September 18, 2012
Above: Farm house in Keldur, Iceland. These are “earth sheltered” houses, an ancient form of passive solar, sustainable architecture. It’s the practice of “packing earth against building walls for external thermal mass, to reduce heat loss and maintain steady indoor temperature.”
From Wikipedia: “A sod roof or turf roof is a traditional Scandinavian type of green roof covered with sod on top of several layers of birch bark on gently sloping wooden roof boards.
July 18, 2012
These photos of Ron Thom’s Boyd House are from the blog Architecture Wanted which provides a good introduction to this house. Also see a great post by Cam McLellan on his Vancouver Lights blog and an article in Western Living by the house’s current owner, Kerry McPhedran.
May 3, 2012
Great Vancouver public art work titled “Nothing Happens in Good Weather” by the Instant Coffee collective, curated by Barbara Cole of Other Sights. Photos by Kate Armstrong and Kelly Lycan via the Goethe Institut’s Goethe Satellite.
April 28, 2012
The Children’s Safety Village in Ottawa, Canada, closed a few years ago. Due to asbestos. via Reddit.
Pretty hard not to read this as metaphor.
April 19, 2012
Lloyd Kahn, Editor in Chief and founder of Shelter Publications, is a North American authority on the handmade house. Visit Shelter for a full list of his book titles on this topic.
March 24, 2012
There is so much going on in this picture.
Square, downtown Victoria, B.C.
January 25, 2012
English architect Edwin Lutyens designed much of the British colonial power’s New Delhi between 1912 and 1930, and his aesthetic dominates the city. While in Delhi I have been staying in a Lutyens-designed house, now a guesthouse in walking distance from the famed Lodi Gardens and from India Gate, also designed by Lutyens.
January 5, 2012
Arcosanti, designed by Italian-born architect Paolo Soleri, is an experimental architectural complex perched on the side of a gulch in the Arizona desert, about 70 miles north of Phoenix.
December 31, 2011
Happy 2012 from Arizona, where I am experiencing a family holiday in the desert.
What is happening in this picture? Party or headache?
[Can someone please explain why they do this to the cacti?
November 20, 2011
I took this photo from my dentist’s office late on a dark November afternoon. That bright light in the upper right by the stadium is a giant electronic screen billboard. It’s one of 3 or 4 such billboards ringing Vancouver’s largest stadium, despite the fact that there are Vancouver by-laws forbidding such signs.
