Following on from the cosmic theme of last week, we need to talk about Time and the ways buildings exist in this particular dimension that we’re stuck with. We need to do this because, even if we ever sorted out what Beauty was and how to create it in buildings, how could we be sure […]
Big news this week was the discovery of the Higgs Boson or, as cautious scientists say, the discovery, to 99.99997% certainty, of a new ‘state’ having an energy level of 125 GeV and seemingly consistent with what a Standard Model Higgs Boson is expected to be. What’s charming about the Higgs Boson is that it […]
In Rotterdam, some architects called Dogma have been serving up reheated Superstudio as their ticket to their day job at The Berlage Institute, but this post has nothing to do with them. Rather, it was this house which, as it happens, is also in The Netherlands, got me thinking about dogma and its meaning for architecture. The architects claim to have […]
First, a quick look of what The New Architecture of Austerity is not. Even before the worst of the current economic “downturn” became evident, there had been murmurs that, considering the amount of steel it took to build, the Beijing National Stadium wasn’t perhaps the most economical or sustainable of buildings. It’s old news that the […]
Another problem with today’s architecture is the lack of an integrative approach towards designing buildings. What’s happening is that parts of a building component are designed without taking into account any other parts it may affect, thereby possibly affecting those parts in a negative way. I especially sensed this during my education at architecture school, […]
Once upon a time, all Inuit people made igloos the same way. They made them out of snow because snow didn’t cost anything, it was there, they had a lot of it, and there would always be more tomorrowThey pressed snow into block shapes and laid them one by one in a spiral that became […]
Performance-beauty already exists in other fields of manufacture and production. Performance-beauty is about a constant and focussed drive to improve comprehensive performance. Nobody cares what microprocessors look like but there is a never-ending effort to improve their performance, eliminate their defects, simplify their manufacture, and reduce their final cost. Performance is all that matters. You […]
