no2self.net

Moral dilema solved: There’s no longer any need to clock up a big carbon footprint travelling to see architecture around the world when CGI rendering gets to this level.

The Third & The Seventh from Alex Roman on Vimeo.
I need never leave Birmingham again.

Facing up, originally uploaded by eversion.

There’s something very satisfying about the way this building keeps facing you as you round the bend. Successfully enfronting the site I think Charles Moore would say.
update:
Yep, enfronting it is:

I should get this out of my system. It must be getting quite dull, all this relentless referencing to Charles Moore. [...]

I found another one… Po-mo blast off!

Inside, Charles Moore reviews Jenck’s ‘The Language of Post-Modern Architecture’:
Whatever it’s called, it is probably more useful to to consider how to do it. Here I think Jencks prescription for a ‘radical eclecticism’ is incomplete. His concept of ‘multivalence’ seems to be entirely to do with architecture as communication [...]

Provided mostly as a supplement to the latest post by The Sesquipedalist, I’ve dug out some old cover images from AD magazine in the 70s.

Much better qualified to explain the history of architectural journalism than I, The Sesquipedalist sets the scene:
During the “book business model” of the ’70s, where the magazine almost completely eschewed advertising, [...]

I’ve been making notes, with varying intensity, since early 2004. Here’s a Google search box to help you mine it:

If you’d like to widen your search to include other blogs, I also run a Google search co-op that includes lots of other great writers on architecture and design:
http://no2self.net/blogsearch

Times are hard. Your credit is being crunched and there’s nothing you can do about it. Your value is being chamfered.
Open the door and run. Run like the wind. Jump. Jump up. Jump up, jump up and get down. Nobody can take that from us, it’ll always be ours. Everything else has gone to hell [...]

More notes from Architecture, You and Me by Siegfried Giedion (found in a second hand bookshop in 2005). This time it’s the recounting of a delightful list of important urban design developments since 1850 – books and building – according to Mr Giedion.
The New Urbanists amongst you may find the regular appearance of Corb a [...]

Still here. Like a Norwegian Blue, I’ve just been resting. I return with some summer frippery.
First, another day in the life post, since the past one proved quite popular. This time delivered via twitter, an offering made even more poignant perhaps by yesterday’s news that they’ve pulled the plug on the UK.
So, from the bottom [...]

Time to put my money where my mouth is, as they say. Here’s the fourth and concluding part of the ‘architecture re-housed’ trilogy – photos of the completed houses.
Of course, although I’ve been quoted on the Building web site this week about the need to focus on existing housing, that doesn’t mean I’m not delivering [...]

Here in Birmingham we await the results of the competition to see which starchitect will be delivering us their iconic vision for the future of the city’s library. As you can imagine, we’re all jolly excited about it *cough*.
Before we get to this bright new future, the previous one has to be dealt with. The [...]