1. 11 May 2008

    Garbage Warrior

    117 days ago

    Here’s an impressive documentary on Mike Reynolds, progenitor of the Earthship concept. 30 or so years ago he started to build houses out of trash: first tin cans mixed with natural cement, then incorporating tires and bottles. His keystone idea was that of a completely self–sufficient home. Harvesting rainwater off the roof, coupled with what’s come to be known as passive–solar to keep the place warm, small–scale electricity generation, and gardening for food. This kind of house covers all your bases. I’ve seen bits about earthships here and there (I’ve always taken an interest in the more marginalized forms of architecture), but learning more about these really fascinates me.

    It’s the perfect blending of home and environment, wrapping you in a microclimate that bends natural processes to your will instead of opposing them. I found a clip of Reynolds on Colbert’s Show, and he said something along the lines of: “we pick banana trees in the middle of winter grown with our own raw sewage.” This isn’t quite true—it’s grey–water that flows through the planters with the banana trees, so not quite sewage—but that’s semantic. Colbert was baffled, his eyes doubled in size, about 5 seconds later he regained his composure and ended the interview with one of his quips. But that about sums it up for me. I’ve always wanted to build up my own place out in the woods, and when I do I’ll be hard pressed not to try out one of these.

    — Garbage Warrior, by Oliver Hodge (torrent)
    — Reynolds’s Organization
    — Here’s a beautiful and recent Earthship being put up by Reynolds and his crew in Nicaragua
    — A pretty decent 7–minute feature from the Weather Channel
    — An equally long feature on an earthship in Normandy (in french)

    Reynolds used to be an architect, but his state liscense was revoked in the 90s. He’s recently had it given back, but fuck that, he calls himself a biotect now.

  2. 13 December 2007

    Architecture Without Architects

    Bernard Rudofsky

    267 days ago

    I’m on a bit of an architecture tear.

    A wonderful black and white photo filled book detailing that which really isn’t considered (but sure should be) in the modern world to be architecture at all: traditional, ‘old world’ buildings. Here I go quoting stuff.

    Vernacular architecture does not go through fashion cycles. It is nearly immutable, indeed, unimprovable, since it serves its purpose to perfection. As a rule, the origin of indigenous building forms and construction methods is lost in the distant past. 1

    The tendency to build on sites of difficult access can be traced no doubt to a desire for security, but perhaps even more so to the need of defining a community’s borders. In the old world, many towns are still solidly enclosed by moats, lagoons, glacis, or walls that have long lost their defensive value. Although the walls present no hurdles to invaders, they help to thwart undesirable expansion. The very word urbanity is linked to them, the Latin urbs meaning walled town. Hence, a town that aspires to being a work of art must be as finite as a painting, a book, or a piece of music. 4

    Above all, it is the humaneness of this architecture that ought to bring forth some response in us. For instance, it simply never occurs to us to make streets into oases rather than deserts. In countries where their function has not yet deteriorated into highways and parking lots, a number of arrangements make streets fit for humans: pergole and awnings (that is, awnings spread across a street, tentlike structures, or permanent roofs). 4

    People who have not yet been reduced to appendages to automobiles find in them Italian hill towns a fountain of youth. 37

    Niether the word arcade nor its many synonyms translate satisfactorily into the American language, perhaps because we have no arcades. Arcades are altruism turned architecture — private property given to an entire community. 67

    The disappearance of age-old pleasures and privileges is the first unmistakable sign of progress. Whereas less than a century ago every Spanish town and village boasted miles of covered ways along its streets, today they are disappearing fast. 71

    Pictures of a particular town in Pakistan show 2-walled towers popping out of every building with a diamond shaped ceiling at some angle greater than 45º – they’re all wind catchers, natural air conditioning, giant fans that funnel the air down a tunnel to the basement and then back up. 113

    “Give a mason bricks and mortar,” writes Jamshid Kooros, an MIT educated Persian architect, “and tell him to cover a space and let in light, and the results are astounding. The mason, within his limitations, finds unending possibilities, there is variety and harmony; while the modern architect with all the materials and structural systems available to him produces monotony and dissonance, and that in great abundance.” 151

  3. 10 December 2007

    Natural Architecture

    Alessandro Rocca

    270 days ago

    A showcase of real landscape architecture. Buildings/art objects created from materials right out of the forest. Completely different from what most people would call architecture, but all the same it makes you think of what the world would be like if we could all figure out how to live and work in circular palaces made of willow stalks transplanted into the german forest and allowed to intertwine into a multistory structure (Auerworld Palace, Sanfte Strukturen, p65) or darkened rooms with a built in camera obscura to bring the waves of a nearby lake, the tops of surrounding trees, the clouds drifting above, or undulating grains inside (Cloud Chambers, Chris Drury, p147). Would be cool.

