This post originally appeared in ADATO magazine (Issue 2, 2019), with the title Sundowner. An alternative title was Sunset Effect, the name given to one final, fleeting show of exuberance before something disappears completely. The title of this post, End of the Road, is another way of saying the same thing. Sundowner “I had the […]
A colleague tells a story of how she once asked a student why they made a certain design decision and the student replied “I don’t know. It’s just design.” It’s difficult to comprehend this as I’ve always thought of design as something requiring no small amount of knowledge and skill together with an understanding of […]
It’s end of semester and students around the world are having to justify their design choices. Some will rely on case studies to substitute for experience while others will depend upon the facticity of ambient site criteria. Still others will attempt to justify their design choices using statistics gleaned from surveys. All these methods have […]
The worlds of architecture and dance don’t intersect very often. This makes me think they might move in sync, respectively affirming the same forces acting upon society. Perhaps by looking at how dance has both changed and stayed the same over the past hundred years we can learn something about how architecture has also. I […]
Those painted houses of Tiébélé [c.f. Final Reductions, Building Nature] are still on my mind. I found myself wondering how the villagers would reply if they were asked if they thought their houses primitive or sophisticated? I doubt they’d understand the question, or think a house should have to be either, or even could be one or […]
Art comes with its own conceptual space observers are expected to enter. If this weren’t the case, then a person wouldn’t even know they were in the vincity of an artwork. [1] Boundaries exist to be broken but an artwork’s conceptual space is usually congruent with the physical space it’s displayed in. You can be […]
Everything in the world is a expression of its place and time and so it’s not wrong to think good architecture is an expression of its place and time. It’s just that every other kind of architecture is too. Unworried, we understand it to mean good architecture represents its place and time. There are many […]
![The Hexagon [a eulogy]](https://i0.wp.com/misfitsarchitecture.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/hexagon-851681007-1522663729867.jpg?fit=300%2C215&ssl=1)
Buildings in which we conduct our lives are mostly structures created from rectiliniar elements joined at right angles. Many find this boring – the implication being that buildings have an obligation to entertain and amuse. This leads to yet another restatement of the building-architecture divide. “Buildings are boring. Architecture isn’t.” Architecture is thus granted licence […]
It’s almost twelve months to the day since I scared myself reading a 2013 book that, it was claimed, re-theorized Post Modernism. “FML,” I thought, “of all the things that need new life breathed into them, we get this one!” Anxiously watching for further signs, I began a draft. About the book, The Graham Foundation wrote [underlines mine]: […]
This second installment of misfits’ prehistory builds upon some of the ideas in last week’s Property, Time & Architecture from 1999. I remastered the file from an InDesign package created February 2010. The original was probably made in Quark XPress a decade earlier because all images were .tif files. Bold headings summarize the text. Blockquotes are diversions and expansions. In this essay, I use the word aesthetics […]
To commemmorate seven years of not fitting in, misfits would like to present some of the early thinking that led to its formation. This visual essay dates from around 1998. It was put together between occasional bouts of paid work, using Quark XPress 3.2 and a PowerMac G3 with 64MB of RAM. The file was stored on iomega 100MB […]
On the occasion of its 50th anniversary, I re-read Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. First published in 1966, and since translated into 16 languages, this remarkable book has become an essential document of architectural literature. A “gentle manifesto for a nonstraightforward architecture” [.] But what exactly is an essential document of architectural literature? Is it something […]
First of all, Thank You All and Season’s Greetings. Have you noticed how the end of the year is always rich with lazy content? Here’s the AIA Committee on the Environment Top Ten Projects 2016 Winners. Here’s Dezeen’s Top 10 Architecture Books of 2016, along with a gratuitous picture. Well before December’s not-entirely-unexpected articles wanting to suddenly tell us about Zaha Hadid’s […]
Pallasmaa, Juhani “The Eyes of The Skin: Architecture and The Senses“, 2nd Edition, Wiley-Academy, 2005 It’s easy to see why this book is essential reading in many schools. It makes architecture sound like a very noble pursuit. Its argument is simple. Western culture has, since the Greeks, emphasised our sense of vision to the neglect of our other ones. […]
