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Category: TYPOLOGIES


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Headroom

Headroom
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Buildings with double height spaces have existed for as long as there have been haylofts, minstrels’ galleries and artist’s studios, but the history of making more efficient use of the height inside residential space is about a hundred years. Many of the first proposals were entries to the 1926 Comradely Competition for Communal Housing organized […]

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Holes in Buildings

Holes in Buildings
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Holes in buildings have been around for a while – at least since 1982 when Arquitectonica’s The Atlantis was completed and most definitely since 1984 when the building was featured in the opening credits of Miami Vice that ran for five seasons from 1984. I just read that one of the five founding members in 1977 […]

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Freedom

Freedom
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This is another of those posts from misfits’ prehistory, this time from August 1999. The description on the site https://www.tomorrow.city/a/freedom-ship says: “Designed by the engineer Norman Nixon at the end of the ’90s, the “Freedom Ship is a 25-story high megaship that is 1,371.6 meters long, 228 meters wide and 106.68 meters high. The vessel is too […]

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The Elevated Courtyard

The Elevated Courtyard
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In China it’s not just in Beijing where courtyard housing is being demolished because its density is relatively low compared to what’s needed. Even the three-storey high stacked courtyards of the 1990 Ju’er Hutong Phases I & II couldn’t deliver the density required thirty years ago without shrinking the size of the courtyard. If the […]

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About Face!

About Face!
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The Active Band was the name of concept that gave kitchens and bathrooms priority on the periphery of residential buildings. French architect Yves Lion proposed it in 1987. Riken Yamamoto’s 2002 Ban Building in Niigata, Japan is a good built example. The photograph below shows Room 3. The thinking went that living rooms and bedrooms […]

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The Outback

The Outback
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Last week, the Australian outback briefly captured the internet’s imagination by the seeming impossibility of finding a 6mm x 8 mm dia. piece of highly radioactive material missing along a 1,400 km (870 mile) stretch of road. Even though caesium-137 basically screams “HERE I AM! I’M OVER HERE!” for 120 years or so, many people […]

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Professional Development

Professional Development
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This post is a summary as well as thoughts on two articles I recently read. The first was “Immersive Research on Public Rental Housing in Baiziwan, Beijing – Learning from Ma Yansong” by Jiajing Zhang of Gaomu Architectural Design Consultancy from December 2021 and the second was “Ideality as Motivation: The Social Housing Practices of […]

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Microhome

Microhome
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We’ve been seeing a lot of microhomes lately, at least in architecture-land where they’re a regular on the competition circuit and in the design studio. Microhomes aren’t the same as the small houses that are usually set as an introduction to architectural design in first year before the projects SMLXL each year. Because a microhome’s […]

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Pasadena Heights v3.0

Pasadena Heights v3.0
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The greatest advantage of terraced apartments is that each apartment can have an outdoor space open to the sky. The greatest disadvantage of terraced apartments on level ground, is that the lower apartments become longer and receive less daylight because because that long end is at the bottom of some light-well, or they receive less […]

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Mallville

Mallville
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A December 2020 Yahoo Finance article [thanks Mark!] said that about 30% of US malls were in financial trouble and that those that survive might have their anchor stores demolished and housing constructed instead. Since then I’ve read predictions of as much as 80% are in trouble but that was the first time I’d read […]