Thomas J Campanella's tome is a skip stop tour of Brooklyn's history, focusing on the built environment but full of rich sketches of the outsized personalities inhabiting and shaping the borough. A blurb from the publisher: Spanning centuries and neighborhoods, Brooklyn-born Campanella recounts the creation of places familiar and long forgotten, both built and never... Continue Reading →
Last weekend I took a walk through Prospect Park and meandered to the LeFrak Center, the ice rink completed in 2014 by TWBTA. I enjoyed a tour of the grounds guided by the project manager Andy Kim as part of Open House New York back in 2018. One of the most striking elements of the... Continue Reading →
Over the past few years I have been creating wooden boxes that can be stacked together to form shelves, with the intent that any object stored on this shelf could be transported by the disassembled boxes. Initially I used finished grade 1x8 and 1x2 poplar wood and countersunk screws to create boxes approximately 15"Lx15"Wx23"H. I... Continue Reading →
Why Mies really left Germany From The Guardian, "Mies and the Nazis" by Tom Dyckhoff: "It was hard for someone to ignore politics in 1930s Germany, but Mies did his best... Starved of work, Mies tried to ingratiate himself with this new, powerful and rich state patron, signing a motion of support for Hitler in... Continue Reading →
Where the CCTV cameras are The CCTV Map project is an attempt to map out the location of all the security cameras in London (though it seemed to start and end in 2012). In 2013 Fast.Co wrote an article about a proposed app SURV which would show users their location vis-a-vis nearby security cameras (spoiler... Continue Reading →
The color wheel Light uses color in an additive process to combine red, blue and green to make white. Pigment uses subtractive color to combine cyan, magenta and yellow to make black. I've had a few teachers and colleagues make a point to view images on a computer screen using CMYK, rather than RBG, because... Continue Reading →
Elementary ergonomics The blog/podcast (now magazine) Funambulist focuses on the 'politics of space and bodies' and has looked often oat the interface of the human body and the built environment. The article "Patterns of Life" by Gregoire Chamayou surveyed many examples of mapping the movement of people (or just their limbs). The image above shows... Continue Reading →
Something about Vastu Shilpa Vastu Shilpa is an architecture firm (VSC) focusing architectural practice, and a foundation (VSF) focusing on research linking the profession and academy. Their firm website (Vastu Shilpa Consultants) shows an entry for the Guggenheim Helsinki competition, and Youtube shows their entry for a new government city in Amaravati, India. The scale... Continue Reading →
Something about feng shui Feng Shui has gone from orthodox principles, with holistic philosophy and worldview to a plural marketplace of ideas as many different schools coexist, to be interpreted by the individual student. This has some parallels to contemporary design schools, two generations removed from the orthodoxy of Modernism and one generation removed from... Continue Reading →
Adam Achrati 