milestones in the pursuit of better performing buildings
High-speed road interchanges have been around for the best part of a century now even though viaducts that allow roads to cross without intersecting have a much longer history. Intersections have been around for as long as there have been roads but the problem with intersections is that give way rules such as “Give way […]
Part 2: Infrastructure Changes in the economics of various AI LLM are happening fast. July 17 saw the launch of the Chinese Moonshot as a free, open-source AI. The full version will be available July 27 – tomorrow, for open scrutiny its claims. Here’s a link to some Australian hand-wringing, some New York Times commentary, […]
This post follows on from Thinking It Through (Part 1), Second Thoughts (a.k.a. Part II) and Good To Go (Part III) that follow the design of a small house at the corner of my sister’s property. Perhaps “Take 4” is a more apt title. This iteration wasn’t prompted by any change in the conditions but […]
A few bits of information. These past six years I’ve been embarrassed more than once for not having visited Hangzhou, so this recent May Day long weekend I wanted to remedy that. My list of things to do and see quickly became unachievable in three days. Also, in a city recognized as “the cradle of […]
This problem of efficiency of language conversion into unicode – and hence anything computer-related and especially AI related – isn’t going away. I’ll continue using the same Unicode Converter and pick up from I❤️U where I left it last week. It’s often the case that I❤️U2 is the response, so I added the newly-minted logogram 2 that […]
According to a story making the rounds a couple of years ago, if you asked AI to identify what the image below is an image of, the answer would be “apple” whereas any child of reading age could tell you it’s an orange with the word APPLE written on it. The glitch has probably been […]
One week on, last week’s topic of how the space for work should relate to the greater world was probably too ambitious. The range of things people are paid to do is simply too large, even if many of them may look the same as we sit at our desks and look at our screens. […]
They don’t always have to be supertall superslenders. We are in St. Louis, Missouri, U.S. and looking at a residential project called One Hundred, by Studio Gang. It’s the kind of thing I try to discourage students from dreaming up. It’s eye-catching in a scale-confounding kind of way but so much effort has been expended […]
Every subway tells a story of the history, geography, politics and economic development of a city. London had the world’s first underground railway with the section between Paddington and Farringdon stations opening in 1863. It was constructed along the course of what had been the Fleet River that, at that time, was little more than […]
At one end-of-semester presentation, a student categorized types of one particular object with temporary vs. permanent on the vertical axis and typical use vs. atypical use on the horizontal. I thought it would have been more objective it the horizontal axis was “used for the purpose for which it was designed” vs. “used for a […]
First of all many thanks to John Hill who alerted me to Brooklyn-based practice SO-IL and three of their projects. One of them you can see here. https://archidose.substack.com/p/architecture-books-week-22025 The next day I came across another article here, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2025/jan/28/so-il-tankhouse-housing-new-york-big-apple, announcing the same book (which I’ve ordered) and another link to another project underway. SO-IL seem hot […]
We’re up to Chapter 5 now. I don’t think the book is going to suddenly turn steamy but the first subtitle is 5.1 Housing for “Sexual Phenomena” – or at least that’s the first translation that came to mind. Looking back, we started with a review of how the houses of Ancient Greece had a public […]
At the end of the previous post I said the reason I think there are so many Japanese Pritzker Prize winners is that I don’t believe Japanese architects were ever that enamored and so hamstrung by the Western classical tradition to begin with. Japanese architects did modernism as well as anyone in the 1930s. In […]
• • • 3. Bureaucratic rule is spatial rule Bureucratic rule is rule by nobody The space that is society was economically configured space. In an economically configured space (i.e. space whose only value is monetary), all persons are of equal value as labourers. They are the people that work “in order to live” (Marx, Labour and […]
