This week I ventured out again into the heat for some green relief in the environs of Benjakiti Park (full set of photos here). The Park, as with most public places in the midday heat of Bangkok, was deserted which felt very luxurious. There were lots of ferns and some great palm tree textures and the breeze made it near tolerable. Read More
Watching Architecture: great online video resources
I recently saw a post on archdaily which linked to a list of architectural documentaries on you tube. If you can put up with the dated style of the videos and some awkward pretentious voice-overs then I recommend that you should watch some, you really should. I think I’ve watched about six now and will certainly be watching more.Read More
ASA Forum Part : Lacaton and Vassal
Maisons groupées, Cité Manifeste, Mulhouse – 2005
The third and final lecture I went to at the ASA Forum.
This was impressive stuff. These guys- another duo but also a couple- have a mission. In this lecture as soon as they said that they made an agreement with landlord of one of their projects that of they increased the unit sizes of the apartments they were re-modelling he would not be able to increase the rent and that this was a stipulation in their contract I knew these guys had a serious social backbone. I was listening.Read More
ASA Forum 2016: Part 2-Langarita Navarro
This second lecture from the international lectures series at ASA forum was a nice surprise (see first post on this topic here). The second male and female duo of architects to speak at the forum were from Spain and presented their work from a clearly theoretical standpoint. In contrast to SANAA who create new shiny white things Langarita Navarro are more attracted to activating existing city fabric. They describe this as a kind of taxidermy. The way that something lifeless can be re-invigorated.Read More
ASA Forum 2016: Part 1-SANAA
Last Saturday I had the pleasure of going to the 2016 ASA Forum held at Impact. There were three international lectures the first was from Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa from SANAA. Having founded their practice in 1995 they were awarded the Pritzker prize in 2010. I was super excited about this lecture as they are particular heroes of mine. I remember one of my tutors, David S.Willey, showing us Naoshima Ferry Terminal which is a super lightweight confection of skinny circular steel columns, mirrored walls and the thinnest imaginable flat roof that defies gravity. We were asked to examine the elegance of the structure and consider the engineering that is required to design such a slender roof with robustness to withstand coastal weather conditions. It was an awakening the complexities underlying apparent simplicity.Read More
