The Dynamics of Delight: Architecture and AestheticsPeter F. Smith, Routeledge, London 2003 Last week I was looking for an article on that 1990s phenomenon, design coding in order to add something to a post with the working title of Pattern. I didn’t find it but, in folders within folders I did discover a stash of […]
For some time now I’ve been fascinated by buildings and spaces not being used the way they were designed to be used. 1979, December (Kyoto, Japan) The first instance I can remember is from 1979. I’d only just arrived in Japan a couple of months earlier and though I was attending a language school in […]
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 […]
This introduction follows on last week’s post and segues into this one because I continued to think about why that particular treatment of old buildings so disturbed me. If you remember, I preferred the treatment given to these buildings. I think it has something to do with setting rather than context even though both can […]
Now, when energy is either scarce or expensive, it’s worth remembering that air conditioning accounts for one fifth of all electricity used by buildings. It’s also worth remembering that air conditioning really only means heating air or cooling air because, if you want your air filtered, purified, humidified or dehumidified, then what you need is […]
Buildings around the world are being extended all the time but the challenges are more visible with art museums and any deficiencies less forgivable. Art museum extensions are over-represented in the media landscape. This could be because art museums are usually prestigious commissions to begin within so art museum extensions must be too. Or, art […]
Sometime around the 5th of August 2020, I saw a reference to a book called Non-Referential Architecture and thought it sounded interesting but, as I was just about to leave Dubai, I never ordered a copy. A few weeks ago the book found me. The front cover tells us it was ideated by Valerio Olgiati, […]
Some views are expansive and profound. Most aren’t. I used the image on the left below in the recent Performance Anxiety post, and the house it describes from Associative Design, the post before. The collage on the right better describes why the view allowed by these high-level windows was so important to me and my […]
The walls are closing in. Around 1900 it suddenly dawned upon architects that the market for Palladian knock-off mansions in picturesque countryside was getting smaller and smaller. There simply weren’t enough landed gentry to go around. A crop of newly rich industrialists brought about a short-lived rebound in the late-19th century but sooner or later new […]
In class last Tuesday I showed some images I thought would help students understand the concept of scale. I explained that the buildings in the image on the left below are of different size but the same scale and the one on the corner in the right image on the right is of the same […]
Less Is More This is the one that started it all. Less Is More is taught and widely believed – whichever came first – to be what mid-20th century architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe claimed of his architecture. I learned just then that the phrase was first used by poet Robert Browning in his […]
Prompted by this empty space outside a mall, I asked a few posts back if invisible design was an oxymoron. Despite having no obvious indicators of design, this empty space enables all the feelgood benefits we like to think more visible design can provide. It enables so much for so little obvious design input and […]
The Chinese and Japanese take calligraphy to another level despite their languages being very different. For decades I believed the Japanese adopted the Chinese system of writing to flesh out their existing alphabet in the sixth century but I recently learned that Japanese was 100% written in Chinese characters in the early eighth century and […]
This post is the first part of an article that appeared under the title Comfort Zone in the #1_20 issue of ADATO, Luxembourg’s only architecture journal. The issue theme was Architecture + Medicine. My working title came from Richard Hamilton’s famous 1956 collage. I’m not sure why. It could be that architecture is just a […]
