The future arrived last week in the form of WordPress with enhanced AI functions. I was not happy that this future downloaded and installed itself as a non-consensual update. The AI STUDIO button appears in the toolbar by default but disappears when you close the sidebar. I used the next paragraph to run some tests. […]
Since my Architecture Is Not Architecture post of three weeks ago, I’ve been more aware of designers wanting me to engage with something on some emotional level and of their unsolicited desire to create “stories” that resonate for me. As much as I’m grateful for being the object of their attention, I smell a rat. […]
This post follows on from Thinking It Through (Part 1), Second Thoughts (a.k.a. Part II) and Good To Go (Part III) that follow the design of a small house at the corner of my sister’s property. Perhaps “Take 4” is a more apt title. This iteration wasn’t prompted by any change in the conditions but […]
A few bits of information. These past six years I’ve been embarrassed more than once for not having visited Hangzhou, so this recent May Day long weekend I wanted to remedy that. My list of things to do and see quickly became unachievable in three days. Also, in a city recognized as “the cradle of […]
Achitecture loves a bon mot and the more enigmatic the better. Yangsong Ma has form in the genre. His declaration in the eponymous 2010 exhibition “Feelings are facts” had us stroking our chins. I made my peace with this fairly quickly since, on some level, all feelings are emotional truths but this is dangerous territory […]
The theory is that being able to reconfigure or otherwise allocate a space in different ways enables that space to be used for a greater variety of activities. This seems simple and obvious enough but still needs untangling. First, it assumes that different activities require different spatial configurations and this isn’t necessarily true because most […]
FILM In 1956, movies were mass entertainment all around the post-war world but output was dominated by the USA across all genres. I never knew that The King and I, High Society, The Ten Commandments, and Around the World in 80 Days were all from 1956 but it’s not important. It’s a mixed bag, but […]
In fields such as chemistry and medicine, statistics denote the reproducibility of effects and the validity of the model linking those effects with causes. Identifying statistically likely conclusions from large data sets is one thing this thing that, for better or worse, we call AI is good at. In the case of hurricane paths and […]
I fell in love too easily with The Story of the Interior. Having largely made up my mind what a unified and an autonomous interior were, I didn’t expect to have to raise my hand so soon after starting reading the chapter titled The Unified and the Autonomous Interior. “Two underlying principles of the story […]
What’s an interior? is a question that’s been nagging me on and off for oh almost 50 years. When I recently enquired at the library of the former Tokyo Institute of Technology, a librarian told me they don’t keep copies of master’s theses. Mine had the clunky title of Research Into Interior Design from the […]
It’s good to have a few things to believe in. Rather than some grand worldview, I’m thinking more of a set of observations that, over the years, help make sense of certain phenomena. Most of mine below relate to Architecture in some way and, perhaps because of that, only tangentially to How to live. 1. […]
If buildings are meant to be for everybody, then everybody is surely entitled to have an opinion on them and any aspect of them – goes one line of reasoning. However, trying to identify buildings that have a degree of public recognition independent of their degree of architectural recognition is like trying to detect neutrinos in […]
The 1974 building we know as Nakagin Capsule Tower was marketed by Nakagin Mansion Co., Ltd. as Nakagin Capsule Mansion <Ginza> (中銀カプセルマンシヨン <銀座>) or, more simply, as Business Capsule (ビジネスカプセル). I recently bought what looks like a newly-printed facsimile of the original marketing brochure for the building. Its yellowed paper is actually a high-quality photograph […]
Houses can have more than one staircase for a variety of reasons. More often than not, it’s to enable two different classes of people to not meet each other, such as in this house with its “front” staircase and servants’ staircases. There’s actually also a third staircase connecting the footpath with the basement and used […]
