We don’t like coal today, but it certainly transformed Victorian-era architecture: “It is the biggest transition in the history of our species, with the possible exception of starting to use fire at all in the first place,” says Barnabas Calder, author of the groundbreaking study… Read More
Is this a true or false statement? “It is through media, of course, that we primarily consume architecture.” Witold Rybczynski recently spoke about this on his blog. Initially he thought it was a preposterous statement. But then he begrudgingly accepts that it is actually the… Read More
This is a good idea (taken from a recent FT article by Edwin Heathcote): The hotel lobby is already understood as a kind of public space, the corporate lobby should belong to that same world, a place open to the functions of the city, porous… Read More
I had a friend — who I know from architecture school — visiting from Detroit for the weekend, so we did a little building tour on Sunday morning. This is the elevated (and half-finished) CIBC Square Park that spans over the rail lines leading into… Read More
If you can’t see the Twitter poll below, click here: At the time of writing this post, affordability was number one, followed by design and beauty, and then sustainability. Some of you were right to point out that these options are not always mutually exclusive.… Read More
I have been in a few of Frank Lloyd Wright’s houses and in every case it turned out like this: The Prairie School (of architecture), for which Wright was a pioneer, was all about horizontality. That typically meant flat roofs, deep overhangs and, in the… Read More
I stumbled upon this multi-unit housing project in Vienna because I thought it looked beautiful and I started thinking about the solid wall-to-window ratio on its facades. But it turns out that this project is far more than just a pretty face. It’s actually a… Read More
The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has just published its latest climate change report. Available here. As a follow-up to this report, Dezeen spoke with Hélène Chartier of the sustainable urbanism network C40 Cities. And she makes some very good points about the… Read More
I was in a “design charrette” meeting earlier today where the topic of good architecture and why some cities do better than others came up. It got me thinking about my recent post about the quality of Canadian architecture and so I’d like to revisit… Read More
Architecture school has a way of indoctrinating you with an appreciation for the past. One of the ways that is done is through architecture history and theory classes. In my case, I was taught to appreciate the work of Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe,… Read More
BRANDON DONNELLY 