  4. 07 December 2007

    Gentle Architecture

    Malcolm Wells

    273 days ago

    The best-known architects of the day create stunning forms and impressive details, but there is little substance behind them. It’s not that the architects don’t know better. They do. We all do, by now. Modern architecture is empty because we still lack the courage to face its consequences. 5

    Life without the courage to face consequences is cowardice, and life teems with it today. 6

    Wells asks where the act of paving over 100 acres of prime wilderness should be put amidst this list:

    • Terrorism
    • Hostage Taking
    • Skyjacking
    • Kidnapping
    • Assault with a deadly weapon
    • etc, etc

    I do know that we’re wrecking this country with out failure to face the consequences of our acts. 7

    Pretending that there are no consequences rages through modern society. We are encouraged from all sides not to look beyond immediate gratification. And nowhere, it seems, is this attitude more common or more heavily cloaked in hypocrisy than it is in architecture. […] But we someitmes forget that each line we draw can actually destroy life. 8

    “abstraction is what dehumanizes us” Robert Finch, 10

    Take away all governments and armies, take away all businesses and industries, take away all communications; take away cars, houses, cities, hospitals, schools, and libraries; take away electricity, clothes, medicine, and police; take away everything, in fact, but the green plants, and most of us would survive. But take away the plants and we would all die. That’s how important they are. 19

    That’s why our cities and suburbs have failed. We’ve created so much convenience and ease we’ve turned ourselves into an artificial people, with artificial values, who live precariously far from the roots of life. If you don’t believe it, just listen to what most people are talking about. Look at what most of us are buying at the supermarket. 20

    “the only treasure we’ll ever have is this incredible ball beneath our feet.” 33

    It isn’t possible for us to clean up skies and rivers once they get dirty. They can do that only by themselves. Our job is to manage wastes and conserve resources. It doesn’t involve skies and rivers at all. Once we do our part we’ll find that the skies and the waters have somehow miraculously cleaned themselves. That’s when we’ll know we’ve been doing something right. 57

    Every creature except man builds unobtrusive or hidden buildings. Every creature except man has solar energy as its sole energy source. Every creature except man recycles all its wastes, not just some of them. […] Imagine having to burn electric lights in the daytime! Imagine having to air-condition! Imagine having to heat a building artificially! Imagine dropping human wastes into drinking water! 58

    But is that all we want, just to get by? Isn’t that exactly the kind of standard that’s caused so much of today’s mess? We’ve produced a whole civilization based on mediocrity, on throwaway automobiles, on honky-tonk highway business, and on nonrenewable resources. If someone doesn’t stop us, we’ll go right on producing it. 60

    As a species we have an almost criminal record of land destruction on this planet, and I feel at times as if the best solution to the environmental mess would be some kind of catastrophe great enough to eliminate all human life. But in my saner moments I know there is catastrophe enough already.

    The 26 acres of buildings and blacktop that make up that shopping center pour 600,000 gallons into the pipe every time an inch of rain falls. 67

    [Our cities] drink diluted sewage and throw away their rainwater. 68

    We look with admiration at the soaring glass walls and never smell all the sewage, never feel all the hear losses, never see all the paper being consumed behind those sheer facades. Our capacity for self-delusion seems unbounded, and the crises always catch us unawares. 87

    Emphasis mine.

    A paving moratorium doesn’t sound like a bad idea… 90

    It’s hard to imagine a future society that might treat land as shabbily as we treat it. We’ve got to change in order to survive, not by setting aside areas to be spared from our shortsightedness, but by making all land destruction a crime. 95

    We feel obliged to fill time. If there is nothing at hand to fill it with, then we manufacture filler. (Just look how we spend our days.) Menwhile, the most beautiful world we’ll ever know slides deeper into trouble. Four billion of us, simply by living here, are greasing its skids — four billion of us, all serving ourselves first. Statistically there seems to be no hope at all. No government, no religion, certainly no new architecture, is going to set things right. Even a sudden switch to the most enlightened, the gentlest, of architectures would make only a small dent in the overall problem.

