Time In much the same way as English speakers say “The Renaissance” or “The Middle Ages” to denote an era and the events associated with it, Chinese people use the names of dynasties to comprehend the history of their country. We’ve all heard terms like The Ming Dynasty or The Tang Dynasty – usually with respect […]
In 2003 I produced a small proposal to fit several two-bedroom houses onto a small site somewhere in Kent, UK. I wanted to design only one house with arbitrary window positions so the houses could be rotated and clustered on the triangular plot. This is it. It could be a row house with windows only […]
In the 1980s when video was beginning to become popular, there was a Korean American video artist called Nam June Paik. He was one of the first to see artistic potential in this new medium that wasn’t film. Once, when asked about the difference between film and video, he was quoted as saying “Film is […]
RECAP: The first part of this post ended with an overview of how roles within the building design and construction industry have changed to streamline the process but with competition for control of the BIM model. This is not control for control’s sake but can be justified in terms of higher quality, quicker response to […]
This, the first post of 2022 is a joint effort between Mohammad Saad Ahmad, an Estimator at Versus Construction in the Greater New York City area and myself. In our respective ways, we are both industry observers. We’ve all watched BIM become mainstream and our relationship to it evolve and but, until even until relatively […]
Thanks to Hugh in New Jersey and Mark in San Francisco for alerting me to some of the micro-living news the world seemed to be awash with last week. There was global incredulity over the 4,500-bed hive dormitory proposed for University of California – Santa Barbara. Already horrendous as an idea, it became worse the more […]
I was on the verge of ditching AppleMusic because its algorithms continually failed to understand what music I like and, for my part, me not being bothered to train it by clicking “Like” and “Dislike” and pretending to have any agency over what appears in my NewMusic mix every Friday when I know full well […]
The term expectations exceeded is frequently heard in academia, usually describing the inevitable outcome of some program or course assessment. The implication is that already high expectations were more than satisfied but, less frequently, the term can also be used to indicate that low expectations were exceeded. This post is about instances where someone has […]
There’s not all that many. I’m not a photographer and don’t think of myself as one even though we all take pictures now. The last dedicated digital camera I had died in 2015 when I was in New York. I went to the Fifth Avenue Apple store and upgraded my iPhone. The selection of photographs […]
A closed aquatic ecosystem is a sealed yet self-sustaining environment for which the only input is the sunlight that plants use to grow and purify the ecosystem. They usually contain gravel, algae, coral and but small shrimp, snails and a kind of crustacean called a copepod all do well as they can get all the […]
The UK’s PM Boris Johnson recently stated that it’s time for everyone to get “back to the office” and that they’ve had enough “days off”. He’s not keen on having people continue working from home probably because they might learn to like it. It also means office buildings may be under-occupied yet, over the past […]
The principles are the same as everywhere else. 1 Reduce 1.1 Reduce consumptionThe best way to deal with waste is to generate very little of it and the most immediate and effective way of doing this is to reduce consumption. It was recently reported that the government of China is drafting a law that would […]
Shipping containers have a simple structure that encloses space yet is strong enough for fully-loaded ones to be stacked eight to ten high. They have structural redundancy because any one container may have to bear the load of eight to ten others above. They have no aesthetic redundancy. They are not algorithmic, parametric or programmatic. […]
Stacking dwellings will create a high-rise building with only one rooftop but only partially stacking them will create many partial rooftops known as terraces. The people of town of Masouleh probably think of theirs more as paths or roads. The ground floor can also have a terrace and many of Edwin Lutyens’ houses have paved […]
