At one time we all either worked from home or in the fields not too distant. If you were in feudal Europe, your “home” was likely to be some kind of peasant cottage provided by the landowner so you wouldn’t waste daylight commuting. It wasn’t provided out of kindness. Housing provided by employers never is, […]
Around the world, coal-fired power stations around the world were often located along rivers because barges of coal needed to come upstream to the power stations built near to where the generated power was to be used. The current power loss in transmission and distribution is currently about 6% so the loss of early electricity […]
I’m glad I’m not a journalist expected to, at a moment’s notice, rush out an obituary summarizing and making sense of an architect and his/her career while often simultaneously introducing them to the general public. The architectural historians and bloggers of yesterday weren’t without their biases but the only responsibility of contemporary architectural journalism is […]
In Summer 2019 an article of mine titled A Shinohara House is a Work of Art appeared in Log #45. This spin-off post picks up the story halfway. It was the final year of my masters course at Shinohara’s “atelier” at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. One day I was looking through the plan cabinet […]
Rats! I didn’t win or even get an honorable mention in the2020 Architectural Fairy Tales Competition.I know, I know. I knowI shouldn’t have written an architectural parablein which everyone got what they thought they wantedand lived happily for a while. The Red Igloo Once upon a time, all Inuit people made igloos the same way. […]
The architectural media likes an anniversary and 2019 is the year we’re meant to be grateful for The Bauhaus and all it did for us. Last week I suggested the real legacy of The Bauhaus lay in legitimizing the idea of design as a standalone activity isolated from manufacture because once design could be valued […]
I remember MUJI in Japan from the early 1980s as retailers of relatively inexpensive and basic items of clothing that were either white or black. Only afterwards came things like the pencil cases, files, folders and storage units that are such a huge part of Japanese living but, even so, MUJI products remain difficult to […]
Two posts back, in Repeating Crevice, Revisited, I wrote If Shinohara was aware of having designed certain possibilities into [a house he designed], he never let on. Now I think about it, he can’t not have known he was designing that house to offer its occupants various levels of awareness of the movements within. Instead, he chose to present an alternative […]
Movies are high-res imagery of elaborate fictions and thus fit naturally into this new media landscape where everything is architecture. It’s not even necessary for a movie to be set in or around a building but, when a movie like High-Rise comes along with a lot of people in a building and one of them’s […]
Sheep aren’t indigenous to Australia but their rearing and shearing factors large in Australian history and culture. True, sheep didn’t turn into ecological nightmares like starlings, rabbits, camels, cane toads and such but still, they don’t touch the ground lightly. They graze much closer than cattle and overgrazing by sheep has been causing soil erosion and denuding landscapes around the world […]
Welcome to misfits’ 2015 Midsummernights’ Quiz! I know I know, there wasn’t one in 2014 but don’t worry – misfits haven’t gone all biennale on you. The quiz is only ever a compilation of oddities and curiosities that hadn’t yet found their way into a post. So go on – enjoy it for what it is! Q1. First up, what’s this? Q2. Who all-capped this on April […]
And so, as Japan’s 2015 cherry blossom viewing (花見) season draws to a close , it’s time to reflect upon what these flowers have come to mean to us. A cherry blossom is the flower of any of several trees of genus Prunus, particularly the Japanese Cherry, Prunus serrulata, which is called sakura after the Japanese (桜; さくら). Currently it is […]
In September 2006, the mayor of São Paulo passed the so-called “Clean City Law” that outlawed all outdoor advertisements, including on billboards, transportation, and in front of stores. Within a year, 15,000 billboards were taken down and store signs had to be shrunk so as not to violate the new law. Outdoor video screens and […]
I’m rediscovering magazines now that magazines are rediscovering architecture. I recently renewed my subscription to The Architectural Review and, in their The Big Rethink series of articles which I’ll have more to say some other time, immediately found what I’d felt a lack of. I’ve dipped into Blueprint once again, less rewardingly, but still better […]
