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Architecture Misfit #6: George Fred Keck
Just when I said that there weren’t any more 20C misfits, along comes George Fred Keck! This photo is of his Crystal House Crystal House (1933–1934) It was built for Chicago’s 1933 “Homes of Tomorrow...
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The Green Veneer
The title of a recent article in architectureau was “Doing less is more.” The gist was that the drive to make every centimetre of a project sustainable can cause us to overlook the fact that the...
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Antarctic Architecture
Earlier, I’d thought I’d continue my Miscellaneous Meditations Upon the Reading of The Autopoeisis of Architecture but instead … * * * A lot of the information in this post about Antarctic Architecture...
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Venturi’s Vehicles
This post is to spread the word about the the French company Venturi who are doing good work in giving electric vehicles higher performance. I first found out above them two weeks ago in connection...
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Celebrity Shoot-out
Representatives of four fairly well-known architectural practices pitch their projects for the limited competition for 425 Park Avenue. The original article is by Oliver Wainwright, writing for The...
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It’s Not Rocket Science #2: Ventilation
Many architects look to Nature for inspiration for how to make their buildings look more natural even though buildings are very unnatural objects. Instead of actually growing out of the ground or...
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It’s Not Rocket Science #3: Yakhchal
By 400BC, Persians had developed a system for making ice in winter and storing it throughout the summer and in a hot desert climate, in buildings they called yakhchal. Most of what you’ll find written...
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It’s Not Rocket Science #5: Night Sky Radiant Cooling
If ever you’ve noticed cloudless nights are colder than cloudy ones, then you’ve experienced Night Sky Radiant Cooling. The temperature of the surface of the earth is relatively constant so the...
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It’s Not Rocket Science #6: The Stack Effect
The Stack Effect is when are is moved into and out of buildings by means of a difference in the buoyancy of the air on the inside and on the outside – between air that is colder and air that is warmer,...
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It’s Not Rocket Science #7: Evapo-transpiration
Speaking of gardens in the sky, I once lived in an apartment building that had one on the 25th-floor. It was just a couple of floors missing from the building and wasn’t really integrated with any...
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More From Less: The Principle
Here’s some outdoor space. Judging by the colour of the brick, the teapot, and the underused barbeque in the corner, it looks like we’re in England. The peripheral plants are doing their...
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The Demise of the Green Roof
PHASE 1: Cost-effective building performance (more from less) This is an Icelandic turf house. They’ve been around for say, 1,000 years – about since the time of the Vikings, let’s say. The turf...
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Architectural Myths #6: Convenience
In the first few decades of the twentieth century, the general unhealthy conditions in much ‘worker’ housing were a major concern for certain architects wishing to make life better for those people....
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Architecture Without Architects
Architecture Without Architects is the title of a book by Bernard Rudofsky, published to accompany an exhibition of the same name at the Museum of Modern Art from November 1964 to February 1965. I...
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