The internet is getting weird again and I, for one, am here for it. Navigating the manifolds and hyper-surfaces of Large Language Models has brought with it a joyous, pub-table-thumping pleasure in declaring the likelihood that intelligence is purely pattern recognition, language is everything and all you need is text. It’s a mood – a …
I’m gonna feed our children non-organic foodAnd with the money saved take ’em to the zoo Totnes Bickering Fair The Council Chambers at the RIBA HQ turns out to be the quietest place in the building to record a podcast, and the antechamber (where in years gone by many an architect must have waited in …
Matt Webb is blogging like its 2005 and has returned to a book baton entry sharing great reads. I couldn’t resist joining in again as I’d been two steps away from the original post after he passed it to Peter Lindberg. Like Matt, I noted the following then returned to look at my choices 17 …
In which I have a chat with an AI about a recent trip to Belgium, with illustrations conjured by a different AI whilst waiting in the Brussels Eurostar departure lounge. They’re playing a game of Frisian handball in the Grand Place in Brussels, is that common? Frisian handball is a game that is commonly played …
Lately, I’ve started to appreciate how dependent I am on a side quest to help boost creative energy. They come in many different forms but the key criteria for any side quest is that it should be tangential, of uncertain outcome and ideally include a companion to help you chart a new part of the …
Wetlands, grottoes, rural remediation, extremophiles, methanogenesis, will o’the wisp, flora, fauna, funga, fenlands and the sublime. Retreat! Re-peat! The sunken land begins to rise again* The Fens, Norfolk – endless sky and sunken landscape, drained for agriculture and taxes, a common land divided by channels and dykes. A future victim of greater human intervention: climate …
Raising teenagers
It would be great to find more examples of keynote speeches given in my profession that even came close to the care, rigour, sense of shared responsibility and warmth for fellow thinkers and practitioners as that found in Bethany Nowviskie’s talk on Digital Humanities in the Anthropocene. I suspect I’ll be digging around at the …
Continue reading “Notes from ‘Structural Fabulation: An essay on fiction of the future’”
I’m collaborating with Mike Dring, the MArch Course Director at Birmingham School of Architecture this academic year to help run a studio for years 5 & 6. Over the last few weeks we’ve been crafting a studio agenda which is less about the question of how we should build and more about questioning why. We’re …
Outside the window a machine scrapes the ground flat in preparation for the arrival of a crane. An engineer is marking the ground with laser-guided accuracy and tomorrow the timber frame structure will be lifted into place then bolted to the cross-hairs of yellow paint marked on the 12 cubes of concrete we’ve poured into …