Disruptive change is being touted as what makes the world better and this alone is sufficient reason to be suspicious of it, as well as the motives of those that say so. At the same time, and no doubt because of it, incremental improvements to known products pass unnoticed, giving people even less incentive to […]
The title is disingenuous, just as it was with Oswald Ungers’ House Without Qualities. That house had plenty of them – just not the usual ones. Anyway, here’s my plan. It looks cheap to build but would obviously be cheaper to build were it squared off. I’ll explain later why it’s not. I like how, topologically, […]
This one has some pretty solid inspirations, most solid of which is the architecture of Riken Yamamoto and its basis in what can be done to break the isolation of households and bring people together in some shared experience of living. The closest word we have to describe this is “community” and that’s a word […]
This building has a single flight staircase that passes by two entrance doors and two kitchen windows, one of slightly reduced height. It’s deck access because the stairwell and access balcony is open and can therefore ventilate and illuminate the inner rooms. This is important. People are trying to use a single configuration to solve […]
A few weeks ago I read that British department store DEBENHAMS had gone into administration and I started to think of other department stores no longer around. In the UK there was ARMY & NAVY, founded in Canada in 1871, but still with one store trading as of 2019, albeit under the name HOUSE OF […]
Architects spend much time organizing living spaces into fairly compact volumes that don’t require constructing unreasonable amounts of space that can’t be used for anything other than accessing those spaces with definite purposes. It’s possible to design houses or apartments that don’t have any circulation space as such, but if one has to travel through […]
Housing specific for certain categories of workers isn’t a new thing. Once upon a time we all worked from home if we weren’t out in the fields and it was in the best interests of landowners to provide housing for the people who worked those fields. This was known as the feudal system and peasants […]
New Mews (1/2) recap: This is a typical Perth suburban block measuring approximately 190m long by 110m deep. In the past it would have had perhaps sixteen single-storey houses. Now it has 22 but some other plots have been subdivided to allow up to eight houses on land previously occupied by two. Such subdivisions have […]
This post follows on from the Property Supplement post some weeks back now. HCS, an architect in Kerala emailed to say that the narrow gap between houses does indeed function as combined light well and air vent. The climate in Kerala is tropical with a summer RH of 95%. HCS said that ventilation issues mean […]
Stacking dwellings will create a high-rise building with only one rooftop but only partially stacking them will create many partial rooftops known as terraces. The people of town of Masouleh probably think of theirs more as paths or roads. The ground floor can also have a terrace and many of Edwin Lutyens’ houses have paved […]
Occasionally, buildings use only walls to enclose and define a space and have no need for a roof. Prayer Room at the Tehran Carpet Museum, Kamran Diba, 1978 But, if one sees the provision of shelter as the defining or at least the dominant characteristic of a building then it’s reasonable to expect a roof […]
Over these past few months, articles in the architectural media have been split between those that use our global pandemic to push their author’s agenda for architectural or urban change, and those decrying this by saying it’s too early to tell and that we should wait until things return to normal – which is itself an […]
At a Dubai design fair several years ago now, I attended a presentation by the then CEO of EMAAR, a large property development company in Dubai. EMAAR is responsible for Dubai Mall, Burj Khalifa and pretty much everything in the vicinity including a road known here as The [Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid] Boulevard encircling much […]
Up until around the late 1960s in Australia and New Zealand, the standard plot for a family house was the quarter-acre block, roughly 1,000 square meters. Typical dimensions were 60′ wide by 180′ deep (20m x 50m) but blocks with wider frontages were prized, especially if on corners. Houses were described as double-fronted or triple-fronted […]
