If you’d gone to the 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels, you probably came back with souvenirs or Kodachrome slides of these next buildings. The Arrow of Civil Engineering – a collaborative design by architect J. Van Doosselaere, civil engineer André Paduart and sculptor Jacques Moreschal. Demolished 1970. The Philips Pavilion – is still sometimes presented as a Le Corbusier design but […]
Japanese people don’t all live in houses like the one above but how are we ever going to know? I left the recent Barbican exhibition The Japanese House: Architecture and Life after 1945 wondering what anyone can ever know about anything but decided to defer judgment until I’d gone through the catalogue. Pippo Ciorra told of […]
Last century, mechanical services and artificial lighting enabled environmental control to levels previously unimaginable. Eliminating windows from non-habitable rooms enabled deep office floor plans. Apartment buildings such as Mies van der Rohe’s Lake Shore Drive clustered non-habitable rooms for ease of servicing. [c.f. The Big Brush] With office buildings, reduced surface area allowed volume to be enclosed more […]
When we look at buildings or even at images of them, we barely register their shapes and surfaces before moving on to consider the next. Building alignment seems to only ever matter when it attracts our attention and one way it can do that is by thwarting our expectations. Why is Le Grande Arche not looking straight […]
If the history of the decline and fall of architecture ever gets written, it’ll mean we finally cared enough to learn from it, perhaps even restore it to being a noble activity. In that history, the name of Philip Johnson will feature prominently for introducing into architecture now-standard practices such as equating celebrity with worth and detaching publicity from truth. Johnson didn’t invent these […]
These useful building components have many names. They’re cinder block in Canada, the US and NZ, hollow block in The Philippines and the UAE, and besser block in Australia. In the UK, NZ and Australia, breezeblock refers to breeze which is another name for ash/cinder and not, I finally learn, to any associated cooling airflow. Other names include CMU (concrete masonry unit) although these tend to do […]
1. Since Inflationary Tendencies of March this year, I’ve been pondering this notion of architecture killing off good ideas by representing them. I was sad at first, because for a long time I’d believed architecture was a force for good and food for the soul but I’ve gotten over that historic hangover. 2. Our media diet doesn’t help. If architecture has become nothing more than a representation of […]
Bridges between buildings are a useful way of going over something to get people or things to a different building more quickly or conveniently. They’re like long corridors that make two or more buildings into one. This is most useful for certain types of factory. The Gosprom building opened in Kharkiv in the Ukraine in 1928 after a local architect, […]
Some of mankind’s earliest attempts to understand climate came from observing simple natural phenomena such as slope aspect. The slope on the left faces north and supports a different type of vegetation from the slope on the right which faces south and is drier. It didn’t take long in the history of civilisation to figure out […]
Let’s ignore dark matter – we don’t know what it is anyway. Let’s hear it for Helium! It’s the second most abundant element in THE Universe. So YAY! PARTY ON!, and etceteras. Helium is 24% of the mass of all elements. Most helium in the universe is helium-4 resulting not from the Big Bang but the nuclear fusion […]
You know sometimes I wonder if I haven’t fallen asleep and woken up in some strange world where new things aren’t invented fast enough to keep up with our desire for them and we don’t notice the blindingly obvious being fed back to us as innovation. I purchased the July 7-14 issue of TIME magazine out of […]
At first, my trusty filter bubble didn’t know what to think when I googled iraqi parliament competition but we got there in the end. Remember this from January 2013? Assemblage? Winners of an RIBA-run competition? You can read the full project description here. Here’s the highlights. A modern parliament building must embody the transparency between […]
The Empire State Building made a mark on New York’s skyline, but was no game changer since buildings had been getting incrementally taller for a while. SOM’s 1957 One Chase Manhattan Plaza was a game changer for reasons that can be easily understood from this next image. The World Trade Center was also a game changer. It wasn’t incrementally […]
In September 2006, the mayor of São Paulo passed the so-called “Clean City Law” that outlawed all outdoor advertisements, including on billboards, transportation, and in front of stores. Within a year, 15,000 billboards were taken down and store signs had to be shrunk so as not to violate the new law. Outdoor video screens and […]
