architecture

Bjarke Ingels’ Vancouver pirate ship

November 1, 2016

Oh really

I can’t remember if I’ve already talked about this Dubai-style luxury twisted tower that Vancouver is getting; apologies if I have. The tower, designed by architect Bjarke Ingels, is now rising in Vancouver but the reason I’m writing about it now is that I just read a critique in Artforum of this year’s Venice Biennale for Architecture which contained a chilling portrait of Ingels.

The largest clear-span wooden building in the world – Tillamook Air Museum

March 17, 2013

The largest clear-span wooden building in the world, constructed entirely without glue wood, was built as a U.S. military air station hangar. It is now the Tillamook Air Museum in Oregon.

Categories: architecture, design, favourite, Uncategorised

Ecce Vancouver

November 15, 2012

Vancouver, is that your motto?

Out with the old, in with the new?

Meanwhile, this questionable object will replace The Ridge Theatre, one of Vancouver’s few historic repertory cinemas:

Apparently this passed a City of Vancouver design panel.

“Contempo” – my term for the insincere faux-modern design style infecting our lives

October 20, 2012

There is a particular type of contemporary design that I deeply despise but for which there is no terminology. About six years ago, out of frustration, I started calling it “contempo.” It is a deliberately cheesy term for a cheesy aesthetic, an aesthetic of dumbed-down, cutesy faux-modernism.

Categories: architecture, cities, craft, cringe list, design, interiors, Uncategorised

West Coast cabin – Clayoquot Sound, B.C.

September 6, 2012

The cabin is probably the true vernacular architecture of British Columbia’s West Coast and other parts of the Pacific Northwest. Vancouver must once have had some of these buildings, thought rampant demolition and ugly development are doing their best to eradicate any trace of this architectural past.

Taliesin West, Frank Lloyd Wright

January 8, 2012

Photography is only minimally allowed at Frank Lloyd Wright’s winter house in Arizona, Taliesin West, so most of these photographs are only exterior shots. I confess I’ve always been less impressed by FLW’s work that most are, so this post is not in praise of FLW or Taliesin West.

Categories: architect, architecture, design, furniture, interiors, textiles, Uncategorised

World’s ugliest buildings?

July 24, 2011

The Pilgrimage Church in Neviges, Germany

These were listed among the world’s ugliest buildings, aggregated from various rankings in Forbes, Virtual Tourist and Oddee.com. Quite apart from blithely ignoring the complexity of the question “what is beautiful,” which philosophy has attempted to deal with for centuries and has only made more unanswerable, this list is pretty odd.

Categories: architect, architecture, cities, design, Uncategorised, urban planning

Coast Modern Film – Fundraiser on July 28, Vancouver

July 20, 2011

If you’re in Vancouver on July 28, and are interested in the vernacular modernist architecture of our region, buy a ticket for this event. Ouno is hosting this fundraiser to benefit the completion of the film Coast Modern by my filmmaker friends Gavin Froome and Mike Bernard.

Kastrup Sea Bath, Denmark

December 5, 2010

The Kastrup sea bath is by White architektur, Denmark. Via archdaily. Photographs: Ole Haupt, White Arkitekter, Erco Lighting, Åke E:son Lindman

The idea behind this swimming platform and pier is that in the not overly warm Danish summer it shields swimmers from the wind and contains the sun.

Categories: architect, architecture, design, green, landscaping, Uncategorised

Taos, New Mexico

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.

Categories: architecture, Uncategorised

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This blog is a long, somewhat messy photo essay on the history and politics of design. Design's socio-historical context—that is, the constraints and influences on the way we make objects, dwellings and cities—seems too often ignored. We no longer know where our styles, tastes or objects really come from, and this damages our creativity and sense of meaning. Historical knowledge is so fugitive in the New World, with everything so decontextualized in the rapid flow of commodities and images. Don't even get me started on tumblr and pinterest. As Fran Lebowitz said, "Designers now, they all have these things called mood boards. I suppose they think a sense of discovery equals invention. It would be as if every writer had a board with paragraphs of other writers—'Oh, I'll take a little bit of this, and that, he was really good.' Yes, he was really good! And that is not a mood board, it is a stealing board." As for the sort of design I'm personally interested in, full disclaimer.....read more ____________________________________

To read about my book project on Vancouver's UN-Habitat Forum event of 1976 concerning just and sustainable urban settlements, click here. Few know that Buckminster Fuller, Margaret Mead, Mother Teresa, Paolo Soleri and Maggie & Pierre Trudeau, along with many thousands of others, came to Vancouver in 1976 to talk about better, safer, fairer and greener cities worldwide. In fact it was the founding conference of UN Habitat, an agency built around a foundational document called The Vancouver Declaration. My book is about what happened that year and is a snapshot not just of Vancouver but of how people around the world began to view cities and themselves differently in the wake of, among other things, the first oil crisis. ____________________________________

architecture

Bjarke Ingels’ Vancouver pirate ship

The largest clear-span wooden building in the world – Tillamook Air Museum

Ecce Vancouver

“Contempo” – my term for the insincere faux-modern design style infecting our lives

West Coast cabin – Clayoquot Sound, B.C.

Taliesin West, Frank Lloyd Wright

World’s ugliest buildings?

Coast Modern Film – Fundraiser on July 28, Vancouver

Kastrup Sea Bath, Denmark

Taos, New Mexico

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