It all started to go wrong with the Garden City. People may have had their own house on a bit of land but, rather than mimic the large landowning estates by growing staple crops on the estate and garden vegetables round the back, it was more important to miniaturize the gardens at the front, with […]
Architecture has had a love affair with prefabrication ever since Gropius’ conversion a hundred years ago. It never did become our dominant way of making buildings but the possibility was sufficient to invite him to Harvard and make his career while destroying those of independent craftspersons and carpenters worldwide. Such is the way of venture […]
Boarding houses are dwellings that can be lived in either as houses or hotels and it seems like they’re due for a comeback now that much of our existing house and apartment stock is either fully or partially rented out short-term to persons not a part of the owner’s household. Property and investments have now […]
Tall food is a nineties restaurant plating affectation that came and went. Whatever was destined by looks or flavour to be on the same plate was stacked as high as it could be. The tall food in the feature photograph has the following layers that are, as far as I can ascertain, from bottom to […]
Living above shops is so common in urban societies it can probably be regarded as a defining characteristic, unlike say a rural or village society where the buying and selling of things takes place in the open-air or at covered markets. I won’t repeat a potted history of living above shops. [c.f. The Vertical City, […]
One response to urban lives characterised by work and routine is to take a break from it all. Some people retreat to their country or weekend houses, others perhaps book a hotel or go to a timeshare in some foreign country. Urban living in Russia is also characterised by work and routine but Russians don’t do any of the above if […]
“Man’s own metabolism is a renewable energy source which he can use freely as long as he exists. It is obvious therefore that it should be exploited for the heating of buildings.” V. Korsgaard One defining criteria of a passivhaus is 10W/m² maximum power to maintain 20°C internally when it’s -10°C outside. Within a passivhaus, the heat […]
1969: Apollo 11 photographs such as this one were a new way of looking at Earth and making its inhabitants feel special, if a little isolated. They also heightened awareness of our planet being a self-contained bubble and in the early 1970s, something called “environmental pollution” was identified as a bit of a problem. See here […]
So what’s for dinner then? Over on prep-blog.com (Prudent Reasonable Emergency Preparedness) Thoreau has done the groundwork for how much land you need to feed one person per year. He allows 145 kg of carbs (55% of total calories), 35 kg per year of fats (35%) and 35 kg per year of proteins (15%) per person, and reckons that 4,700 sq.m […]
The UK is in two minds about large supermarkets. Mind #1. Mind #2. There’s nothing romantic about what’s replaced it either although some attempt faux-countryside or equally faux architectural-media stylings. Here’s an eco-friendly, sustainable supermarket designed by the CHQ Partnership. It didn’t stop the rot. And nor did smaller stores in central London, partly because the limited range of goods on offer […]
In Alicante there’s a restaurant named after it’s founder-chef Quique Dacosta Restaurant. You can find out more about Dacosta’s food on the excellent alifewortheating site from where these next images came. Here’s a taster. Dacosta’s food is pretty and tasty. The emphasis seems to be on excellent seasonal produce, which puts it in the same realm as Japanese […]
Over the past few decades we’ve learned a bit about how to satisfy our need for energy without screwing up the planet, even if we fall down in the actual practice of it. Reducing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is great but all the building rating systems, recycling initiatives, car pooling schemes and […]
It was hard to miss Philips’ Microbial Home when it was announced in 2011. It was everywhere. Like me, you probably appreciated the idea of domestic ecosystem, thought it looked a bit over-designed, and turned your attention elsewhere. Fortunately, the Philips website has full descriptions of the Microbial Home project as well as some generously […]
Corner stores are the opportunistic colonisers of underused space for our benefit. They’re the friendly bacteria of cities. Cities don’t work because of enigmatic signifiers, junk space or parameters. They work because of corner stores. There’s not much about corner stores we don’t already know, apart from possibly the fact they’re usually called that because they’re […]
