Search Results for "colour"

an architecture history fit for purpose, largely undocumented history

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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 […]

The Uses of Poetry

August 9, 2026

poetry and hyrdaulic engineering

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 […]

AESTHETICS

Front-end Design

July 5, 2026

market design, post-design, when design no longer matterw

There are somewhere between 90 and 130 automobile manufacturers in China. Many are groups under the umbrella of one or more the four state-owned manufacturers but there are also many that aren’t. The list and breakdown on Wikipedia seems comprehensive. On China roads in Wenzhou – a fairly prosperous Tier-3 city – I see BMWs, Mercedes Benzes, […]

“Signature Moves”

June 28, 2026

AI writing

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“Let me activate my copywriting expertise …” Sycophantic ChatGPT was bad enough, but I’m not warming to what Claude Opus 4.8 concludes is a personality. Once again, let’s meet again on the other side. Supergraphics, or How Buildings Learned to Shout Let us begin, as one must, with a definition. A supergraphic is a graphic element scaled […]

SCIENCE

Relationship Issues

June 7, 2026

living with AI, propaganda

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We humans aren’t good at imagining things outside our experience so it’s only human that we’ve now gone and built this thing called AI that’s not good at imagining things outside its training. A more fundamental issue is that we’re more comfortable with intelligences that look like us. Remember how those aliens in V easily […]

THEORY

The Autonomous Interior

April 5, 2026

autonomous interiors, interiors

I fell in love too easily with The Story of the Interior. Having largely made up my mind what a unified and an autonomous interior were, I didn’t expect to have to raise my hand so soon after starting reading the chapter titled The Unified and the Autonomous Interior. “Two underlying principles of the story […]

THEORY

A Taxonomy of Interiors

March 29, 2026

inte4riors, interior design interior design & space, space and the objects inside it

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What’s an interior? is a question that’s been nagging me on and off for oh almost 50 years. When I recently enquired at the library of the former Tokyo Institute of Technology, a librarian told me they don’t keep copies of master’s theses. Mine had the clunky title of Research Into Interior Design from the […]

TYPOLOGIES

Houses With More Than One Staircase

March 1, 2026

functional differentiation, intermittently functional space, staircases

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Houses can have more than one staircase for a variety of reasons. More often than not, it’s to enable two different classes of people to not meet each other, such as in this house with its “front” staircase and servants’ staircases. There’s actually also a third staircase connecting the footpath with the basement and used […]

GUIDES

Misfits’ Guide to TOKYO #2

February 15, 2026

future Tokyo, RIken Yamamoto, The Space Of Power The Power Of Space, Tōgō Murano, Tokyo architecture

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If Misfits’ Guide to TOKYO #1 was about my recommendations to see buildings that are probably going to be around for a long time to come, then this post is about those that I’m not so sure about so, if you’re in Tokyo and wanting to see some buildings, you might want to take a […]

Good To Go (a.k.a. Part 3)

February 1, 2026

performance

Villa Rotonda and Haus am Horn don’t look very similar on the outside and even less similar on the inside, but both are biaxially symmetrical and both have a large, top-lit space of increased height where those axes intersect. Here’s those two central spaces. On the right is that Haus am Horn study niche (nische) […]

TYPOLOGIES

Second Thoughts (a.k.a. Part 2)

January 25, 2026

design for the elderly, space and light, tiny houses

The first second thought has to do with orientation. At approx. 45°N, Villa Rotonda has no problems with view and no problems with illumination although the last of the setting sun in winter may be blocked by those trees to the south west and that are known as the Southwest Grove. They were intentionally planted, […]

TYPOLOGIES

Thinking It Through (Part 1)

January 18, 2026

barrier free, tiny house

According to the New York Times, the architects of Reversible Destiny Foundation believe that comfort is a precursor to death and that what they design is intended to lead their users into a perpetually tentative relationship with their surroundings due to multiple levels, oddly angled switches, uneven floors, and a riot of colour. I agree […]

Chinese Landscape Painting #2

January 11, 2026

landscape gardening, landscaping, river conservation