  5. 09 October 2007

    Castle

    David Macaulay

    332 days ago

    Taking a look at a castle getting built. A children’s book without much plot, but tremendous illustrations and a fun look at an imaginary castle.

    I got it to read for a french research paper that’s due thursday. I haven’t yet managed to start the paper, but I read these 80 pages and skimmed through a few other books. Wish me luck.

  6. 30 November 2006

    The Nature of Order Book 2: The Process of Creating Life

    Christopher Alexander

    645 days ago

    Architects are much too concerned with the design of the world (its static structure), and not yet concerned enough with the design of the generative processes that create the world (its dynamic structure). 4

    Real kindness is something quite different, something valuable in itself. It is a true process, not guided by the the grasp for a goal, but guided by the minute-to-minute necessity of caring, dynamically, for the feelings and well-being of another. This is not trivial, but deep; sincerely related to human feeling; and not predictable in its end-result, because the end-result is not a goal. Unlike the goal-oriented picture, which is imposed intellectually on our substance as persons, real kindness is a process true to our essential human instinct and to our knowledge of what it means to be a person. But the machine-age view showed a process like kindness as being oriented toward a goal, just as every machine too has its purpose — it’s goal, what it is intended to produce. 9

    The Principle of Least Action, 37: The principle says that the evolution of any dynamic system will always follow the path of least work.

    Under these circumstances, as layer upon layer of smooth unfolding takes place, what develops is a system of centers which is stronger, crustier, and more imbricated, and in which the centers (at first hundreds, then thousands, or tens of thousands) all reinforce and intensify each other. 65

    This, I believe, is an essential model which teaches us the real meaning of living structure, and which shows us these phenomena as naturally existing phenomena of beauty which will occur without effort in any world where the wholeness is allowed to unfold smoothly and truthfully, without disturbing previously existing centers. Once this is clear, we shall then have a vision of the world in which the world itself — all of it — animals, plants, mountains, rivers, buildings, roads, terraces, rooms, and windows — is part of a single system and a single way of understanding. 83

    Thus the world has entered a new phase. What is made, what is built now, what develops in the world, is governed by images and rules. It is no longer automatically governed by the existing wholeness. It is now governed by what we decide. 109

    The essence of successful unfolding is that form develops step by step, and that the building as a whole then emerges, coherent, organized. The success if this process depends, always, on sequence. A building design can unfold successfully only when its features “crystallize out” in a proper order. 129

    It goes on like that. It is not complicated, not pretentious, but simple and obvious. It is just common sense. 130

    Thus what I have referred to as the “rough, rambling” quality of so much that is good in the environment, comes from the light-hearted yet profound adaptation which such a simple stepwise process encourages, and which a more formal or controlled design process cannot achieve. 171

    Instead of using plans, design, and so on, I shall argue that we must instead use generative processes. Generative processes tell us what to do, what actions to take, step by step, to make buildings and building designs unfold beautifully, rather than detailed drawings which tell us what the end-result is supposed to be. 176

    *All* the well-ordered complex systems we know in the world, all those anyway that we view as highly successful, are generated structures, not fabricated structures. 180

    The step-by-step approach works. The all-or-nothing approach does not work. THis is the secret of biological evolution. During the course of evolution, the adaptation of the thousands and millions of variables that must occur to make one successful organism happens step-by-step, essentially one gene at a time. That is what makes evolution possible. It would be impossible for nature to “design” a system as complex as any organism all at once. 237

    Butterfly effect, 241: If we examine a complex natural system evolving, each next stage of its evolution depends on its previous stage. Mechanistic 19th-century science created a thought-model in which the next stage would be easily predictable from the previous stage. But it turns out that the world is not like the mechanical thought-model. More sophisticated discoveries have made it clear that in a complex system the next stage is dependent on the current configuration of the whole, which in turn may depend on subtle minutiae in the history of the previous wholes, so “reave-like” that there is no way to predict the path of the emerging system accurately ahead of time.

    To create a living world, successfully, we must again find ways of making all building processes move forward in this experimental, responsive fashion. That on thing alone, as a kind of bedrock for all design and all planning and all building, will change the world. 246

    What steps do you take, in what order? The most basic instruction I can give you as a guide for a living process, is that you move with certainty. That means, you take small steps, one at a time, deciding only what you know. You try never to take a step which is a guess or a “why don’t we try this?” Large scale trial-and-error, shots in the dark, simply do not work. Rather, you move by slow, small decisions, deciding one thing, getting sure about it, and then moving on.

