Skip to content

Tag: New typologies for new circumstances


Categories:

More of the same

More of the same
Post date:
Author:
Number of comments: no comments

Mario Chiattone was a Swiss architect who fell in with The Futurists. This is his 1914 Futurist City. He’s showing it’s the future by going for mixed-use superblocks linked by elevated pedestrian walkways on perimeter buildings bordering ground level roads futuristically congested with automobiles. This unit is then repeated X-Y. A decade later was Ludwig […]

Categories:

The Cost of Space

The Cost of Space
Post date:
Author:

I know it’s common practice in Western Europe, Japan and China, for residential unit listings to include not only the price but also the floor area of the dwelling. Some agents will even provide the cost per square metre so you can make your own judgment about the effects of factors such as location, view […]

Categories:

Headroom

Headroom
Post date:
Author:

Buildings with double height spaces have existed for as long as there have been haylofts, minstrels’ galleries and artist’s studios, but the history of making more efficient use of the height inside residential space is about a hundred years. Many of the first proposals were entries to the 1926 Comradely Competition for Communal Housing organized […]

Categories:

Holes in Buildings

Holes in Buildings
Post date:
Author:

Holes in buildings have been around for a while – at least since 1982 when Arquitectonica’s The Atlantis was completed and most definitely since 1984 when the building was featured in the opening credits of Miami Vice that ran for five seasons from 1984. I just read that one of the five founding members in 1977 […]

Categories:

Freedom

Freedom
Post date:
Author:

This is another of those posts from misfits’ prehistory, this time from August 1999. The description on the site https://www.tomorrow.city/a/freedom-ship says: “Designed by the engineer Norman Nixon at the end of the ’90s, the “Freedom Ship is a 25-story high megaship that is 1,371.6 meters long, 228 meters wide and 106.68 meters high. The vessel is too […]

Categories:

The Kitchen

The Kitchen
Post date:
Author:

In the oversized Victorian country houses of 19th century Britain, it was the custom for domestic tasks such as the preparation of food to be conducted out of sight of both family and guests but, in the Middle East, houses often a separate outside kitchen in which the maid roasts meant while, in the indoor […]

Categories:

Game On!

Game On!
Post date:
Author:

In my last post I made some observations on the project plan below but I had to ask myself what I would have done with the same building and a similar brief. From what I understand from the Architectural Record article, the brief was to get as many units onto the site as inexpensively as […]

Categories:

About Face!

About Face!
Post date:
Author:

The Active Band was the name of concept that gave kitchens and bathrooms priority on the periphery of residential buildings. French architect Yves Lion proposed it in 1987. Riken Yamamoto’s 2002 Ban Building in Niigata, Japan is a good built example. The photograph below shows Room 3. The thinking went that living rooms and bedrooms […]

Categories:

The Outback

The Outback
Post date:
Author:

Last week, the Australian outback briefly captured the internet’s imagination by the seeming impossibility of finding a 6mm x 8 mm dia. piece of highly radioactive material missing along a 1,400 km (870 mile) stretch of road. Even though caesium-137 basically screams “HERE I AM! I’M OVER HERE!” for 120 years or so, many people […]

Categories:

Professional Development

Professional Development
Post date:
Author:

This post is a summary as well as thoughts on two articles I recently read. The first was “Immersive Research on Public Rental Housing in Baiziwan, Beijing – Learning from Ma Yansong” by Jiajing Zhang of Gaomu Architectural Design Consultancy from December 2021 and the second was “Ideality as Motivation: The Social Housing Practices of […]