Sometime around late 2018 I felt I had to do something about how poorly this blog was indexed. Even I had trouble finding things and had, on occasion, resorted to a google search of my own blog. That feeling had been particularly strong this year, especially since the thumbnail EasyIndex software I’d been using was […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
The short-lived Japanese architectural movement of Metabolism is, Rem Koolhaas noted, notable for being the only architectural movement that didn’t originate in a Western country. I can’t say this is wrong, but I don’t feel it’s all that true either. Metabolism wasn’t exactly global and who’s to say local architectural movements are happening everywhere all […]
The capabilities of BIM continue to grow incrementally through improvements to algorithms and hardware. About this time last year, I wrote about how I thought BIM packages that offered the real-time estimation of energy performance, carbon impact or cost would be an incredibly useful for the verification of design decisions. Rather than that becoming a […]
This first image is courtesy of Moon World Resorts, Ltd., a Canadian consortium proposing to build a moon-shaped hotel in Dubai. The image says just that. Moon-shape, Dubai. It could only say Dubai more if Burj Khalifa was also in the image but that’s impossible because moon building is exactly where Burj Khalifa was last […]
August 18, 2021 – August 18, 2022 This is the third and final week of The 2nd Misfits’ Triennale. It spans the above period and brings us up to the present, or rather, to three and a half weeks ago. If I’ve missed anything worthwhile in those past three weeks then I’ll find out about it […]
August 18, 2020 – August 18, 2021 This post covers the second week of The 2nd Misfits’ Triennale spaning the period including the Chicago Biennale, the Sharjah Bienalle, the Venice Bienalle and others, as well as Dubai Expo 2020. You won’t find any content about themes of pavilions and exhibitions, who was chosen to curate them […]
This list of memories isn’t ordered according to my memory but according to the year of manufacture and so it’s an unintentional history of materials, technology and trends over the past fifty or so years. Ahh the 1932 1227 Anglepoise desklamp, designed by George Carwadine! Circa 1975 when I was in second year, I bought […]
The leaf building in a non-urban environment, the duck building in a rural one and the pineapple building in a pineapple field are all buildings that have the shape of something that isn’t a building. We’re not fooled for a second however, since their size gives the game away and tells us that they’re too […]
You know how it is when you rearrange bookshelves. You pick up something and open it and before you know it, the morning is gone. The other day, I picked up Issue #46 of Log magazine from 2019. I remember skimming through it and the following Issue #47 about carbon form. I thought I’d revisit […]
Chinese apartment buildings have a great deal of owner modification apparent on their exteriors, particularly in the case of the older ones. The preference is towards more useable space though it doesn’t seem to matter if this space is open or closed. One downside is that bathroom windows can become partially or wholly internal. With […]
