Architecture
Building design, aesthetics, and engineering.
Zachary Roush and
Architecture
Favelas, spontaneous architecture
Rio is not known as the safest city. There are favelas 4 situated on the hillside. Yet there is a lot we can learn from them.
The architectural design of favelas is not planned. For decades, people helped each other with constructing the unit next door (on a whim it seems!), resulting in a complex and intricate... See more
Rio is not known as the safest city. There are favelas 4 situated on the hillside. Yet there is a lot we can learn from them.
The architectural design of favelas is not planned. For decades, people helped each other with constructing the unit next door (on a whim it seems!), resulting in a complex and intricate... See more
Coco Liu • The unique spatial patterns of Rio de Janeiro: on topography, spontaneous architecture, and fashion
All these losses, for me, carry equal weight, precisely because, for Black, research and writing about building held as much transformational potential as design and construction. Indeed, it might be true that, for Black, such a duality did not exist. Perhaps, for him, writing and spatial thinking were one and the same. This is what most excites me... See more
Peter L’Official • Black Builders
We'll speak about the architectural imagination.
And I'm going to suggest that some concept like the imagination
is necessary if we want to treat architecture as a mode of knowledge.
The classical philosophers said, the soul
never thinks without phantasm, which is to say that thought needs a material
image, something to carry the thought.
So we begin to think of the imagination as bridging the gap between perception
and understanding.
source: HarvardX GSD1xThe Architectural Imagination
I’m not sure how safe Rocinha would have been if I had wandered there on my own. But from the little that I’ve seen, they are rich in culture and hold strong community values.
Living in New York City, the city is also densely packed, yet we exist independently in our own spaces and spend a lifetime not knowing our immediate neighbors. While in... See more
Living in New York City, the city is also densely packed, yet we exist independently in our own spaces and spend a lifetime not knowing our immediate neighbors. While in... See more
Coco Liu • The unique spatial patterns of Rio de Janeiro: on topography, spontaneous architecture, and fashion
I find an interesting parallel here to the ideas James Scott proposes in Seeing Like a State (which we covered back in RE #4): a top-down, central planning-style of design can't effectively predict the diversity of user needs. It turns out, contra to the "expert architect", that the users know best what they need from their space. And often even... See more