When the Japanese character 心 is pronounced shin, it can mean mind, spirit, motive or core, and when it is pronounced kokoro it can mean mind or spirit; mentality; idea, thought; heart, feeling; wholeheartedness, sincerity, sympathy; attention; interest, care; will; intention; taste, mood, true meaning; spirit, mentality,… You get the idea and why I was […]
There are buildings we use regularly and some of us may even experience some of them as architecture. There are also buildings we only know from photographs and understand to be architecture even though we have no first-hand experience of them as owner, visitor or user. Vladimir Tatlin’s 1919 Monument to the Third International, Antonio […]
The two posts Architecture Reductions from December 2015 and Final Reductions from October 2018 ran with the idea of what could be done away with in residential space or, more to the point, what would remain. In rough sequence there were Ornament, Outdoor space, Fireplaces, Dining Rooms, Separate rooms, Kitchens, Quality materials, Interior finishes, Design […]
As part of my current quest to annotate my memories, the three houses below come first because they’re of the same style and vintage as the first house I was aware of. Any of the three could have been built between the late 1940 and mid-1950s. The ones on the left had brick cavity walls […]
It recently occurred to me that the story of me and architecture can be illustrated by Japanese architects I’ve encountered and appreciated along the way. The period 1970-1980 was pretty intense. This post collects a lot of information in one place. I know this blog is poorly indexed but, if I ever trust an AI […]
I know I shouldn’t be interested in architecture as moneymaking machines. Even as a guilty pleasure, it’s increasingly not that much fun. I’m obviously an addict. This may be the last of this series of posts. You’ll understand why at the end. I thought my undergraduate first year architecture history book may have been my […]
The Chinese city of Hangzhou is on the Qiantang River that empties into Hangzhou Bay which is a large, funnel-shaped indentation on mainland China’s east coast. Pacific Ocean tides are funneled by the bay to create a tidal wave (a.k.a. tidal bore) that can be as high as nine meters and travel up to 40km/hour […]
High-speed road interchanges have been around for the best part of a century now even though viaducts that allow roads to cross without intersecting have a much longer history. Intersections have been around for as long as there have been roads but the problem with intersections is that give way rules such as “Give way […]
Pasadena Heights is a 1974 project by Kiyonori Kikutake. It’s near the Japanese city of Mishima which is twinned with Pasadena in California. You may have read about Pasadena Heights on this blog before because the first time I wrote about it was in 2015 but over the years there have been various mentions plus […]
Poetry isn’t really part of our lives anymore, if ever it was. I recently read that most educated Chinese people can recite one or two poems about West Lake that I’m currently trying to write something about. Hmm. I can remember the first few lines of John Keats’ La Belle Dame sans Merci (“O what […]
The suburb of Daglish in Perth, Western Australia has much green space in the form of roadside verges, parks, dog-friendly parks and playing fields. Many homes are large and relatively new and this relatively new double-story typology has an entrance, a double-car garage and possibly a master bedroom across the width of the block but, […]
Part 2: Infrastructure Changes in the economics of various AI LLM are happening fast. July 17 saw the launch of the Chinese Moonshot as a free, open-source AI. The full version will be available July 27 – tomorrow, for open scrutiny its claims. Here’s a link to some Australian hand-wringing, some New York Times commentary, […]
Part 1: Architecture GrahamHello 马辰。 It’s me, Graham. I’ve been thinking about how to best convey the essence of our conversations about Chinese language computing and the policy guidelines governing the siting of data centers in China. It’d be great if we could work together in WordPress but WordPress has its own AI agents that […]
The snippets below are what I took away from a 29th June The Guardian article titled ‘There’s this deep mystery of what, actually, is this thing?: the philosopher inside Google DeepMind’. “When I first joined DeepMind, it was not at all clear how you were going to get AI you can talk to. Now, by […]
