Essay: The Adaptive City
A few months ago, Scott Burnham kindly asked me to contribute to the exhibition catalogue for Urban Play, a project he conceived and then developed with Droog Design. It is being sponsored by the city of Amsterdam and is premiering there this September. In Scott’s words, "Urban Play is about placing the individual at the […]
Journal: Arup
Another bit of admin. After a couple of weeks of rapid-fire consultancy directly post-Monocle, I joined Arup as a senior consultant in their urban planning business across the Australasian region. A month in, and I'm enjoying it hugely. I'm particularly proud to be working for Arup, a company I've long admired for both their work […]
Recent and forthcoming
Spot of admin, forgive me. I’m doing a presentation at Creative Social tomorrow night (Thursday 14th May 2008), here in Sydney. This particular edition of Creative Social is organised by my friend Tim Buesing, and forms part of a wider global network of workshop-style sessions and presentations aimed at creative directors. I’ll be doing something […]
Essays: The new engineering: a discussion with Arup’s Tristram Carfrae
This discussion is part of a series of interviews conducted for Arup’s Drivers of Change programme. See Drivers of Change for more information. I met Tristram Carfrae at Arup’s Sydney office, which sits in a couple of storeys of a fairly anonymous block on Kent Street. The anonymity is typical for Sydney’s ultra-business-like CBD, but […]
Robin Hood Gardens is not the same as a digital model of Robin Hood Gardens
There’s an extraordinary – and rather British, I must say – kerfuffle going on over the future of the Robin Hood Gardens estate in London at the moment. Essentially, the building, designed by Alison and Peter Smithson (aka The Smithsons) and completed in 1972, is in danger of being pulled down. Margaret Hodge, a UK […]
Houses. Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa. SANAA (Actar 2007)
The Japanese architectural firm SANAA rightly have the adulation of the world’s press bestowed upon them. After a steady, sure ascendancy over the last decade or so, they’ve now joined the big league with their recent New Museum of Modern Art on New York’s Bowery. However, this excellent book by the Barcelona/New York-based publisher Actar […]
Honda Puyo
I love this Honda Puyo concept car, just exhibited at the Tokyo Motor Show. Not least for its looks, its clear orientation towards high-density urban living – it can spin 360 degrees to park – plus the now obligatory ‘green’ credentials of electric motors and hydrogen fuel cell, but mainly because of two ongoing obsessions: […]
Unfolding house with vertical garden
In thrall as I am to the idea of buildings that move, transform, alter their shape or composition, I was drawn to this fantastical sketch in the latest issue of rather enjoyable Australian architecture magazine Monument (#81, Oct/Nov 2007). It’s not actually a moving building – just a building inspired by sense that it might […]
The first architects
For someone who has spent most of his career fusing what might be called ‘the sharpish end of information technology’ to other things, I’ve paradoxically retained an interest in vernacular architecture and design, which often deploys ancient solutions, refined by age, use and experience. (It’s not actually a paradox, of course). Here in Australia, a […]
The Buckminster Fuller Challenge
"On the occasion of the 112th birthday of one of the 20th century’s most prescient futurists and global thinkers, The Buckminster Fuller Institute (BFI) announces the launch of the first annual BUCKMINSTER FULLER CHALLENGE." "Each year a distinguished jury will award a single $100,000 prize to support the development and implementation of a solution that […]