Pasadena Heights is a 1974 project by Kiyonori Kikutake. It’s near the Japanese city of Mishima which is twinned with Pasadena in California. You may have read about Pasadena Heights on this blog before because the first time I wrote about it was in 2015 but over the years there have been various mentions plus […]
The snippets below are what I took away from a 29th June The Guardian article titled ‘There’s this deep mystery of what, actually, is this thing?: the philosopher inside Google DeepMind’. “When I first joined DeepMind, it was not at all clear how you were going to get AI you can talk to. Now, by […]
It’s good to have a few things to believe in. Rather than some grand worldview, I’m thinking more of a set of observations that, over the years, help make sense of certain phenomena. Most of mine below relate to Architecture in some way and, perhaps because of that, only tangentially to How to live. 1. […]
For a while, the working title of this post dealing with what architectural education has shed over the years was Architectural Education Reductions, in the spirit of Architecture Reductions (2015) and Final Reductions! (2018). Strictly speaking, when cooking, a reduction is the evaporation of superfluous liquid to arrive at something more concentrated and closer to […]
The sectional drawing has all but disappeared as a way of conceiving, depicting and communicating architectural space. I think the rot set in with those CAD programs students like to believe “do it all for you” and that all one has to do to generate a section at any time is slice the model along […]
This post was prompted by a comment a reader made in response to last week’s post, Associative Design. Thanks KT! I’ve disliked flashy architectural graphics for as long as I can remember. I could always sketch and, in my undergraduate course with its life drawing and sketching excursions I had occasional successes such as a […]
I was one of those undergraduate students who often worked late and I shared a studio room with two classmates who did also. We’d long ago run out of anything new in our lives to talk about and, as the semester progressed, our conversations became more like reveries, filling the time but increasingly random and […]
Anyone who was precociously imagining houses and spaces instead of playing outside like a normal kid probably has a series of formative houses they enjoyed imagining being in long before they even knew it was someone’s job to design them. These are mine. The first was an A-frame chalet with a spiral staircase, It was […]
The version of the Infinite Monkey Theorem I first heard went “If you give an infinite number of monkeys an infinite number of typewriters then, sooner or later, one of them will type Shakespeare’s Hamlet.” The correct version is “If you give a monkey a typewriter and an infinite amount of time then, sooner or […]
How many ways are there to generate a design proposal for a building? Some universities cut to the chase, and tell their students to walk down a certain street or around a part of town and “find an architectural project”. For what it’s worth, this is Identification, Analysis and Synthesis all in one. The rest […]
Synthesis is the third and last major stage of the design process where it’s all supposed to come together and, as if by magic, it does. It’s where all the explicitly stated problems supposedly solved in some supposedly relevant way by some relevant or worthy “case study” or “precedent” problems find their way into the […]
Identifying and defining the problem in the first stage of this thing called the design process is already loaded with assumptions such as, for one, the need being one an architectural response can satisfy. Already I’m not so keen to use terms such as problem and solution, let alone assume a causal relationship between them. […]
Last year I wrote a foreword for a book on the design process. I won’t be spilling any beans by saying that, however you look at it, it breaks down to the three sub-processes of 1) Identify/define the problem, 2) Decide what buildings, concepts, ideas, tools or techniques you think will be of use in […]
I am new to your blog, but i regret not finding it three years ago when I was in shock and depression as to where I found myself in architecture. I joined architecture instead of engineering only because it had lot to do with construction than engineering theoretical entrenchment. Now when i look back, I […]
