We’ve been seeing a lot of microhomes lately, at least in architecture-land where they’re a regular on the competition circuit and in the design studio. Microhomes aren’t the same as the small houses that are usually set as an introduction to architectural design in first year before the projects SMLXL each year. Because a microhome’s […]
The greatest advantage of terraced apartments is that each apartment can have an outdoor space open to the sky. The greatest disadvantage of terraced apartments on level ground, is that the lower apartments become longer and receive less daylight because because that long end is at the bottom of some light-well, or they receive less […]
A December 2020 Yahoo Finance article [thanks Mark!] said that about 30% of US malls were in financial trouble and that those that survive might have their anchor stores demolished and housing constructed instead. Since then I’ve read predictions of as much as 80% are in trouble but that was the first time I’d read […]
In last week’s post I mentioned Sou Fujimoto’s Wooden House to illustrate the intimacy I would want a Wearable Architecture to have. I included some diagrams. From the section below, I learned that the bathroom is sunken – a reasonable design decision given that many a small house has a sleeping area above the bathroom […]
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 […]
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 […]
The two main advantages of elevated roads come from them being elevated. One is that the land beneath them can be used for something else or even left as it is, and the other is that through traffic is not hindered by local traffic. The main disadvantage of elevated roads is also due to them […]
I’ll clarify what a mock mashup isn’t before going on to what one is. The 1998 Chips by Will Allsop is what I’ll call a mock aggregated building, commonly known at the time as a stacked building. The conceit found favor in housing developments because architects could say to nodding municipalities that it “broke down […]
RECAP: The first part of this post ended with an overview of how roles within the building design and construction industry have changed to streamline the process but with competition for control of the BIM model. This is not control for control’s sake but can be justified in terms of higher quality, quicker response to […]
Shikumen (stone gate buildings) are a housing type peculiar to Shanghai, and named after the stone gates leading from the street to a hierarchy of orthogonal alleys. The collective unit is called a li-long. As an subject of academic scrutiny, shikumen are well-trodden ground well picked over. Everyone will want to tell you shikumen are […]
The problem: to arrive at a circular configuration for medium-high rise housing that has 1) the structural efficiency of circular structures such as the Chinese vernacular Han (Hakka) communal house 2) cross ventilation to all apartments enabled by the two or four apartments per landing as in a typical floor of a standard Chinese apartment […]
Victor Gruen’s original shopping mall concept assumed private car ownership that allowed malls to be located on cheap but well-connected land on the edge of town. I’m told that in Tehran Bazaar you can buy anything you want but, in 2009, I was involved with an initial pitch for Tehran’s first American-style shopping mall. We […]
In Hong Kong, the Hong Kong Housing Development Authority continued to develop and deliver new housing for the population. Most recognizable of the various types is the tower block with a cruciform typical floor. I’ve been mentioning this since at least 2017 as an example of a stable typology that is difficult to improve on. […]
A couple of weeks back I ended The Handshake House post with this layout proposal for a narrow Australian suburban block. It assumes a temperate to hot climate and Perth, the city I was thinking of, has just that. It’s what’s known as a Mediterranean climate characterized by hot dry summers and rain falling mostly […]
