Way back in 2010, the home page of one of the first iterations of this blog had the following mission statement. Have you ever thought Rem Koolhaas might be just another person? Or Harvard GSD not the centre of the Universe? Are you unmoved by biennali and festivali, and neither like nor ‘like’ anything on […]
Many architects make a name for themselves when they design their first house and sometimes the house is one for themselves. The first known projects of Kunio Maekawa and Kenzo Tange were houses for themselves but the phenomenon isn’t unique to Japan. For example, there’s Philip Johnson who designed a house for himself as a […]
The 2005-06 competition for the design of Absolute Towers in Mississagua just outside Toronto in Canada was a privately-run competition open to anyone interested in entering. The following jury shortlisted six proposals from 92 entries. Ed Sajecki, civil engineer and professional planner, founding partner of LinkedIn Larry Beasley, urban planner, formerly Co-Director of Planning for […]
Victor Gruen’s original shopping mall concept assumed private car ownership that allowed malls to be located on cheap but well-connected land on the edge of town. I’m told that in Tehran Bazaar you can buy anything you want but, in 2009, I was involved with an initial pitch for Tehran’s first American-style shopping mall. We […]
This is the Brazilian city of Sao Paulo. Some years ago now, I read that the city’s mayor had banned signage on buildings because he knew his city wasn’t the prettiest city in the world but thought people weren’t looking at the city enough because they were too busy reading it. Removing signage didn’t make […]
In February 2016 it was difficult to avoid the early proposal presented as Habitat 2.0. It maxxed the height to make mountainesque shapes that increased the number of upper level apartments with terraces. (The last thing you want is a building that goes from vertical to horizontal too quickly.) The image above shows how the […]
Up until around the late 1960s in Australia and New Zealand, the standard plot for a family house was the quarter-acre block, roughly 1,000 square meters. Typical dimensions were 60′ wide by 180′ deep (20m x 50m) but blocks with wider frontages were prized, especially if on corners. Houses were described as double-fronted or triple-fronted […]
Indeed. Alpha-planet Mars continues to excite people in ways Venus just doesn’t. People such as Elon Musk present colonising it as our best option for when life on Earth becomes too distasteful even for the wealthy. Driving this is the neoliberal mantra that the solution to the problems caused by technology is more technology. I […]
Designing an automobile is not the same as designing a building.
Frank Lloyd Wright and his Froebel® blocks are the main reason we associate building blocks with the nurturing of architectural creativity. The great man himself told us it was so. The blocks may well have been responsible for Wright’s early mastery of horizontal and vertical massing but they might also explain his persistent aversion to […]
It’s not just the Chinese authorities who are fed up with novelty buildings. I hope they’ve learned their lesson. I fear however, that the recent Chinese edict will only serve to drive symbolic references underground. Downplayed symbolism was already evident in, for example, Pritzker Prizers Zaha Hadid for ‘pebbles on a stream’ Guangzhou Opera House and Toyo Ito […]
I never expected to look back at the 1990’s and think it was a kinder, gentler era. Behind the Postmodern FacadeArchitectural Change in Late Twentieth-Century AmericaMagali Sarfatti Larson, 1993 How architecture has changed and how the systems for its production have changed along with it is an important topic but the book itself is somewhat dated. This post will attempt […]
It’s not just me who’s thankful the most egregious examples of CAD architecture will never get built, but it’s pointless being thankful if we’ve already imagined them. It’s entered our lives already and is already as real as it ever needs to be. When imagery of architectural propositions is debated, discussed and consistently reacted to as if it were real, […]
There’s a lot of lonely architects out there, beginning and ending their days alone. Nobody knows they exist. They look at their weekly calendars and see whole elevations of windows for lunches unlunched, meetings unmeetinged. They never set their mobile phones to silent. Many businesses have sprung up to help solve this problem and team up lonely architects with […]