    ...

    When I say that you should move in small decisions, I do not mean that the decisions should be small in physical scale. Rather, I mean that the content of each decision should be limited to a particular subject, to some feature of the design, disconnected from other matters, and floating, to an extent, by itself. 258

    We should run through the possibilities very fast, and reject most of them. If we do accept one, we should accept it, reluctantly, only when we finally encounter something for which no good reason presents itself to reject it, which appears genuinely wonderful to us, and which demonstrably makes the feeling of the whole become more profound. 258

    The crux of every design process lies in finding the generative sequence for that design, and making sure that sequence is the right one for the job. [...]

    Another way of saying the same thing is to observe that for many people, perhaps the most difficult thing of all in understanding living process, and in getting a proper sequence for the unfolding of the whole, is reconciling oneself to the idea of doing one thing at a time. 317

    It is only in its uniqueness to unique conditions, made necessary by find adaptation, that anything takes on living form. This is true to such an extent that if the structure of uniqueness at every part does not occur within a structure, we can be sure that it is not an unfolded whole, not a living structure at all. 324

    Just make it nice at every spot. 337

    In any living process, or any process of design or making, the way forward, the next step which is more structure-enhancing, is that step which most intensifies the feeling of the emerging whole. 371

    What matters is that the building — the room, the canyon, the paingting, the ornament, the garden — as they are created, send profound feeling back towards us. 372

    What I am saying then, is that before making anything, large or small, and before each step in the process of making it — before each step — we must be able to feel its emotional substance. 383

    The idea that a building becomes more “organic” if it has a more complex form, even when based on notions of the interior organization, is almost always wrong. 422

    Simplicity: making the essential in life come forward, and allowing the inessential to be laid aside. 462

    To understand the idea that the symmetries in a structure are “just right,” consider, for example, the flow of electricity in two parallel wires. Other things being equal, the current will flow equally in the two wires. Why is this? If we want to, we can invoke some rule like Ohm’s law or the principle of least action, to show why the wires carry the same current. But the deepest explanation, the most profound one, is simply this: There is no reason for the two wires to carry different currents, because the situation is symmetrical. Therefore, they carry the same current. In the absence of any reason, thing distribute themselves symmetrically. Asymmetries occur only where there are reasons powerful enough to generate them. 472

    ...the lack of need for “image,” again makes it possible for people to do just what is required, and nothing else. 478

    In the 20th century we assumed that to be simple is to use drastic geometric shapes lacking in structure. Yet nature teaches us that what is truly simple — a waterfall say — is vastly complex — as a structure — and yet vastly simple in its essence. Thus we must strive for something which is utterly simple, in the sense that there is nothing unwanted there, nothing extra. At the same time we know that if we succeed in being truly simple, we reach a find filigree of level upon levels in which every part is unique, each adapted to the one unique spot in the world where it lies. 489

    Frederick Taylor, mentioned 515.

    The traditional process of the architect then, what is it? [...] Making, designing, building, helping. 560

    The idea that feeling itself can become both criterion and instrument – that what is done, no matter how large or how small, can become personal, connected to the personal self of all human beings – and that this process then opens the door to a new form of society. That is truly revolutionary. That can shake the world. 567

    What I do know, and am certain of, is that the society of the future, the long future of men and women on our planet, will – must – inevitably be carried forward by this kind of process which allows the nourishment of the individual to happen at the same time that vast, and highly technical developments occur. 569

    It is the vision of a future living Earth that draws me on. Inspired by a throughly new view of structure, feuled by a view which sees living process as the origin of all life, this allows us to contemplate, for the first time, the idea that one day such living process will cover and completely generate, in biological fashion, the natural and human-made and built environment that we may ultimately learn to call our living Earth. 570

  7. 29 July 2006

    Brilliant Orange

    David Winner

    769 days ago

    A look into the synthesis of Dutch culture, football, and design. A few months ago one of the guys at work mentioned it, and when I saw it again mentioned here there was no stopping me telling the friendly librarians to send it my way. Centered around the freestyle, elegant, beautiful style of Netherlands football from the glory days, Winer looks at how that philosophy merges with the rest of the Dutch world. Lots of talk about Soccer and Design, two good hooks for me.

