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 […]
Part 1: Architecture GrahamHello 马辰。 It’s me, Graham. I’ve been thinking about how to best convey the essence of our conversations about Chinese language computing and the policy guidelines governing the siting of data centers in China. It’d be great if we could work together in WordPress but WordPress has its own AI agents that […]
“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 […]
Two weeks ago I thought I’d give my handy native Chinese AI assistant Doubao (豆包 = Bean Wrap) the job of writing its version of my post of last week. Apart from the first and last sentences, the prompt was about the same level of detail as a note I might make as a seed […]
The future arrived last week in the form of WordPress with enhanced AI functions. I was not happy that this future downloaded and installed itself as a non-consensual update. The AI STUDIO button appears in the toolbar by default but disappears when you close the sidebar. I used the next paragraph to run some tests. […]
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) […]
The first time I noticed something was about to happen was when I saw two white-on-blue signs amongst the rows of vegetables (looking west, below), asking the growers to harvest them befofre the end of the month as “works” were going to commence for this bank of the river. Works commenced two months later. Early […]
This last week of the year when the architectural internet is celebrating the ten best buildings of 2025 as is its custom, I’d like to consider the worst buildings a particular architect has put their name to. It’s too late to be an office party game or a Christmas party game but you can limit […]
A November 24 article on Dezeen and probably everywhere else screamed outrage because, in the US from 1 July 2026, architecture is on track to no longer being considered a professional degree. Its opening sentence was Loans available to architecture students in the USA will be reduced under the terms of president Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, […]
Once a post is online, I usually revisit it the day after to weed out typos and evidence of over-hasty editing. Sometimes I might rephrase something but there’s always a temptation to add further thoughts, particularly at the end as a kind of coda. At one stage, the August 11 post had two additional endings […]
I was going to title this post Word Of The Year but I just learned that enshittification was selected as the 2024 Word of the Year by both the American Dialect Society and the Macquarie Dictionary. I first heard the word a couple of years ago and thought it referred to the state of the […]
I’ve probably mentioned that I recently scrolled through three year’s worth of ArchDaily in three weeks. I couldn’t help but notice there’s only a limited number of types of articles. As you’d expect, the largest category of posts is content provided without fee by architects but the problem for ArchDaily is that there’s simply isn’t […]
TOKYO 100 ApartmentsDesigning 100 rental apartment buildings in and around TokyoAkio YACHIDAKajima Publishing In Tokyo last April, I bought a small A5 book crammed with apartment project plans, sections and photographs, many of which were not very large. It was just the kind of thing I like but because it was so dense with information […]
ArchDaily keeps morphing. Until about a week ago, it had been possible to study images in the project galleries but a person had to have a subscription to read the articles. This week, I’m being encouraged to sign up for a free subscription that will enable me to look at 50 galleries per month while […]
