Alongside, for example (and this was very much a late 90’s discourse thing), Roland Barthes and The Death of the Author.

de Certeau’s writing was hugely influential to me as an architect-in-training.

And the thing is that this is ultimately a choice - it could have been very different - and the decisions that led to this form, this materiality, are rightly being questioned.

If the goal was to make something timeless it certainly feels like it’s from another age….

Like a concrete aircraft carrier: was LA’s giant new $724m gallery really worth all the carbon emissions? Built on tar swamps and two tortuous decades in the making, Lacma’s latest addition used twice as much metal as the Eiffel Tower. How did America supersize revered architect Peter Zumthor?

‘Below Zumthor’s flaring concrete cantilevers, a model of a woolly mammoth drowns in a lake of crude oil, as a mother and baby mammoth look on helplessly.’ www.theguardian.com/artanddesign...

I don't need a summary of what's available online, in biographies, or even in my own notes. I need to comb through and find the great details, decide what interests ME. No, it's not efficient. It's slow and painstaking. But I don't believe in efficiency as an ultimate good, especially in writing. /

Goes to the point that the graphs / numbers are pretty much meaningless

As far as I understand, machine learning, algorithms and LLMs are not (yet) being held accountable nor are their developers seeking to be. So the graph makes for a good headline and social media fodder, but not much more than that.

… and even if the utility / efficacy of AI improves somewhat, there will be a point at which the human education, experience, judgement and continued development demanded by regulation, professional indemnity and other accountability measures will unavoidably be required.

Anyone who actually does this for a living will tell you it’s more likely the reverse (18%)…

Sniper’s alley ftw

Book: High-Tech Britain - Buildings of the space age by Geraint Franklin

East Croydon station in glorious sunshine

Inmos, Newport

At last! A book dedicated to the bristling silhouettes of Britain's High-Tech architecture - possibly our greatest export. Congratulations to @geraintfranklin.bsky.social

With all-original photography by John East. Especially love East Croydon looking heroic in bright sunshine.

I think it may have been the other way around - the film predates the station by over a decade

It’s the expressiveness of that structural feat that makes it such a compelling space, you really sense the drama of it. It needs to be austere or it would all be a bit too much.

The gothic solemnity of Westminster station does it for me every. single. time.

Easily the best house museum in London, well worth a visit and several return ones.

… Only undone by an awareness that while you are outsourcing your own ethics, purpose and responsibility - someone else, somewhere else is expecting the same of you. Consequences will find you one way or the other, it’s the needless damage wrought along the way that bears thinking about.

This first one which considers insulation from consequences is on point and, I fear, already endemic. The idea that fault or responsibility lies with someone else is everywhere - from everyday life in cities, to the professions, government, climate and beyond.

(Aware of the irony of sharing it here, when the second harbinger of the writer’s so-called ‘soft apocalypse) is baked into this very app.)

The quiet catastrophe in your pocket Inventor Pep Torres on three trivial, almost invisible inventions that are quietly dismantling our humanity

Good piece, this: www.ft.com/content/b06c...

A ‘wet floor’ warning sign weighted down with a piece of terrazzo that matches the floor it is positioned on.

Reduce, reuse, recycle - the aesthetic edition.

“When we started on site there was this moment when the whole thing looked like a mix between an archaeological dig, a construction site and a laboratory,” Tuckey says.

Just because we can build pretty much anywhere, for and with anyone, should we, and if so how?

A deeply personal and propositional book but one which has a deep cultural and theoretical hinterland, and asks questions we do not stop often enough to ask:

Book review – Learning from the Local: Designing responsively for people, climate and culture Nicholas de Klerk discusses a new book by Piers Taylor that invites us to re-examine our own principles and intentions with regards to where and how we practise

First review for 2026, of Piers Taylor’s Learning from the Local: www.bdonline.co.uk/briefing/boo...

'The past is an underused tool': An Elizabethan mansion's secrets for staying warm In a deadly cold period known as the Little Ice Age, clever Elizabethan designs kept a magnificent stately home unusually warm – with lessons for how we can heat our own homes better.

Brilliant to see the BBC picking up Ranald Lawrence and Dean Hawkes' fabulously interesting and important #environmentalhumanities work on #HardwickHall. They measured solar gain to understand Elizabethan comfort tech.
The original articles are hugely worth reading too.
www.bbc.co.uk/future/artic...

The little-known story of Giacometti’s rural retreat Paris was not the artist’s only home. Increasingly, he returned to his birthplace in a secluded valley in the Swiss Alps

Grateful, in a never-ending stream of ever more appalling news, for things like this: a quiet meditation on Giacometti’s postwar life, split between his studio in Paris and family home in Stampa: www.ft.com/content/8703...

I left two years ago, and stopped posting a year before that. This place may never replace what Twitter once was but that’s no reason to stay.

So many examples this weekend of how achieving high office does not ‘make’ someone, it reveals them.

That is all.

Vidéo. La maison radieuse de Rezé, au sud de Nantes, en proie aux flammes Vendredi 2 janvier, un incendie s'est déclaré dans la Maison radieuse, l'unité d'habitation pensée par Le Corbusier à Rezé, dans la métropole de Nantes.

Fire at Corb’s Maison Radieuse outside Nantes: www.ouest-france.fr/societe/fait...