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Category: AESTHETICS

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Decorative CMU

Decorative CMU
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These useful building components have many names. They’re cinder block in Canada, the US and NZ, hollow block in The Philippines and the UAE, and besser block in Australia. In the UK, NZ and Australia, breezeblock refers to breeze which is another name for ash/cinder and not, I finally learn, to any associated cooling airflow. Other names include CMU (concrete masonry unit) although these tend to do […]

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Performance Beauty

Performance Beauty
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It’s good to take a break from architecture every now and then.  So one evening last week I powered down the laptop and fired up YouTube on the flatscreen. I was in the mood for opera!  “Sure,” you may say, “but opera’s still about organizing people and how they move and interact in and around a space!”  […]

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Designer Bookbinding

Designer Bookbinding
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The word “designer” before anything is never a good sign. Here’s what designer bookbinding looked like in the time of Alberti. To be fair, most books also had designer pages. They weren’t for everybody. Here’s a designer book that could easily have been on the shelves in a Palladian villa. Here’s an example of German bookbinding from the […]

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Isamu Noguchi: Aesthetic Efficiency

Isamu Noguchi: Aesthetic Efficiency
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Meet Isamu Noguchi. Misfits’ doesn’t normally have much time for artists, especially superstar sculptors, but the rules need to be bent a bit for Isamu Noguchi. There’s a biography here. Noguchi is sometimes known for this sculpture he did in 1940. Some of you may have seen it. Many will know this coffee table he designed […]

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Disambiguation: ARM Architecture

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ARM architecture is a computer instruction set architecture developed by ARM Holdings. ARM = Advanced RISC Machine RISC = Reduced Instruction Set Computer An instruction set is a list of all the instructions that a processor can execute (e.g. add, subtract, move, load, store, etc.). In 2005, about 98 percent of the more than one billion mobile […]

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“Hello-o! The tree is not trying to be beautiful.”

“Hello-o! The tree is not trying to be beautiful.”
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This post is the first of a new type where you can send me suggestions for inclusion in the gallery of 1) mobile phone masts pretending to be trees or 2) well-designed mobile phone masts not pretending to be anything. Use the form at the bottom to send me a link.

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The Tree is Not Trying to Look Beautiful

The Tree is Not Trying to Look Beautiful
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Here’s an image of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in happier days. It’s in semi-submersible mode so it could be towed to where it needs to be. Here’s a link to its technical specifications.  This next one’s a different type of oil rig – a jackup oil rig. Again, it’s not self-powered, but it has a […]

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