Journal: Three essays from last summer; networked urbanism
“The secret, I think, of the future is not doing too much”—Frei Otto Around this time last year, at the family home in Brisbane, in the jetlagged early hours of what was ostensibly a holiday, I wrote a set of articles for three architecture-oriented publications—a magazine, a journal and a book—all concerning the dynamics of […]
Essay: On the smart city; Or, a ‘manifesto’ for smart citizens instead
Please note: This piece has moved over here, in the publication But What Was The Question? at Medium. Please read, and link to, that version instead. ———– Oh, the smart city. I have “previous” here, over about a decade of writing about the interplay between cities and technology. And particularly, having written about The Street As […]
Essay: 21st Century Gestures Clip Art Collection
A month or so ago, Nicolas Nova asked me to write an essay for a project he was doing. He said they'd been working on a catalogue of novel "gestures, postures and digital rituals" and could I write about that, please, as a kind of foreword. "Curious Rituals is a research project conducted at Art Center College […]
Journal: Flood
(1. Very sketchy initial notes from the last day or so, sent from a suburb of Brisbane as the Queensland floods hit. As I write, in the broader Queensland floods, there are 13 confirmed dead, and dozens more missing. With that in mind, we are incredibly fortunate here, and our experiences pale by comparison to […]
Finlandia: the greatest architectural mistake ever made? Aalto’s benign errors
I've been to Helsinki a couple of times this year. It's one of my favourite cities – civic, compact, cultured, curious, crafted. Charming but not overly so. Pale yellows, pale greys, pale whites, pale blues. Sea-borne and wrapped in rock and forest. Jugend and modern, eastern and western. Solid sometimes stolid. A quiet riot of […]
Essays: Emergent Urbanism, or ‘bottom-up planning’
I was asked to write an article around ‘bottom-up planning’ by Architectural Review Australia a while ago. It was published in the last issue, and I’m re-posting here. ‘Bottom-up’ is hardly the most elegant phrase, but I suspect you know what I mean. Either way, I re-cast it in the article as ‘emergent urbanism’ which […]
Journal: For the life between buildings – some notes on the iPad
Many, many, many people have written about last week’s announcement of Apple's iPad. I don’t actually remember a response quite like it. Far more than for the iPhone, for instance, or for any contemporary product or service I can recall. Perhaps its omnipresence in the media is due to promise it appears to hold for the […]
Essays: Towards a new architect: an interview with Carlo Ratti
I’ve just finished working with Carlo Ratti and various cohorts on a great little project, which I hope might see the light of day here before too long (update: here it is.) In the meantime, I thought I’d post this discussion I had with Carlo late last year, which was recently published in Architectural Review […]
Robert Miles Kemp (Postopolis! LA)
Robert Miles Kemp’s talk was always interesting and occasionally spellbinding, most of all when showing the work in responsive robotic structures. His videos of simple blocks self-assembling into what he called “nano-architecture” are quite extraordinary (sometimes eliciting a collective delight similar to that of The Living at Postopolis! NYC). Kemp situated this within a wider context […]
Whitney Sander (Postopolis! LA)
NB: This is a write-up of a talk that took place at Postopolis! LA during April 2009. Notes are taken in real-time, with editing and context added afterward so reader beware. All Postopolis! LA entries are gathered here. Another interview by David A and David B of ArchDaily, this time with Whitney Sander of Sander […]