The notion of served spaces and servant spaces has been around for a while in architecture and we accept this apparent opposition as a conceptual certainty. After all, what could make more sense than mapping an archaic but entrenched social classification onto buildings? The nomenclature is easy to understand as it mirrors that of masters […]
The Chinese language is the world’s only language that doesn’t have an alphabet. Each of its 3,000 essential characters has a pronunciation, intonation, meaning and writing stroke order that must be learned and remembered. It’s a lot. So I’ve used the English alphabet to organize some examples of Chinese fit-for-purpose and make it easier to […]
The history of modern architecture in Japan is short and relatively well documented even though major protagonists such as Antonin Raymond and Bruno Taut neglected to mention each other in their respective histories. Kunio Maekawa, Junzō Yoshimura and Junzo Sakakura were, along with Togō Murano, the first generation of modern Japanese architects. Togō Murano travelled […]
A few months ago I bought a new iMac. It wasn’t my first so I knew it’d be delivered in a plain brown cardboard secondary box as a precaution against opportunistic theft, even though this stops the inner box advertising the company and one’s smugness. In a masterful example of packaging design, the side of […]
Before we had design, those of us who were wealthy enough could have craftspersons design and make objects for our amusement and/or use. Not everyone had Russian Imperial family levels of wealth but aspiring households could have a tea service designed by a craftsperson and fabricated by them, somewhat impractically, from solid silver or gold. […]
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 […]
This is an admission of an omission. For the three years I was at Kazuo Shinohara’s atelier at the then-called Tokyo Institute of Technology, I thought Kiyoshi Seike (清家 清) was running his own studio at the end of the corridor of the same floor of the same building. I used the Ōokayama gate to […]
Sigmund Freud is generally regarded as the father of psychoanalysis, that revolutionary circa 1900 idea that aimed to externalize and give expression to people’s innermost feelings in order to gain an understanding of them and, if not a happier life, at least a life less torn by anxieties and insecurities. The Expressionism of the late […]
The sectional drawing has all but disappeared as a way of conceiving, depicting and communicating architectural space. I think the rot set in with those CAD programs students like to believe “do it all for you” and that all one has to do to generate a section at any time is slice the model along […]
This first image is courtesy of Moon World Resorts, Ltd., a Canadian consortium proposing to build a moon-shaped hotel in Dubai. The image says just that. Moon-shape, Dubai. It could only say Dubai more if Burj Khalifa was also in the image but that’s impossible because moon building is exactly where Burj Khalifa was last […]
August 18, 2021 – August 18, 2022 This is the third and final week of The 2nd Misfits’ Triennale. It spans the above period and brings us up to the present, or rather, to three and a half weeks ago. If I’ve missed anything worthwhile in those past three weeks then I’ll find out about it […]
Going outside used to be easy. You’d open a door and step forward and there you were! Sometimes you’d find yourself on a porch – which is sort of like outside but without the rain. It gave you a chance to put your umbrella up or, if you were coming back, to put it down while […]
August 18, 2020 – August 18, 2021 This post covers the second week of The 2nd Misfits’ Triennale spaning the period including the Chicago Biennale, the Sharjah Bienalle, the Venice Bienalle and others, as well as Dubai Expo 2020. You won’t find any content about themes of pavilions and exhibitions, who was chosen to curate them […]
This list of memories isn’t ordered according to my memory but according to the year of manufacture and so it’s an unintentional history of materials, technology and trends over the past fifty or so years. Ahh the 1932 1227 Anglepoise desklamp, designed by George Carwadine! Circa 1975 when I was in second year, I bought […]
