The Big Brush is the practice of treating apartment housing as 20-25 metre wide lines drawn across a site 3D. The 20-25 metres comes from the 10–12 metre maximum depth for a habitable room backed by a non-habitable room plus an extra 2 metres for a double-loaded corridor. Here’s Mies van der Rohe’s Lafayette Apartments. Detroit, 1956. Here’s SOM’s Lake […]
Opera was invented in Italy in the 16th century as soon as people had money and power and, for probably the first time in the history of the world, leisure because they weren’t constantly preoccupied trying to hang onto that money and power. And what did they do? They invented opera – a fusion of music, drama, singing and storytelling. […]
By “one wall”, I don’t mean this, clever though it is. Or this, much as I like it despite it going against everything misfits stands for. I was thinking more of something I found recently, in the book “Learning From Vernacular – Towards a New Vernacular Architecture” by Pierre Frey. It’s a house with a […]
I hinted at zoomorphic architecture briefly in a recent post. If Art Nouveau took advantage of plants for novel architectural stylings, then ZA did it with animals. The V&A exhibition is long gone, but the website lingers. Here’s that splash text again. Zoomorphic presents a startling new trend in architecture – buildings that look like animals. Animal resemblances […]
The Maximum Dwelling showed some of the ways newly rich Victorian-era industrialists and entrepreneurs spent their new money on building supersized houses to announce their arrival in society. No surprise there. Architecture is often how rich people do this. The world’s moved on though. Today, big and expensive buildings are how newly-rich countries present themselves to […]
Just as fire requires oxygen, fuel and a source of heat in order to exist, buildings require money, land and someone with a desire to build. These usually come together in the shape of a client. Minimum dwellings will no doubt feature again in this blog but, for now, let’s have a look at the […]
Don’t want to be a grouch or anything, but have you ever wondered about how many sustainability awareness centres there suddenly are around the world? And about how many of those are in sensitive areas and – how shall we say? – overdesigned? Here’s three. “The Sustainability Discovery Centre provokes visitors to discover where they […]
This first example is the micro-compact home (2005) by Horden Cherry Lee architects. It’s been been doing the internet rounds for a while now, photographed in increasingly picturesque locations. The cube is about 2.35m each side = 7.15 sqm. You can almost get an idea what’s going on from these images. I think the TV might slide up […]
Let’s first take a look at the mother of all microflats, Kisho Kurokawa’s Nakagin Capsule Tower. At architecturalmoleskine there’s an excellent post which will fill you in if you’ve never seen or heard of it. In this post however, I’ll only be concerned with how little space it takes for one person to live. At Nakagin, […]
