For someone who’s supposed to be not only be tired of history, but of history repeating itself, I thought I ought to get this draft out of my drafts folder so it’s no longer a reminder of my history of history fatigue. I don’t know how long it’s been sitting there, but History Repeating #1: […]
Last week was the first week of semester so my choices for this post were the next installment of Yamamoto’s book or something I’d already had half a draft for and this is what follows this preamble. I did see this book in Tokyo’s Kinokuniya but didn’t pick it up. Last year, Yamamoto had another […]
I’d like to belatedly thank Andrew N. Nelson for compiling his The Compact Nelson Japanese-English Character Dictionary although, now I think of it, I’ve never known there to be a larger one. I bought my first copy, now known as the “classic” edition, somewhere around 1976. The edges of its pages were black from years […]
I found one mention of Leo having enrolled in an engineering course and, since he graduated from the University of Arts when he was 30, it could have been anything from a foundation course to a first degree. In 1956, two years after graduating from the University of Arts, he opened an office (in his […]
A long time ago now, some people in Greece thought a column looked better if it had a base, a middle part that did most of the work, and another bit at the top. For quite some time after studying architecture became a thing, students have had to memorize the names Base, Shaft and Capital […]
Despite living all my life in a postmodern world where the same project continues with successive reincarnations as different styles, I still believe there was more to history than referencing it. Admittedly, the emphasis on referential facade design as perception management went a long way to enable the optimization of development gain. Apart from one […]
Venice has been an inspiration to artists and architects for centuries. Even today, the Venice Architecture Bienalle sustains the city’s symbolic importance for architects and architecture despite the city having almost no 20th century buildings. its most used one is the Venezia Santa Lucia railway station, designed by Angiolo Mazzoni. That’s it on the left, […]
Neighbours on Longitude 135° was the backslappy motto of Australia’s presence at Expo ’70 in Osaka, Japan. An accompanying graphic showed longitude 135°E pleasingly spanning the middle of Australia and the expo’s location of Kansai still regarded by many as the heart of Japan. Many Japanese thought the Australian pavilion reminded them of Hokusai’s famous […]
The worlds of architecture and dance don’t intersect very often and this makes me think they might move in sync, respectively countenancing the same forces acting upon society. Perhaps by looking at how dance has both changed and stayed the same over the past hundred years we can learn something about how architecture has also. […]
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 […]
What is the social cost of architectural fame?
It’s not like people suddenly woke up in 1920 in a world with machines. For centuries, simple ones using wind or water had been powering grindstones in vernacular buildings called mills because that is what they did. These buildings were the factories of their time. It was all part of the only system of production […]
The architectural media likes an anniversary and 2019 is the year we’re meant to be grateful for The Bauhaus and all it did for us. Last week I suggested the real legacy of The Bauhaus lay in legitimizing the idea of design as a standalone activity isolated from manufacture because once design could be valued […]
I can’t say Ludwig Kurz was representative of all craftsmen any more than I can claim Anton Hofer represents The Bauhaus but this post is not about individuals – it is about two different approaches to education, design and production that coexisted once. Ludwig’s Kurz’s formal education took place over the three winters of 1922-23, […]
