December 3, 2010
“Compare and despair” is good advice, but I can’t help it. Here are two skyscrapers designed for the same public corporation, BC Hydro.
December 1, 2010
John di Castri is one of Victoria, BC’s best known architects. This house seemed strangely familiar to me, and then I discovered that di Castri had left Victoria for Oklahoma to study for three years with Bruce Goff (see Goff’s influence here).
November 30, 2010
Vancouver architect Ned Pratt produced work in an era that—from the standpoint of our developer-led moment—is quickly starting to look like a golden age. Pratt and Arthur Erickson along with their contemporaries Ron Thom and Fred Hollingsworth still rank among Vancouver’s best and most influential architects.
November 28, 2010
This small residential hotel in downtown Vancouver was stubbornly saved from demolition by its amazing owner, the quietly determined George Riste. George resisted numerous attempts by BC Hydro to buy his building, continually asserting the rights of his tenants to remain exactly where they were.
November 22, 2010
For brutalist concrete, I find this little bank quite friendly. And not half bad for a drive-in. Unfortunately it seems to be abandoned. Photo above is by agilitynut, and and an alternate view is here.
November 20, 2010
Above: the superb book design on Davis’ often-reprinted books from the 1970s.
Chuck Davis died early this morning at age 75. Chuck was arguably Vancouver’s most well-known historian; certainly he was its best-loved historian for anyone who grew up in Vancouver in the 70s or 80s.
November 11, 2010
Renowned landscape architect Cornelia Oberlander will be giving a lecture Thursday November 18 at the University of British Columbia’s Beaty Biodiversity Museum. From the site:
The environment is not the same to a landscape architect as it is to a biologist.
November 7, 2010
There are views of two different churches here. San Francisco de Assissi just south of Taos, New Mexico, along with an old settlement there. The church with the white banding around the wall is part of a church in Taos Pueblo itself.
November 2, 2010
Peter Zumthor has been named the architect for the 2010 Serpentine Pavilion in London, having just won the Pritzker Prize in 2009 and Japan’s Praemium Imperiale in 2008.
October 27, 2010
So this is how the last energy crisis looked, in spy fiction anyway. The James Bond film The Man With the Golden Gun, 1974, which unfortunately starred Roger Moore rather than Sean Connery, revolves around the capture of an innovative solar energy device funded by the villain Scaramanga and coveted by MI5, which desires the world-dominating powers it confers for itself.
