They don’t always have to be supertall superslenders. We are in St. Louis, Missouri, U.S. and looking at a residential project called One Hundred, by Studio Gang. It’s the kind of thing I try to discourage students from dreaming up. It’s eye-catching in a scale-confounding kind of way but so much effort has been expended […]
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 […]
In 2003 I produced a small proposal to fit several two-bedroom houses onto a small site somewhere in Kent, UK. I wanted to design only one house with arbitrary window positions so the houses could be rotated and clustered on the triangular plot. This is it. It could be a row house with windows only […]
I didn’t go out of my way to look for Otto Wagner’s Karlsplatz Stadtbahn Station. I just got off the train and there it was. And I didn’t seek out Josef Maria Olbrich’s Secession Hall but there it was at the other end of Karsplatz. A few days later I encountered Otto Wagner’s Schützenhaus (1904-1908), […]
Following on from The Uncompleted Apartments, this proposal is an improved configuration for extending the building into a nine storey building having two lobbies or a six storey building with three, both buildings having two elevators for 72 apartments. The internal stairwells now front the access corridor crevice and no longer occupy premium perimeter but […]
These are some semi-detached apartments in India. The surface area of the paired apartments and the gaps between pairs of apartments ensure cross ventilation which is good if you’re cooking Indian food. The semi-detached pairs are pulled closer together by the shared access node. The open bridges don’t impede cross ventilation and are observable in varying […]
I remember this building from when it was published in Japan Architect in 1975. It was called something like House with 54 Windows. I didn’t remember the name of its architect, Kazuhiko Namba, or that it was a combined clinic and house but I did like its controlled craziness. Like many other buildings of the time, it […]
Is it possible for an architecture to be popular and affordable? Is it even possible anymore to conceive of an architecture that exists outside the perceived status- and value-adding mechanisms of art? MUJI are giving it their best shot. For a start, their houses are not unique in the way that superior art and architecture […]
When the market for architect-designed private houses finally dries up it will be said in today’s world the private house is passée and anachronistic and no longer capable of conveying architectural meaning of any relevance. We’re practically there now and architects have no option but to cast their nets wider and embrace the mass-produced home as […]
Kenji Hirose (広瀬 鎌二, 1922–2012) graduated in 1942 from Musashi Engineering School and, after the war ended, shifted to architecture in a few simple moves. 1945: Naval Facilities Engineering Division1946-51: Tokyo Mokko (Timber Structures)1949-51: Masachika Architects1952: Founded Kenji Hirose Architect & Associates1966: Professor at Musashi Technical College Department of Architecture He designed this house in 1949 […]
French novelist Gustave Flaubert was unimpressed by the advent of railways in the 19th century. He thought trains would only allow more people to move about, meet and be stupid. It’s easy to imagine what he would have thought of the internet. [1] Two years ago, I unbookmarked myself from all architectural websites and have since […]
A vernacular of performance … Microprocessor research and technological application is always concerned with the pursuit of higher performance for the same or lower energy input, manufacture using simpler and fewer mechanical and chemical processes, the discovery of processes having higher degrees of tolerance, the elimination of ecologically unsound and toxic processes, the search for […]
Sunday, May 28, 8:00 am: I publish a post titled The Piano and The Double-Sided Apartment and refer to this next plan as “an embryo unité d’habitations.” I go on to say that, “the overall intention, the end apartments with their different orientation, the way the elevator lobby has been accommodated, and the lax attitude towards fire escape […]
Fernand Pouillon1912 – 1986 1912Born May 14, in Cancon, France. 1934Palais Albert 1er, (30 apartments, 2 commercial units), avenue Albert 1er, Aix-en-Provence, France, in collaboration with Henri Enjouvin. Pouillon was 22. 1935Palais Victor Hugo (28 apartments), avenue Victor Hugo, Aix-en-Provence, France 1936Groupe Corderie 25 (40 apartments), 27 avenue de la Corse, Marseille, France The fernandpouillon.com website lists the creation […]
