The Hong Kong Housing Authority has a museum that charts the history of Hong Kong’s high-rise residential typologies, and of how people’s living in them has changed. The time may come when we have to think of these towers as a resource that needs to be reused and repurposed as often as possible to get […]
This post is not so much a reworking of the 2020 post, Reconstructivism, but an attempt to put its ideas back out there in 2023 as it’s good to have a Plan B. We all remember the carnage that the 2008 financial crisis dealt the construction industry. This was painfully evident in Dubai with projects […]
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 […]
The walls are closing in. Around 1900 it suddenly dawned upon architects that the market for Palladian knock-off mansions in picturesque countryside was getting smaller and smaller. There simply weren’t enough landed gentry to go around. A crop of newly rich industrialists brought about a short-lived rebound in the late-19th century but sooner or later new […]
An automobile appeared in this blog only a few weeks ago when I used this image to suggest a nascent postmodernism was, in 1960, already guiding product design in the direction where what a thing meant or represented was more important than what it was or did. Since that post I’ve become more aware of […]
This post, written in early May, concludes last week’s Comfort Zone post. I’ve not been out much lately. The above photo shows my studio apartment in Dubai. I spend a lot of time at that table staring out the window, wondering what to write and, when I’m not doing that, I look at my walls […]
The core is a relatively recent invention. Burnham & Root’s 1891 sixteen-storey Monadnock Building in Chicago never had one. What building services there were, were all in the middle of the building but hadn’t yet coalesced into a core. Structural rigidity was afforded by the load-bearing masonry construction. Steel frame construction and the invention of […]
