.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

The board’s mismanagement of the CMAR is pretty bad though. No GMP? Not making the CMAR do estimates during design?? That’s the whole point of doing a CMAR! oig.federalreserve.gov/reports/boar...

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Neil Flanagan 🧱🗃️ @jgbollard.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

I’ll be real with you: I do not think Donald Trump understands the construction procurement term of art, “guaranteed maximum price.”

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Neil Flanagan 🧱🗃️ @jgbollard.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Indian urban planning is a uniquely messed up version of the UK’s uniquely messed up urban planning. Mumbai maybe more so than other cities. The success of the Delhi metro is promising.

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