    Pieter Jansz Saenredam (59), post renaissance dutch painter. Wow, find Interior of the Church of St Bavo in Haarlem and take a look at it..

    Hollandse Velden (62), Hans Van der Meer on photography:

    Football is a game of space So why should you leave the space out? Every Monday in the newspapers you see the same stupid, boring close-ups taken from behind the goals with long telephoto lenses which distort the space. Those pictures show you football situations but you have no idea what they mean. Two players fight for the ball. So what? Where on the pitch are they? IN the 1950s, we had different pictures, more interesting photographs of the crowd, wide-angle pictures of the game. The close-ups tell you so little. When the sports photography archives are opened in a hundred years, there will be a whole part of the history of the game missing because all the interesting little things around the pitch were simply not photographed. 64

    You can’t rationalize it. It’s like driving a car. That is also about being part of a system larger then you… the car becomes you. You can only drive it when you don’t know the rules any more, when you forget everything they taught you. Every time you turn a corner, you don’t get out of the car to measure the curves and then get back into the car. You do everything blind because of the system, the road and the other cars, which are part of the system too… And that’s the moment when you are ‘in form’ in both senses. It feels good and there’s this whole hectic feeling of extension into the world this is being “informed.” Lars Spuybroek (architect), 71

    We played with anything as long as it was round – rolled up papers tied with string, anything. Some people’s parents had money and could get hold of a proper ball, but mostly it was tennis balls. You develop great technique like that. The ground was hard, so you didn’t want to fall because it hurt; so you have good balance. And the game was very quick because the hard ground makes the game quicker. No one ever told us how to play. It was all natural. Arnold Muhren, 119

    I’ve always wanted to con kids into playing soccer with a tennis ball, I kick them around my house and play keep away with the dogs using only my feet, and it’s good fun. But something about having fields and goals makes it hard to use tennis balls, and I’ve never even played soccer in the street. Goddamn privilege.

    Brazil, sadly, is no longer swinging and flaming. I see defenders boot the ball away shamelessly. Holland must never play like that. If we did, people would murder me, and they would be right to do so. Guus Hiddink, 149

    Holland v. Italy, Argentia ‘78: Arie Haan 163 (Whenever a specific goal came under discussion, I checked for it on youtube or google video, and it would be there.)

    I think it is very Dutch to look for a simple solution. And the biggest thrill in our work is to find an even simpler solution. That is what we like. In the end the most satisifying solution is the one where you have cleared everything away and there is no solution at all any more but, at the same time, the problem has been solved. That’s the nicest way of doing it. Benthem, 237-8

  8. 01 June 2006

    827 days ago

    BLDGBLOG: Portable entryways

    Stairways to nothing. Stairways to everything?

    via Kjell Olsen827 days ago

  9. 15 April 2006

    Notes on the Synthesis of Form

    Christopher Alexander

    874 days ago

    Alexander lays out a system for designing complex forms, taking into account that just the human brain is completely incapable of such a task.

    His system is a graph of design considerations organized hierarchically to minimize interference between individual subsets of the graph. When subsets are sufficiently decoupled, they will come to functional equilibrium independently of the entire system, allowing the form being designed to be created and fulfill it’s requirements quickly.

    Alexander lays out two traditions of design: the unselfconscious, and the selfconscious. The unselfconscious builder acts within a complete system of design, taught to him by means of example and by hand. The selfconscious is today’s architect – taught in school and putting his reputation on the line, trying to be new and different, with each project undertaken.

    The Mousgoum cannot afford, as we do, to regard maintenance as a nuisance which is best forgotten until it is time to call the local plumber. It is in the same hands as the building operation itself, and its exigencies are as likely to shape the form as those of the initial construction. 31

    I shall call a culture unselfconscious if its form-making is learned informally, through imitation and correction. And I shall call a culture selfconscious if its form-making is taught academically, according to explicit rules. 36

    On the unconscious:

    No complex adaptive system will succeed in adapting in a reasonable amount of time unless the adaptation can proceed subsystem by subsystem, each subsystem relatively independent of the others. 41

    Closely associated with this immediacy is the fact that the owner is his own builder, that the form-maker not only makes the form but lives in it. Indeed, not only is the man who lives in the form the one who made it, but there is a special closeness of contact between man and form which leads to constant rearrangement of unsatisfactory detail, constant improvement. The man, already responsible for the original shaping of the form, is also alive to its demands while he inhabits it. And anything which needs to be changed is changed at once. 49

