We humans aren’t good at imagining things outside our experience so it’s only human that we’ve now gone and built this thing called AI that’s not good at imagining things outside its training. A more fundamental issue is that we’re more comfortable with intelligences that look like us. Remember how those aliens in V easily […]
Just prior to Chinese New Year on January 26 came the announcement of the next Large Language Model AI assistant, Hangzhou Tencent’s DeepSeek. Attention immediately focussed on how it could have a performance comparable to, say, oldsters like ChatGPT using less powerful chips when we’d been led to believe that increasingly higher powered chips were […]
I have a problem with the terms ‘top-down’ design and ‘bottom-up’ design despite us all knowing what they mean and accepting the hierarchy they imply but, as long as design remains something that happens in stages in some kind of sequence, there’s nothing wrong with thinking of it as a process. However, top, bottom, left […]
In 1995 with too much time on my hands and living in King’s Cross, I borrowed the book of the title from Camden Library around the corner. I remember being amazed how someone had used observations of the buildings plus the suppositions of others such as Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc and Auguste Choisy, to deduce how Gothic cathedrals, […]
I’m afraid it’s some more musing on AI. Recently, I was given a copy of Neil Leach’s book Architecture in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: An Introduction to AI for Architects [thanks VpD!]. It’s not the only book on the topic out there but, with a field that seems to be changing so rapidly, I […]
In February 2016 I wrote about something called associative design and linked to this next video. I wrote that it seemed a genuine attempt to improve things in that its design decisions are shaped by the same variables by which the project and its performance are to be judged and you don’t get much better […]
Sunday evening last week I walked along the river into town. On my way, the first building to enter my eye was one of those LED facade buildings I mentioned in the Reading the City post. I’ve become a bit of a connoisseur of this genre. This next one’s my current favorite. It wasn’t on […]
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory is the new name for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) currently being constructed in Chile. The Objective When it becomes fully operational in October 2022, the observatory will take ten years to photograph all of The Universe it can see. With a field of view of 4° (or about eight times […]
Of this blog’s sixteen categories, SCIENCE hadn’t been updated since Fast Tracking of March, 2017 about the development of Japan’s Shinkansen (lit. new arterial line, a.k.a. “bullet”) trains. In the post I praised the attempt to make something better through ongoing research that resulted in incremental improvements. This is what makes it science, not architecture. […]
It’s easy enough to make a train go fast but much harder to make it stay on the track and to give passengers a comfortable ride. The 0 Series Shinkansen These are the ones Japanese remember most fondly and which so amazed the world when the Tokaido Shinkansen [東海道新幹線, lit. New Arterial Line; a.k.a. Bullet Train] connecting Tokyo and Osaka opened on 1st October 1964 […]
Waste was one of the ‘fronts’ Aravena identified in his opening statements for the 2016 Venice Architecture Bienalle. By now we’ve all either seen or seen images of the exhibition entrance features – you know the ones. You’ll probably also have been told those installations were made from 10,000 sq.m of plasterboard and 14 km of metal studs from […]
The Rocket Stove is the application of pure thought to solve a problem that affects the health and lives of about one third of the world’s population. Smoke from cooking fires kills two million persons per year, mostly mothers and small children. Stoves and open fires are the primary means of cooking and heating for nearly three billion people. In India, some 400,000 people die […]
Socrates disapproved of that new craze for writing things down. He thought people who used reed pens and papyrus to write things down no longer made any effort to remember. Despite Socrates’ misgivings, Plato did manage to remember a thing or two in The Republic. Xenophon was another furtive note-taker. He recalls Socrates describing the perfect house. oriented towards the south […]
Back in February 2013 I wrote about the ancient Persian yakchal buildings for making ice in winter and storing it until summer. These buildings used a combination of night sky radiant cooing in conjunction with the thermal mass and insulating properties of mud brick. I wrote Insulation: The walls of the dome were at least two metres thick at […]
