It’s not often I look at all the photographs I’ve taken in such a short space of time as I did with my My Best Shots post two years ago. Some of my pet themes and patterns were obvious. For one, all were of buildings. Some photographs aspired to the standards and conventions of traditional […]
In her book, American Architects and the Mechanics of Fame, Roxanne Williamson hinted at such a thing as a “creative spark” being somehow “transmitted” to an employee in an office of an architect who was either just-about-to-be-famous or flush with the success of their first highly acclaimed project. Williamson contains her study to American architects […]
It’s only recent history but, before the use of image datasets became commonplace, architects used language prompts to tell an AI system what they wanted. The problem was that computers and people don’t speak the same language. If you say to an AI system “Design me a beautiful building!” it won’t know what you mean […]
A long time ago now, some people in Greece thought a column looked better if it had a base, a middle part that did most of the work, and another bit at the top. For quite some time after studying architecture became a thing, students have had to memorize the names Base, Shaft and Capital […]
Around the world, coal-fired power stations around the world were often located along rivers because barges of coal needed to come upstream to the power stations built near to where the generated power was to be used. The current power loss in transmission and distribution is currently about 6% so the loss of early electricity […]
Japan’s first high-speed rail link known to English speakers as the “Bullet Train” but to Japanese as the (Tokaido) Shinkansen [東海道新幹線, lit. New Arterial Line], began operating between Tokyo and Osaka almost sixty years ago on October 1, 1964, the same year as the Tokyo Olympic Games. It was the realization of a 1940 proposal for […]
Mario Chiattone was a Swiss architect who fell in with The Futurists. This is his 1914 Futurist City. He’s showing it’s the future by going for mixed-use superblocks linked by elevated pedestrian walkways on perimeter buildings bordering ground level roads futuristically congested with automobiles. This unit is then repeated X-Y. A decade later was Ludwig […]
The Architect Statement Chair Chairs designed by architects are notoriously uncomfortable – a statement probably first uttered with respect to chairs designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. It was probably his Origami Chair they were referring too, but the clinical chair for Price Tower is discomforting to even look at. FLW’s low cost designs for his Usonian […]
I’m currently reading Casey Mack’s recent book, “Digesting Metabolism: Artificial Land in Japan 1960-2200” when I’m both teaching a short course on Modern Japanese Architecture and, at the same time, interested in making better use of enclosed volume in residential spaces by squeezing an extra cubic meter of living space out of 30 cu.m [c.f. […]
It was maybe February 2019 and I was living in Dubai when this invitation to participate in this event arrived in my inbox. Rapid Cities – Responsive Architectures seeks to examine the dialectic, tensions, problems and possibilities of architecture and urbanism as technologically imbued, fast-paced commercial exercises. These questions are all provocative but still manage […]
I know it’s common practice in Western Europe, Japan and China, for residential unit listings to include not only the price but also the floor area of the dwelling. Some agents will even provide the cost per square metre so you can make your own judgment about the effects of factors such as location, view […]
I only learned about Victorian era architect Decimus Burton (1800–1881) a few months ago when two articles on him appeared in The Guardian online the same day. Decimus Burton was a skilled and prolific architect who, until recently, was mostly forgotten or, more to the point, never remembered. Both articles suggested this was because he […]
Buildings with double height spaces have existed for as long as there have been haylofts, minstrels’ galleries and artist’s studios, but the history of making more efficient use of the height inside residential space is about a hundred years. Many of the first proposals were entries to the 1926 Comradely Competition for Communal Housing organized […]
Holes in buildings have been around for a while – at least since 1982 when Arquitectonica’s The Atlantis was completed and most definitely since 1984 when the building was featured in the opening credits of Miami Vice that ran for five seasons from 1984. I just read that one of the five founding members in 1977 […]
