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All roads out of Bucharest are closed. The first heavy snow of the season is proving a challenge, even for seasoned Romanians. As the locals continue to persevere with their daily business, a group of marooned IARD (International Architectural Regeneration & Development) students turn their attention to the virgin snow of their nearest park. The […]
August 30, 2011
If the 21st century has a defining style so far, The Neuse Museum in Berlin could certainly be the face of it. This recent emergent from under the knife of David Chipperfield is considered by many to be his masterpiece. In a time of reclamation and touchy-feely tendencies, when the word ‘vintage’ is grossly over-used […]
April 2, 2011
Fire rages across the fantastical cityscape of Dreamland, the painted faces of the midgets melting in the heat as they face off against the flames from their half-sized fire truck. The drama of Hades tearing into the starry night sky is projected on the passive, sleeping mass of the ocean only yards away. A constant […]
January 15, 2011
The charismatic willow has a well-established presence in our minds, and not surprisingly, it has all sorts of cultural roles and traditional applications. Poets and writers are continuously captivated. It’s even possible the tree once stood at the very centre of spiritual folklore in this country when pagan belief said that a willow gave birth […]
December 19, 2010
Amidst the mountain tops of the Asir region in the far south-west of Saudi Arabia lies the town of Abha. The place is green and a good ten degrees cooler than the desert, only half an hour’s drive below. The air is clean and pure and from your lofty foothold you frequently face fantastic thunderstorms […]
November 24, 2010
Is there such a thing as feminine architecture? Or architectural gender at all? For 99% of our history buildings have been designed and built by men. Only very recently, relatively speaking, have women been able to enter the fray. It’s perhaps natural that in the beginning they had to emulate men in order to gain […]
October 3, 2010
In the 1940’s Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy attempted to start an architectural revolution. Soon after dedicating himself to rural or ‘peasant’ architecture and starting work with the Nubian Vault roofing and mud brick building techniques, Fathy took on the enormous and not-so envious task of re-locating the inhabitants of the village ‘Gourna’, near Luxor in […]
September 19, 2010
A few weeks back I helped a friend construct a geodesic dome for an islamic art workshop at the V&A in London. There are various ways of triangulating a dome or sphere (I believe the Bucky method produced a dome entirely of equilaterals) and I was not responsible for the calculations in this instance but […]
June 23, 2010
Contrary to popular belief multicoloured balconies are not some kind of definitive answer to designing social housing. Just as multicoloured fins are not all you need for an award winning office façade. It would seem that a multitude of ears perked up when somebody suggested that fluorescent colours might improve our collective disposition. Is this […]
June 15, 2010
In my opinion there is a national (at the least) crisis in rural and sub-rural architecture. At some point in time we must have completely lost our way to reach our current, bleak, standpoint. The problem that I am referring to is encapsulated and realised in new housing developments just outside of towns all over […]
Occasionally Architectural 
November 1, 2012
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