seanemmer

Do you plan on supporting Google Cloud Functions?

I was a bit confused by this as well. Later in the tutorial, you will build a separate "Results" view that shows the tally of the current vote and lets you manually move to the next vote by triggering the 'Next" Redux action. Hope that helps.

Also for those interested in more on Redux, there is an excellent Getting Started tutorial by Dan Abramov (its creator) on egghead.io:

https://egghead.io/series/getting-started-with-redux

I highly recommend the Full Stack Redux Tutorial:

http://teropa.info/blog/2015/09/10/full-stack-redux-tutorial...

Learning Redux from the get go means you can skip a lot of React's internal state management / lifecycle methods.

The tutorial also covers a bunch of relevant topics like TDD with React, immutable.js, and socket.io.

I used PDFMake on a recent project and was very pleased.

One issue we ran into in browser was the huge size overhead from vfs_fonts - is there a preferred workaround to this issue (we had to serve it separately from the rest of the app), or any solution in the pipeline?

More informative article from Huffington Post:

http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/6367654

but can it sort Skittles?

Yea, at the end of the day there is just a ton of emotion tied up with this site - so you're right in that the security requirements / monumentality of it probably go beyond what the optimal specifications should be. It's kindof a timeless debate, how to balance the emotional with the rational (going way beyond just architecture). The emotional aspect is definitely supercharged in this case.

That's a fair point - the author does spend a fair bit of time questioning the functional requirements themselves. I am not informed enough on urban planning or the circumstances surrounding the site to make a judgement there. I will, however, say that making the building 1) secure and 2) historically aware seem to be non-optional requirements given the nature of the site.

I was more so addressing the critique of the structure itself:

>One World Trade is symmetrical to a fault, stunted at its peak, its heavy corners the opposite of immaterial. There’s no mystery, no unraveling of light, no metamorphosis over time, nothing to hold your gaze

My point is primarily that such traits as those advocated by the critic, that the building be be ‘immaterial', ‘mysterious', and ‘metamorphosing', are highly subjective. I could just as easily state that the building ought to be ‘substantive', ‘familiar', and ’stable'. My architectural preference is for buildings that avoid trying to achieve any of these "qualities" of taste, but rather buildings that deliver elegant solutions to their objective requirements. If ‘mysteriousness’ is a necessary trait in order to achieve the function of the building, then so be it. But the critic simply attacks the building for lacking certain qualities that he has not adequately tied to the purpose and nature of the building.

I've admired this building throughout its construction and reading this critic's postmodern teardown really irked me. I'm a hardcore modernist in that I think a building's elegance is measured by it's functionality. This structure has multiple, in many ways contradictory functional requirements, needing to simultaneously be a supertall office building, monument, and fortress. This is no simple task.

Given these requirements, I think SOM did an excellent job - the building manages to simultaneously be reverent and purposeful. It's clean, modern, and evokes the Twin Towers without parroting them. True, it doesn't have the postmodern panache of the Shard or some rippling Gehry building-sculpture hybrid. But I for one don't admire such deviations from function. Insofar as the critic values postmodern features, that is a matter of taste, not objective civic merit.

Furthermore, I think it is incorrect to conflate its design with other, unfortunate circumstances surrounding its construction (delays, budget, security, politics). The broad strokes of the design have been in place since 2005 (with the admittedly unfortunate scuttling of plans for the base and antenna array).