Some countries either have or have made in the past a social custom of performing certain domestic activities in public. For example, up until the middle of last century, both the US and the UK had the custom of scrubbing one’s stoop [= step or steps leading to the front door]. In Japan into the […]
This post is not so much a reworking of the 2020 post, Reconstructivism, but an attempt to put its ideas back out there in 2023 as it’s good to have a Plan B. We all remember the carnage that the 2008 financial crisis dealt the construction industry. This was painfully evident in Dubai with projects […]
It was a flying visit to Dubai for a two-day conference and an opportunity to revisit the city I’d lived in from September 2008 to September 2020. It’s not always a good idea to revisit overly familiar places from one’s past where every road and building has a memory of being travelled or seen. One […]
This post is a reworking of a post of almost exactly one year ago, in an attempt to find a better way of approaching the subject. It’s mostly the preamble that’s different as the manifestations remain much the same although some of my examples are more extreme. This is because an architecture of sharing isn’t […]
Authenticity is probably the wrong word as it’s been severely debased and overused for some time now, especially with respect to those marketable things known as experiences, particularly if they take place in foreign countries. Remember the photos of the long queue of people with their identical bucket lists of authentic experiences waiting to get […]
In the English language, we usually use the words twin or paired to describe instances of two things and collective nouns to describe instances of three or more. Although they’re not exactly words we use every day, all English speakers of a certain age know some collective nouns such as a flock of birds, a […]
From December last year to February this year, I was in Perth, Australia for the first time since 2019. It was nice to take a flight and enjoy airports and travel again. I flew Shanghai-Hong Kong and Hong Kong-Perth so I had to finish watching the movie Drive My Car after the transfer. I probably […]
The first thing many people younger than me probably thought of when they saw the title of this post is the song Mansard Roof by epic New York indie band Vampire Weekend. This link is to the video accompanying the studio version of the song that, I think as a statement of musical intent is […]
I’ve lived and worked in China for almost three years now. There’s many things I still don’t understand but there’s no urgency. These things will sort themselves out. Representations of grass (1) A Chinese Tier 2 city with aspirations to becoming a New Tier 1 city will generally have a metro system in place and, […]
Meatspace is a word I first heard a few weeks ago. It’s used to describe the human realm that’s not capitalizing artificial intelligence. It’s slightly derogatory and its users slightly smug. It implies that that part of the human realm is full of losers. Not on the winning team. I know I’m being repetitive but […]
In China it’s not just in Beijing where courtyard housing is being demolished because its density is relatively low compared to what’s needed. Even the three-storey high stacked courtyards of the 1990 Ju’er Hutong Phases I & II couldn’t deliver the density required thirty years ago without shrinking the size of the courtyard. If the […]
There’s been a flurry of articles voicing fears of AI in creative fields such as art, graphic design and, to a lesser extent, poetry and literature and, to a lesser extent still, architecture. As soon as computer processing speed and power increased, it was inevitable that this would be showcased by computers challenging humans in […]
At the end of the last post and with reference to Tadao Ando’s 1973 Sumiyoshi/Azuma House, I wondered when does a courtyard become a lightwell? Or the other way around? It might be a poor question because all courtyards provide light and ventilation but we look at the Ando house and see a courtyard not […]
Architects used to have us believe that better architecture made for better lives. They were rightly ignored as it would make more sense for us all first to agree on what a better life is before thinking about the means to achieve it. Of course some degree of spatial and physiological requirements need to be […]
