Tag: the forces operating against a useful architecture

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For me, this linking of Brutalism with the Solomon R. Guggenheim is the last straw. There’s little point recalling Brutalism’s former role of applying economies of materials and the rationalities of construction to fill a social need. That all belonged to a time three quarters of a century ago when national governments were still concerned […]

MEDIA

Parable

April 12, 2020

how is architectural media complicit?, the forces operating against a useful architecture

Rats! I didn’t win or even get an honorable mention in the2020 Architectural Fairy Tales Competition.I know, I know. I knowI shouldn’t have written an architectural parablein which everyone got what they thought they wantedand lived happily for a while. The Red Igloo Once upon a time, all Inuit people made igloos the same way. […]

Motion Sickness

December 8, 2019

The 1970s obsession with “go faster” stripes on cars manifested itself in Australia with the Ford Capri and GM’s Holden Monaro. The stripes didn’t make the cars go any faster but they did indicate the vehicle had a higher-performance specification. In only a few years time, post modernism and signifiers detached from signifieds were to become […]

Space Merchants

September 15, 2019

The Space Merchants is a 1952* science fiction novel by Frederick Poihl and C.M. Kornbluth, depicting a future world in which industry and advertising are completely merged and working to market sham products to a human underclass called “users”. As I write, industry and advertising aren’t yet the same thing but they may as well […]

NEWS

Triennale Hang-over

August 25, 2019

how is architectural media complicit?, the forces operating against a useful architecture

The first difference I noticed in my recent ArchDaily bingewatch [c.f. Misfits’ Trienniale] was how less intrusive text was. It was now optional with a “Read more” link that, to be accurate, should probably more correctly read “Read?” Clicking it loaded the “story” as images interspersed with text mostly describing those images – the captions, basically. […]

HISTORY

The Will of the Epoch (2/2)

July 28, 2019

A smart city is a data-mining machine for living in.

HISTORY

The Will of the Epoch (1/2)

June 30, 2019

the forces operating against a useful architecture, towards an architectural history fit for purpose

Large buildings don’t build themselves. They’re always going to be the product of some well thought-out and scaled-up system of production. The field of project management exists to comprehend and control this system to deliver the required result at the appropriate level of quality, the required budget and the required time. I used to begin […]

HISTORY

1950–1965 Australia

June 23, 2019

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An Unfinished Experiment in Living is the title of a 2018 book describing Australian architect-designed houses over the period 1950–1965, and how they not only reflected what was happening in Australian society but created the grounds for wider changes. It was a time when architecture could make a difference – until it wasn’t anymore. Hence the […]

The Unsmart Home

June 2, 2019

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Late last year I visited the site of the Solar Decathlon Middle East 2018, held in Dubai. The overall winner was Virginia Tech with their FutureHAUS. Here’s a vid overview. Early on we see images of robots making automobiles, as if this is how those larger consumer objects known as houses could and should be […]

REVIEWS

100 IDEAS

May 5, 2019

This book "100 Ideas That Changed Architecture" raised questions about the ideas that define it.

The Homestead Myth

August 25, 2015

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Representing a myth a people like to believe about themselves is a sure-fire path to everlasting fame as an architect. Frank Lloyd Wright did it with Fallingwater which is not so much a poem to bountiful American Nature but to the pioneers claiming and taming it. Tadao Ando did it with his Sumiyoshi House that perpetrated the Japanese ascetic aesthetic myth we […]

NATURE

Vertical Farmwash

May 14, 2015

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When we have an architecture that fulfils no shelter need, it’s no surprise we get vertical farm proposals that satisfy no real food requirement. Vertical farms are not going to look like this. Ever. They’ll most likely look like this if they don’t already – sheds providing conditions suitable for plants to grow. Plants being plants, those […]

MYTHS

Architecture Myths #17: Genius Loci

March 18, 2015