For Part I Following on from Graham’s first post on this architectural ‘masterpiece’, and which mainly talked about how bad the planning of the house was, today I’m going to talk about some other things that weren’t so great about this villa. As soon as it was completed, it was apparent that the house was […]
Hello again. I’d like to talk about ornament. But first, I have a friend who’d like to say something. You can find Adolf Loos saying the same thing in more words here but he did make two important points. The first is that ornament is unnecessary – he believed that ornament on buildings was the sign of […]
Previous posts: Part I, Part II Back to STACEY and, this time, with DAYLIGHTING & VIEWS. Daylighting is a very important yet neglected aspect of buildings. In addition to its benefits for energy-saving, it has huge psychological and productivity benefits for a building’s occupants as well. As for productivity, studies have shown that daylight can have […]
Hello again! Check this out! http://www.ribapylondesign.com/ Yes, it’s an RIBA-approved competition to re-design electricity pylons. Here’s all the good bits from the competition brief, deconstructed. Competition Objective The challenging target of an 80% reduction in carbon emissions by 2050, means substantial change in our energy infrastructure with electricity becoming an increasingly important part of our […]
These days, a lot of what you hear about, or read about on the internet as justification for why a certain building is the way it is, is culture and history. These two words are repeated a lot in many architecture articles that get published. They are usually used in the sense that having a […]
1) INTERNET ARCHITECTURE Unless a person either owns or visits a building for business or pleasure and has direct experience of it, they are going to have to rely upon images of that building to know something about that building. This has been the case for several decades now but, as with many other aspects […]
This drawing of a design for a small cinema by Herbert Bayer is a popular drawing in Bauhaus exhibitions and publications. It’s still in good condition after 85 years, there’s something pleasing about the layout, and it has some pretty colours. Lovely. Now let’s see what the drawing tells us about the building. The dotted […]
No. It isn’t the very fancy and expensive decorations or the Court of The Lions, and it certainly isn’t the spiritual feeling that one is supposed to feel when looking at such an enormous built object. Those are not the things that amaze me so much about Al Hambra Palace in Granada, Spain. What does […]
If he is remembered at all, the architect Hannes Meyer is remembered inappropriately as the “third” director of the Bauhaus. He was actually the second director of the Bauhaus. Walter Gropius was first, from 1919 to 1927, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was third, from 1930 to 1933. Gropius and Mies van der Rohe […]
Let’s start by agreeing that, at the end of the day, architecture is supposed to make us good buildings and that architectural education should teach students how to make those good buildings? Sadly, as I experienced it, and I don’t think that architecture schools are much different, it almost succeeded in teaching me how to […]
This post started life as an Amazon book review but, with BIG, it’s not easy to write a book review without writing an architectural review since book and buildings are both exercises in brand-building. The “brilliance” of this book is how it reduces architecture to easily comprehensible images. The “brilliance” of their architecture is how […]
Previous post: Part I I thought now might be a good time to bring some technical stuff again to this blog, and thus, the second part of STACEY 1.0; Energy & Carbon. LEED gives a lot of attention and weight to credits related to “Energy & Atmosphere”. The reason behind that is its large contribution […]
Bashar’s post the other day got me thinking “If architects are the new tailors, then who are the new emperors?”After all, to make a building all you need is a client with money, land and a reason for wanting it. Architects always follow the money and, after a respectful time lag so we can forget […]
There’s an old fairy tale in which emperors were the people to work for and make a lot of money in return. And if you’re really clever, you could get a lot of money by doing the least amount of work possible, or even by simply doing nothing, as this story tells. Once upon a […]