    This is the second crucial feature of the unselfconscious system’s form-production. Failure and correction go side by side. There is no deliberation in between the recognition of a failure and the reaction to it. 50

    Rigid tradition and immediate action may seem contradictory. But it is the very contrast between these two which makes the process self-adjusting. 52

    The forms produced in such a system are not the work of individuals, and their success does not depend on ant one man’s artistry, but only on the artist’s place within the process. 59

    On the conscious:

    With the invention of a teachable discipline called “architecture,” the old process of making form was adulterated and its chances of success destroyed. 58

    To achieve in a few hours at the drawing board what once took centuries of adaptation and development, to invent a form suddenly which clearly fits its context – the extent of the invention necessary is beyond the average designer. 59

    It isn’t that the designer sucks, it’s that he pretends not to suck. Which makes him suck all the more.

    Language gets in the way of our reckoning with a design problem:

    But once these concrete influence are represented symbolically in verbal terms, and these symbolic representations or names subsumed under larger and still more abstract categories to make them amenable to thought, they begin seriously impair out ability to see beyond them. 69

    Caught in a net of language of our own invention, we overestimate the language’s impartiality. Each concept, at the time of its invention no more then a concise way of grasping many issues, quickly becomes a precept. We take the step from description to criterion too easily, so that what is at first a useful tool becomes a bigoted preoccupation. 70

    In this fashion the selfconscious individual’s grasp of problems is constantly misled. His concepts and categories, besides being arbitrary and unsuitable, are self-perpetuating. Under the influence of concepts, he not only does things from a biased point of view, but sees them biasedly as well. The concepts control his conception of fit and misfit – until in the end he sees nothing but deviations from his conceptual dogmas, and loses not only the urge but even the mental opportunity to frame his problems more appropriately. 70

    We can’t get out from under ourselves, we’re completely self absorbed by nature. We’re so good, who would even want to deviate from his conceptual dogmas. So?

    The dilemma is simple. As time goes on the designer gets more and more control over the process of design. But as he does so, his efforts to deal with the increasing cognitive burden actually make it harder and harder for the real casual structure of the problem to express itself in the process 73

    If theory cannot be expected to invent form, how is it likely to be useful to a designer? 75

    Alexander introduces his program as a layer in between the subjective selfconscious interpretation of a design problem and it’s application to a form. The creation of an interrelated set of specifications (graph theory) reduced to it’s simplest and least coupled form (a tree), can mediate our bias toward a problem and lead to the best solution.

    Form and requirement diagrams: form diagram represents what an object will look like, a requirement diagram represents how it will work. Separate the two aren’t of any help to designing the solution to a problem.

    The solution of a design problem is really only another effort to find a unified description. The search for realization through constructive diagrams is an effort to understand the required form so fully that there is no longer a rift between its functional specification and the shape it takes. 90

    The unified description is the merger of form and requirement, representing all the information pertinent to solving the problem at hand.

    In all these cases, the invention is based in a hunch which actually makes it easier to understand the problem. Like such a hunch, a constructive diagram will often precede the precise knowledge which could prescribe its shape on rational grounds. 91

    And Alexander is already on his way to getting at the idea of a pattern langauge:

    Every component has this twofold nature: it is first a unit, and second a pattern, both a pattern and a unit. Its nature as a unit makes it an entity distinct from its surroundings. Its nature as a pattern specifies the arrangement of its own component units. It is the culmination of the designer’s task to make every diagram both a pattern and a unit. As a unit it will fir into the hierarchy of larger components that fall above it; as a pattern it will specify the hierarchy of smaller components which it itself is made of. 131

  10. 12 December 2005

    998 days ago

    Renzo Piano

    the people who make the most noise often have the least to shout about.

    In some way, people believe that if you are permeable, if you are a good listener, you don’t have the quality of somebody with a firm attitude. But this is not true. I think people should try to teach young children that these qualities – stubbornness and a capacity to listen- might look like they are opposites, but they are not. This is what, fundamentally, I got from my mother.

