One response to urban lives characterised by work and routine is to take a break from it all. Some people retreat to their country or weekend houses, others perhaps book a hotel or go to a timeshare in some foreign country. Urban living in Russia is also characterised by work and routine but Russians don’t do any of the above if […]
In MONOPOLY™ you receive money when other people land on your property. You get more if there’s a house, even more if there’s more houses, and even more still if there’s a hotel. The appearance of hotels on the board usually means the beginning of the end of the game. Not too long ago, a New York apartment sold […]
The first time a one-and-a-half floor apartment featuring a double-height space crossed the architectural horizon was Richard M. Hunt’s Tenth Street Studio building in New York in 1857. Designed specifically for artists, it had large windows lighting double-height spaces. Apartments were arranged around a central gallery space that was skylit and that served as an exhibition […]
A mat building is a building that has access, layout, daylighting and ventilation solved for a plan unit that’s repeated as often as needed. Variations are allowed. A quick search on the term usually returns the same examples. The Free University of Berlin, Candilis, Josic, Woods and Scheidhelm, 1963 Venice Hospital proposal, Le Corbusier, 1964 It’s easy […]
Key worker housing is what remains of worker housing. Key workers include nurses, teachers, police, paramedics, firemen – I’m not sure if firemen still are. Wasn’t there a strike not too long back? I hope they’re not privatised. I can’t imagine a world in which they were. Let’s hope somebody isn’t. People in these occupations are called key workers because […]
Serviced apartments aren’t new. In one of the older parts of Dubai there’s an entire area of these apartment-hotel hybrids. Just like a hotel, your apartment is cleaned and your room made each day. There’s laundry and dry-cleaning services, a newspaper outside your door in the morning and you leave your key at the front desk when you […]
The City of Mishima in Japan is twinned with Pasadena in California. Pasadena Heights is the name of a housing complex in Mishima and designed by Kiyonori Kikutake, completed 1974. I remember it from Japan Architect, the English language version of 新建築. Here it is now, still at 35° 6’53.68″ 138°57’38.37″ Its description on housingprototypes.org doesn’t do it justice. […]
In the first few decades of the twentieth century, the general unhealthy conditions in much ‘worker’ housing were a major concern for certain architects wishing to make life better for those people. Housing was making people sick, mainly due to the lack of ventilation and natural light. As we saw with the building featured in […]
This first example is the micro-compact home (2005) by Horden Cherry Lee architects. It’s been been doing the internet rounds for a while now, photographed in increasingly picturesque locations. The cube is about 2.35m each side = 7.15 sqm. You can almost get an idea what’s going on from these images. I think the TV might slide up […]
This first image shows how slaves were packed onto a British slave ship according to the Regulated Slave Trade Act of 1788. This document seems to be proud of the use of mezzanine shelves to allow the transport of more slaves yet still allow space for their entry and exit as shown in the longitudinal […]
Let’s first take a look at the mother of all microflats, Kisho Kurokawa’s Nakagin Capsule Tower. At architecturalmoleskine there’s an excellent post which will fill you in if you’ve never seen or heard of it. In this post however, I’ll only be concerned with how little space it takes for one person to live. At Nakagin, […]
1) INTERNET ARCHITECTURE Unless a person either owns or visits a building for business or pleasure and has direct experience of it, they are going to have to rely upon images of that building to know something about that building. This has been the case for several decades now but, as with many other aspects […]
