The placing of benches and trees seems to bring out the worst in public authorities. Having created good SLOAP (= Space Left Over After Planning) they try to ameliorate the problem by calling up the landscapers and asking them to stick in a few benches and trees. Damn them! The correct policy is to treat [...]
The question of urban density seems to keep being asked anew every five years or so. It is said that in 1800 only three percent of the world’s population lived in cities.
That means many of us have become used to tighter spaces very quickly in evolutionary terms. Do we need to tie ourselves in knots [...]
Probably not, but (1) London can be a grey old place (2) red is London’s emblematic colour (3) Tower Bridge is one of the best-known London icons (4) the colour would appeal to Chinese tourists (5) from time to time, one should ‘paint the city red’ (6) I had a red toy model of Tower [...]
Designing a city is a complex business. There are commercial and development pressures to be considered. But a city is more
than just a continual investment of capital and occupation of new space. It has an identity. Sometimes only a local one. But sometimes
a global one.
Sometimes a remembered one.
What gives a city its identity? [...]
The French farmer’s protested their financial plight in a charmingly French manner by greening the Champ-Elysee.
Another unusual example of the trend towards green is the Lost House of Paris. The occupants literally live within a greenery covered house. To travel green in the city of romance you simply phone a ‘Vectrix’ taxi.
As Pierre Patel’s 1688 [...]
Jean Nouvel’s design models for the Serpentine Pavilion (& see below) were attractive but ‘parked’ on the grass like a se of London buses. As built, the pavilion is better related to its context. It must be that the organizers have taken heed of the Gardenvisit blog’s comments on the 2010 Serpentine Pavilion. We remarked [...]
Big Ben and I would like to ’speak for England’ in respectfully reminding the German Pope that England is more important as the home of Europe’s political passion (liberalism) than as the home of the world’s most beautiful game (football). England is the country in which Hobbes and Locke wedded Latin and Germanic ideas of [...]
It's the first crit for the school year.
The project explores form as a generative idea in design. Students were asked to create a series of three dimensional compositions comprised of 3 rectilinear volumes. Each object within the composition had to maintain an orthographical relationship to each other, and a series of adjustments testing</i the idea were made. The outcome was produced as an all-white 200mm2 composition.
models en masse
Here are some of the world’s best potatoes – and I grew them! They are organic Charlottes, seaweed-grown, flavoured with wild mint and dressed with fresh organic parsley. No chemical fertilizers or herbicides or pesticides were used. So if the local supermarket can charge £5/kilo for their best spuds then mine must be worth £10/kilo [...]