    If you are the first in the class, I guess – I never experienced that – but I guess you grow up with the feeling that other people will learn from you. You are teaching others, not the opposite. And I feel that there is a moment when, unfortunately, because of that, you stop learning. You stop absorbing. And life is about learning, about grabbing every occasion. And art is about that; art is robbery in the noblest sense. It is taking things. Art! Art! In every sense.

    via Kjell Olsen998 days ago

  11. 19 November 2005

    1021 days ago

    Grand Canyon West

    the Glass Bridge will be suspended 4,000 feet above the Colorado River on the very edge of the Grand Canyon.

    More than one million pounds of steel will go into the construction of the Grand Canyon Skywalk.

    via Kjell Olsen1021 days ago

  12. 13 November 2005

    1027 days ago

    Inhabitat

    Planted roofs are so hot.

    via Kjell Olsen1027 days ago

  13. 31 October 2005

    1040 days ago

    Material guy

    How long do you think concrete lasts? It has many problems and it’s very difficult to replace or fix. If a paper tube is damaged it can be replaced by a new one. The lifespan of a building has nothing to do with the materials. It depends on what people do with it. If a building is loved, then it becomes permanent. When it is not loved, even a concrete building can be temporary.

    The next year, the Kobe earthquake struck in his native Japan, and Ban came to the aid of the Vietnamese refugee community. “All the temporary houses were outside the city, but if they moved out of the city they would lose their jobs. So they had to live under plastic sheets in the park, and it became very unhealthy. Neighbours tried to kick them out. I thought maybe if I redesigned everything very nicely they could continue living there.” Ban came up with a simple “log cabin” made out of thick paper tubes, with plastic sheeting for the roofs, prefabricated windows and beer crates filled with sand for the foundations. Each cabin can be assembled in a few hours. He also built them a new “temporary” church out of paper columns (and money from his own pocket), which was only dismantled a few months ago – to be reassembled in Taiwan.

    via Kjell Olsen1040 days ago

  14. 22 October 2005

    1049 days ago

    Welcome to the house of FUN

    Impressive looking subterranean ultra green home. When I build my house it’s going to be south facing and subterranean with a green roof – this is almost my dream home. More at CNN, and click via to read the great summary at treehugger”

    via Kjell Olsen1049 days ago

  15. 12 September 2005

    1089 days ago

    Zoka Zola

    Net zero energy home.

    Our aim is to construct an urban single-family house that is ecological, socially regenerative and self-sustaining. We will only use energy generated on site. We would like this building to be an inspiration to other homeowners and developers in urban environments.

    via Kjell Olsen1089 days ago

  16. 20 June 2005

    The Very Small Home

    Azby Brown

    1173 days ago

    Azby Brown details 18 beautifully designed compact Japanese homes. The mantra of constraints fostering creativity is beautifully reinforced in the book, with incredible solutions to space problems.

  17. 15 June 2005

    1178 days ago

    FLlWHall

    A photo of Wrights Marin County Hall of Justice before additional landscaping work was done, jesus christ it looks sweet. via landandliving’s followup to this earlier post on the subject.

    via Kjell Olsen1178 days ago

  18. 09 June 2005

    1184 days ago

    Anarchaia

    Architecture is that great living creative spirit which from generation to generation, from age to age, proceeds, persists, creates, according to the nature of man, and his circumstances as they change. That is architecture. Frank Lloyd Wright, 1937

    I love Wright, and architecture too.

    via Kjell Olsen1184 days ago

  19. 08 April 2005

    1246 days ago

    Land Living: Modern Lifestyle Design

    Paolo Soleri is an Italian architect who was an apprentice of Frank Lloyd Wright in the late 1940’s. Soleri later developed the concept of Arcology, the fusion of architecture and ecology, an alternative urban development form. In 1970 construction began on Arcosanti, a prototype town for 5,000 people (there are currently about 60 residents).

    Looks cool.

    via Kjell Olsen1246 days ago

  20. 09 March 2005

    A Pattern Language

    Christopher Alexander

    1276 days ago

    A great book detailing some widely applicable ways to design building, and why. Taken from studies conducted by Alexander and his architectural students and colleagues from The Center for Environmental Studies at the University of California, Berkely.

  21. 09 January 2005

    Small Spaces

    1335 days ago

    An incredible look at how to best use small spaces, taking storage, utility, and all kinds of other factors into account.

  22. 05 January 2005

    Frank Lloyd Wright

    1339 days ago

    A great film detailing the life and works of Frank Lloyd Wright – a great architect and designer. Arguably one of the best in history, easily in America, this film gives Wright his due.

  23. Also somewhat recently

      |