milestones in the pursuit of better performing buildings
Japan’s first high-speed rail link known to English speakers as the “Bullet Train” but to Japanese as the (Tokaido) Shinkansen [東海道新幹線, lit. New Arterial Line], began operating between Tokyo and Osaka almost sixty years ago on October 1, 1964, the same year as the Tokyo Olympic Games. It was the realization of a 1940 proposal for […]
I know it’s common practice in Western Europe, Japan and China, for residential unit listings to include not only the price but also the floor area of the dwelling. Some agents will even provide the cost per square metre so you can make your own judgment about the effects of factors such as location, view […]
This post is not so much a reworking of the 2020 post, Reconstructivism, but an attempt to put its ideas back out there in 2023 as it’s good to have a Plan B. We all remember the carnage that the 2008 financial crisis dealt the construction industry. This was painfully evident in Dubai with projects […]
This post is a reworking of a post of almost exactly one year ago, in an attempt to find a better way of approaching the subject. It’s mostly the preamble that’s different as the manifestations remain much the same although some of my examples are more extreme. This is because an architecture of sharing isn’t […]
In my last post I made some observations on the project plan below but I had to ask myself what I would have done with the same building and a similar brief. From what I understand from the Architectural Record article, the brief was to get as many units onto the site as inexpensively as […]
Here’s where I left it in Sky Rectangle – a proposal for interlocking back-to-back apartments arranged in rows half-stacked and half-terraced, with both the apartments and access corridors illuminated and ventilated by 4m x 8m shafts open to the sky and corridor. In that post I mentioned how the images above are just my impressions of […]
The notion of served spaces and servant spaces has been around for a while in architecture and we accept this apparent opposition as a conceptual certainty. After all, what could make more sense than mapping an archaic but entrenched social classification onto buildings? The nomenclature is easy to understand as it mirrors that of masters […]
The Chinese language is the world’s only language that doesn’t have an alphabet. Each of its 3,000 essential characters has a pronunciation, intonation, meaning and writing stroke order that must be learned and remembered. It’s a lot. So I’ve used the English alphabet to organize some examples of Chinese fit-for-purpose and make it easier to […]
A few months ago I bought a new iMac. It wasn’t my first so I knew it’d be delivered in a plain brown cardboard secondary box as a precaution against opportunistic theft, even though this stops the inner box advertising the company and one’s smugness. In a masterful example of packaging design, the side of […]
Before we had design, those of us who were wealthy enough could have craftspersons design and make objects for our amusement and/or use. Not everyone had Russian Imperial family levels of wealth but aspiring households could have a tea service designed by a craftsperson and fabricated by them, somewhat impractically, from solid silver or gold. […]
Going outside used to be easy. You’d open a door and step forward and there you were! Sometimes you’d find yourself on a porch – which is sort of like outside but without the rain. It gave you a chance to put your umbrella up or, if you were coming back, to put it down while […]
An Architecture of Sharing is about the sharing of building elements. As such, it is about the density of human occupation and, by extension, how people can live in close proximity with sufficient comfort and maximum dignity. An Architecture of Sharing is about sharing the building resources that create those elements. It is about using […]
As a way of comprehending a building, the sectional view is always regarded as secondary to the plan. Nobody’s ever said “The section is the generator!” or, even if they do, it’s seen as something exceptional even though buildings are three dimensional objects and a plan is no more or less important than a section. […]
Bridges were the first elevated roads, allowing the landscape to flow uninterrupted beneath them. This was good for the flow of traffic and also for any rivers that might have been flowing through anyway. It’s usually easier to build a bridge than to build a dam, divert a river, or scrape away at the sides […]
