The other week I was in Madrid’s Barajas Airport Terminal 4. Designed by the architects now known as Rogers Stirk Harbour and Partners, it won The Stirling Prize, the UK’s ‘highest’ architectural award in 2006 so it must be good, right? After all, it’s not often one gets to see a real, award-winning bit of […]
The Misfits’ “English for Architects” Awards are designed to highlight groundbreaking examples of the English language being used to make shitty buildings and ideas seem not only better than they are, but fucking amazing! The Rem Koolhaas Prize: The name of this prize is in honor of Rem Koolhaas when he hasn’t had time to […]
This house and I go back a long way. The “Lincoln House”, designed by Mary and Thomas McNulty, was built in 1965 and featured in the December 3, 1965 issue of LIFE Magazine. I was maybe ten, waiting in the barbershop at the Epsom Avenue shops when I picked up the magazine and saw it. […]
In Rotterdam, some architects called Dogma have been serving up reheated Superstudio as their ticket to their day job at The Berlage Institute, but this post has nothing to do with them. Rather, it was this house which, as it happens, is also in The Netherlands, got me thinking about dogma and its meaning for architecture. The architects claim to have […]
First, a quick look of what The New Architecture of Austerity is not. Even before the worst of the current economic “downturn” became evident, there had been murmurs that, considering the amount of steel it took to build, the Beijing National Stadium wasn’t perhaps the most economical or sustainable of buildings. It’s old news that the […]
Twelve aready! Doesn’t time fly? etc. Born rich and in the Middle East, it’s never really had much to do apart from indicate a destination. It’s easy to criticise and it’s easy to disapprove but it’s actually quite an amazing building. This gets forgotten. I’ve seen many articles about the building as a hotel – its […]
Q. What links Love, Architecture and Religion? A. The answer could only be Antoni Gaudí (1852 – 1926), couldn’t it? Here’s a pic of him looking dapper, before he stopped caring about this-worldy things like appearance. Gaudí’s always been a bit of a strange one. In a 20th century history lecture or book, he usually […]
One of our earlier posts was titled “What’s the point of architecture?” and it’s true that many of our posts have mentioned shit shapes and stuff. Recently however, I’ve been wondering what’s the point of engineering. I’ll set out my thinking first. The Statue of Liberty is a good example of what I’ll call the “traditional” relationship […]
1) The Chicago School architects invented Modern Architecture by “expressing” the steel frame and by “getting rid” of ornament. NOT TRUE! The Chicago School architects were designing department stores and office buildings – both new types of buildings for new types of commercially-driven clients. By that time, steel frame construction had become cheaper and quicker. […]
Another problem with today’s architecture is the lack of an integrative approach towards designing buildings. What’s happening is that parts of a building component are designed without taking into account any other parts it may affect, thereby possibly affecting those parts in a negative way. I especially sensed this during my education at architecture school, […]
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In this post I’d like to talk about an exciting new possibility – the impending death of parametric architecture! When it happens, we’ll have Povilas Cepaitis, Luis Enrique, Diego Ordoñez and Carlos Piles of the AA School of Architecture to thank as they’ve developed an Efficient fabrication system for geometrically complex building elements. It was […]
Q: Which one of these four tables is the misfit? Is it Table 1, designed by Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret, Charlotte Perriand, in 1928? This table is called the LC6 but it’s usually known (unfairly to its co-designers) as “the Corbusier table”. You can download lots of nice photos of it from the Cassina website, […]
Today’s Guardian newspaper had images of the shortlist for the pylon competition I wrote about in an earlier post. Here are the six shortlisted entries. 1) T-Pylon by Bystrup Architecture, Design & Engineering Materials: Hot dip galvanized steel with a paint finish and as alternatives Cor-Ten steel, stainless steel, and hot dip galvanized without paint. What […]
