I remember MUJI in Japan from the early 1980s as retailers of relatively inexpensive and basic items of clothing that were either white or black. Only afterwards came things like the pencil cases, files, folders and storage units that are such a huge part of Japanese living but, even so, MUJI products remain difficult to […]
Art comes with its own conceptual space observers are expected to enter. If this weren’t the case, then a person wouldn’t even know they were in the vincity of an artwork. [1] Boundaries exist to be broken but an artwork’s conceptual space is usually congruent with the physical space it’s displayed in. You can be […]
Tall food is a nineties restaurant plating affectation that came and went. Whatever was destined by looks or flavour to be on the same plate was stacked as high as it could be. The tall food in the feature photograph has the following layers that are, as far as I can ascertain, from bottom to […]
“Who needs architecture critics?” was the rhetorical question of the title but, as with most rhetorical questions, the answer wasn’t long forthcoming. We all do, it seems.I might have guessed for, the previous six months, I’d been continually reminded I was missing out on the full value of my subscription. Gradually, these reminders became more closely […]
This post is about buildings that look like flying saucers. First up, is Matti Suuronen’s Futuro House from the late 1960s. They say only 100 were ever built but wherever I go in the world I seem to see one in some state of disrepair, and I’m not that well travelled. Weburbanist has some ultrafab […]
I’m not sure which bothers me more, bad architecture or bad copywriting. Probably copywriting. It puts ideas in our heads. And closing our eyes doesn’t make them go away. You’d think bad architecture is responsible for bad copywriting but it’s the other way around. Architects think of what their press kit will say and then […]
First, a quick look of what The New Architecture of Austerity is not. Even before the worst of the current economic “downturn” became evident, there had been murmurs that, considering the amount of steel it took to build, the Beijing National Stadium wasn’t perhaps the most economical or sustainable of buildings. It’s old news that the […]
One of our earlier posts was titled “What’s the point of architecture?” and it’s true that many of our posts have mentioned shit shapes and stuff. Recently however, I’ve been wondering what’s the point of engineering. I’ll set out my thinking first. The Statue of Liberty is a good example of what I’ll call the “traditional” relationship […]
These days, a lot of what you hear about, or read about on the internet as justification for why a certain building is the way it is, is culture and history. These two words are repeated a lot in many architecture articles that get published. They are usually used in the sense that having a […]
