Thanks to Hugh in New Jersey and Mark in San Francisco for alerting me to some of the micro-living news the world seemed to be awash with last week. There was global incredulity over the 4,500-bed hive dormitory proposed for University of California – Santa Barbara. Already horrendous as an idea, it became worse the more […]
In February 2016 I wrote about something called associative design and linked to this next video. I wrote that it seemed a genuine attempt to improve things in that its design decisions are shaped by the same variables by which the project and its performance are to be judged and you don’t get much better […]
Indeed. Alpha-planet Mars continues to excite people in ways Venus just doesn’t. People such as Elon Musk present colonising it as our best option for when life on Earth becomes too distasteful even for the wealthy. Driving this is the neoliberal mantra that the solution to the problems caused by technology is more technology. I […]
I never knew Neo-Fururism had been a thing since 2007 so I had some catching up to do. [c.f. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-futurism] I did know that Futurism V1.0 had been an early 20th century artistic movement that wanted to do away with everything old and create only things that were new. The original Futurists were particularly fascinated […]
The problem is much the same around the world, whether Barcelona, Dubai or Crested Butte. Short-term rentals for holiday lets are changing the way people think about where they live. “Destroying local communities” is a fairly emotive term but so is the flipside, “Local residents sell out!” Rather than question whether the sense of community is really […]
First there was practice … and then there was spatial practice … but all spatial practice is not architecture. The machinery I’m going to describe at the beginning of this post does useful things like position stuff – in space, as it happens – in order for some benefit to be achieved from them doing […]
![“Everything is Architecture” [a rant]](https://i0.wp.com/misfitsarchitecture.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/00s.jpg?fit=300%2C200&ssl=1)
Physicists can rightly say everything is physics and chemists can rightly say everything is chemistry and we’d all agree that everything at some level is one of them, both of them, or some combination of them. Some undiscovered grand theory may prove them to be two different names for the same thing and, when it does, […]
In 1937, Douglas Haskell drove across the US and identified elements of a popular architecture. He thought Route 66 was okay. His 1958 essay “Architecture and Popular Taste” probed what people who were unschooled in architecture said they liked. Haskell has been actively forgotten because he believed in a popular architecture as a true vernacular architecture and not […]
Frank Lloyd Wright and his Froebel® blocks are the main reason we associate building blocks with the nurturing of architectural creativity. The great man himself told us it was so. The blocks may well have been responsible for Wright’s early mastery of horizontal and vertical massing but they might also explain his persistent aversion to […]
It’s almost twelve months to the day since I scared myself reading a 2013 book that, it was claimed, re-theorized Post Modernism. “FML,” I thought, “of all the things that need new life breathed into them, we get this one!” Anxiously watching for further signs, I began a draft. About the book, The Graham Foundation wrote [underlines mine]: […]
blagoustroistvo (literal: well-establishment) – site enhancement, including grading, road construction, building of communication, sewage, water, energy infrastructure and measures to clean and repair a territory, control air pollution, protect water bodies and soil, conducted to make a given territory habitable and adequate for the decided use, to create healthy and comfortable conditions for the population. (Technical Translator’s […]
The Type A apartment is a result of the 1928 study the Stroykom team of architects did to determine the potential and technology for smart, affordable and universally suitable housing. They focussed on adapting existing residential typologies to new realities. One typology was the double-aspect apartment paired about a landing and their redesign was called the “Type A”, the first […]
Structural engineers and quantity surveyors have always been core consultants in the building industry but their roles can often be performed by an architect if the job isn’t too large. With large jobs though, the requirements are too great and diverse for any one architect or practice to handle so it’s both inevitable and desirable to have some separation of […]
First of all, Thank You All and Season’s Greetings. Have you noticed how the end of the year is always rich with lazy content? Here’s the AIA Committee on the Environment Top Ten Projects 2016 Winners. Here’s Dezeen’s Top 10 Architecture Books of 2016, along with a gratuitous picture. Well before December’s not-entirely-unexpected articles wanting to suddenly tell us about Zaha Hadid’s […]
