Many architects make a name for themselves when they design their first house and sometimes the house is one for themselves. The first known projects of Kunio Maekawa and Kenzo Tange were houses for themselves but the phenomenon isn’t unique to Japan. For example, there’s Philip Johnson who designed a house for himself as a […]
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 […]
Antonin Raymond is important enough to be called “The father of Modern Architecture in Japan” but he’s not so well known. He’s not “taught”. At first I thought he might be a misfit but this is a career case study. I’ll explain why. First some facts I’ve pieced together from the sources at end. Raymond […]
The leaf building in a non-urban environment, the duck building in a rural one and the pineapple building in a pineapple field are all buildings that have the shape of something that isn’t a building. We’re not fooled for a second however, since their size gives the game away and tells us that they’re too […]
You know how it is when you rearrange bookshelves. You pick up something and open it and before you know it, the morning is gone. The other day, I picked up Issue #46 of Log magazine from 2019. I remember skimming through it and the following Issue #47 about carbon form. I thought I’d revisit […]
“Taking [the 1920s], and its historic moment in time as a starting point, this conference seeks to explore the past, present and future of how we visualize people, place, cities and life. … It invites filmmakers exploring city representation, architects, urban planners and designers engaged in the visualization of buildings, cities …. and more.” https://amps-research.com/conference/visioning/ […]
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 […]
Sometime around the 5th of August 2020, I saw a reference to a book called Non-Referential Architecture and thought it sounded interesting but, as I was just about to leave Dubai, I never ordered a copy. A few weeks ago the book found me. The front cover tells us it was ideated by Valerio Olgiati, […]
An Architecture of Sharing is about the sharing of building elements. As such, it is about the density of human occupation and, by extension, how people can live in close proximity with sufficient comfort and maximum dignity. An Architecture of Sharing is about sharing the building resources that create those elements. It is about using […]
Chinese apartment buildings have a great deal of owner modification apparent on their exteriors, particularly in the case of the older ones. The preference is towards more useable space though it doesn’t seem to matter if this space is open or closed. One downside is that bathroom windows can become partially or wholly internal. With […]
As a way of comprehending a building, the sectional view is always regarded as secondary to the plan. Nobody’s ever said “The section is the generator!” or, even if they do, it’s seen as something exceptional even though buildings are three dimensional objects and a plan is no more or less important than a section. […]
Some views are expansive and profound. Most aren’t. I used the image on the left below in the recent Performance Anxiety post, and the house it describes from Associative Design, the post before. The collage on the right better describes why the view allowed by these high-level windows was so important to me and my […]
June to December last year was a golden time for the blog. Visitor and page view numbers were rising to approach what they’d been in 2018 before I tired of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and the treadmill of promoting. I continued to announce new posts on LinkedIn though. American reader numbers have always been the largest […]
For some years now I’ve mistakenly believed that all it takes is 50 sq.m of land to produce the amount of nutrients sufficient to sustain one adult human. I don’t know where that misbelief came from because the figure I now see is a hundred times that at 5,000 sq.m or just a little over […]
