I have about 15 minutes before I need to head out for dinner, so I’m afraid that there won’t be much of an ATC post today. It has been a busy week.

But given that this week was Bjarke Ingels’ talk in Toronto and many of us are pretty excited about his King West project, I thought I would share a video where he sketches and talks about architecture. Click here if you can’t see it below.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIsIKv1lFZw?rel=0&w=560&h=315]

I love the idea that architecture is about imagining how things could be. That’s how I feel about both architecture and real estate development.

Architect Bjarke Ingels will be in Toronto next week to talk about how architecture can create communities and about a new project that he is working on with developers Westbank and Allied REIT here in the city.

The last time I heard Bjarke speak was when I was in undergrad and he had recently started a firm called PLOT with Julien De Smedt. That was over 10 years ago. So I am looking forward to this talk. If you’re also going to be attending, tweet me and let’s try and connect at the event.

In anticipation of that, I thought I would share a book that his firm published about a year ago called, BIG, HOT TO COLD: An Odyssey of Architectural Adaptation. 

What’s interesting about the book is that all of the projects are organized according to climatic location – literally hot to cold. That’s why the pages themselves start as red and end up in dark blue.

https://500px.com/embed.js

Back in architecture school we used to joke around that to be a great architect you had to have a badass sounding name. This was largely driven by the fact that so many famous architects were/are European and so they had/have more unique sounding names – at least to us.

Think Rem Koolhaas, Bjarke Ingels, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier (actually Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris), Alvar Aalto, and so on.

There are of course lots of great non-European architects and lots of names that don’t sound as badass as the ones listed above. But that didn’t stop of us from perpetuating the belief that you needed a badass name.

So what could you do if your name wasn’t badass enough to be a famous architect? Well we applied the principles of architectural spoonerism. That meant we switched around the first letter of your first name with the first letter of your last name to create a new architectural identity.

Sometimes this worked beautifully, but sometimes it didn’t work at all. In my case, I became Drandon Bonnelly, which is arguably a bit more badass. But the best example is that of my friend Alex Feldman. He became Flex Aeldman. Now that’s badass. He sounds like an architect bodybuilder.

I have about 15 minutes before I need to head out for dinner, so I’m afraid that there won’t be much of an ATC post today. It has been a busy week.

But given that this week was Bjarke Ingels’ talk in Toronto and many of us are pretty excited about his King West project, I thought I would share a video where he sketches and talks about architecture. Click here if you can’t see it below.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIsIKv1lFZw?rel=0&w=560&h=315]

I love the idea that architecture is about imagining how things could be. That’s how I feel about both architecture and real estate development.

Architect Bjarke Ingels will be in Toronto next week to talk about how architecture can create communities and about a new project that he is working on with developers Westbank and Allied REIT here in the city.

The last time I heard Bjarke speak was when I was in undergrad and he had recently started a firm called PLOT with Julien De Smedt. That was over 10 years ago. So I am looking forward to this talk. If you’re also going to be attending, tweet me and let’s try and connect at the event.

In anticipation of that, I thought I would share a book that his firm published about a year ago called, BIG, HOT TO COLD: An Odyssey of Architectural Adaptation. 

What’s interesting about the book is that all of the projects are organized according to climatic location – literally hot to cold. That’s why the pages themselves start as red and end up in dark blue.

https://500px.com/embed.js

Back in architecture school we used to joke around that to be a great architect you had to have a badass sounding name. This was largely driven by the fact that so many famous architects were/are European and so they had/have more unique sounding names – at least to us.

Think Rem Koolhaas, Bjarke Ingels, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier (actually Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris), Alvar Aalto, and so on.

There are of course lots of great non-European architects and lots of names that don’t sound as badass as the ones listed above. But that didn’t stop of us from perpetuating the belief that you needed a badass name.

So what could you do if your name wasn’t badass enough to be a famous architect? Well we applied the principles of architectural spoonerism. That meant we switched around the first letter of your first name with the first letter of your last name to create a new architectural identity.

Sometimes this worked beautifully, but sometimes it didn’t work at all. In my case, I became Drandon Bonnelly, which is arguably a bit more badass. But the best example is that of my friend Alex Feldman. He became Flex Aeldman. Now that’s badass. He sounds like an architect bodybuilder.