In last week’s post I mentioned Sou Fujimoto’s Wooden House to illustrate the intimacy I would want a Wearable Architecture to have. I included some diagrams. From the section below, I learned that the bathroom is sunken – a reasonable design decision given that many a small house has a sleeping area above the bathroom […]
In 2003 I produced a small proposal to fit several two-bedroom houses onto a small site somewhere in Kent, UK. I wanted to design only one house with arbitrary window positions so the houses could be rotated and clustered on the triangular plot. This is it. It could be a row house with windows only […]
The two main advantages of elevated roads come from them being elevated. One is that the land beneath them can be used for something else or even left as it is, and the other is that through traffic is not hindered by local traffic. The main disadvantage of elevated roads is also due to them […]
I’ll clarify what a mock mashup isn’t before going on to what one is. The 1998 Chips by Will Allsop is what I’ll call a mock aggregated building, commonly known at the time as a stacked building. The conceit found favor in housing developments because architects could say to nodding municipalities that it “broke down […]
Shikumen (stone gate buildings) are a housing type peculiar to Shanghai, and named after the stone gates leading from the street to a hierarchy of orthogonal alleys. The collective unit is called a li-long. As an subject of academic scrutiny, shikumen are well-trodden ground well picked over. Everyone will want to tell you shikumen are […]
The problem: to arrive at a circular configuration for medium-high rise housing that has 1) the structural efficiency of circular structures such as the Chinese vernacular Han (Hakka) communal house 2) cross ventilation to all apartments enabled by the two or four apartments per landing as in a typical floor of a standard Chinese apartment […]
A couple of weeks back I ended The Handshake House post with this layout proposal for a narrow Australian suburban block. It assumes a temperate to hot climate and Perth, the city I was thinking of, has just that. It’s what’s known as a Mediterranean climate characterized by hot dry summers and rain falling mostly […]
Handshake accommodation isn’t something that happens only in China. Many Japanese suburban houses have a boundary setback of only 50cm. Here’s one we know. There’s windows on the side elevations but they’re small and low down so nobody’s going to be actually shaking hands through them. And, still in Japan, here’s one we’ve probably forgotten […]
If you’ve heard about handshake apartments, they’ll probably be in Shenzhen, China, and in buildings built so close that occupants in neighboring buildings can shake hands from their windows. You can get the idea from these images. They’re intense, but it’s what happens if you want to solve density, access, daylighting and ventilation without recourse […]
Disruptive change is being touted as what makes the world better and this alone is sufficient reason to be suspicious of it, as well as the motives of those that say so. At the same time, and no doubt because of it, incremental improvements to known products pass unnoticed, giving people even less incentive to […]
The title is disingenuous, just as it was with Oswald Ungers’ House Without Qualities. That house had plenty of them – just not the usual ones. Anyway, here’s my plan. It looks cheap to build but would obviously be cheaper to build were it squared off. I’ll explain later why it’s not. I like how, topologically, […]
This one has some pretty solid inspirations, most solid of which is the architecture of Riken Yamamoto and its basis in what can be done to break the isolation of households and bring people together in some shared experience of living. The closest word we have to describe this is “community” and that’s a word […]
Architects spend much time organizing living spaces into fairly compact volumes that don’t require constructing unreasonable amounts of space that can’t be used for anything other than accessing those spaces with definite purposes. It’s possible to design houses or apartments that don’t have any circulation space as such, but if one has to travel through […]
Housing specific for certain categories of workers isn’t a new thing. Once upon a time we all worked from home if we weren’t out in the fields and it was in the best interests of landowners to provide housing for the people who worked those fields. This was known as the feudal system and peasants […]
