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

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...

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.

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

Here we go again…

Permit me a gripe, just because it’s that time of year: What is it with the increasing number of cyclists deciding that pavements are fair game?

Shaking hands with Brian Eno when he awarded our 2nd year-end group architecture installation (a bunch of models on a plywood wave) best in show - many years ago now.

“Architecture is slow and I’m afraid we are destroying its meaning.” From @edwinheathcote.bsky.social’s interview with Diébédo Francis Kéré: www.ft.com/content/a286...

A little late to this but an excellent piece on the AI race in last weekend’s FT: www.ft.com/content/1258...

The whole series is worth listening to but this one, which positions the Temperance movement as a model for the pushback against addictive screen time / social media, is really interesting. The seeds of this resistance are already visible: www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...

The writer makes a good point, if you want free content to train your LLM, then nationalise the model so that creators have a stake in them too - seems fair: youtube.com/shorts/7eQIU...

Disney Hall is great. Some of his small projects are perhaps even greater.

I love and learned a lot from Gehry’s early work, specifically the hay barn and his Santa Monica house, but it’s very hard to look at the Battersea housing project and not think it falls into the first, not the second category.

OK, I’ll take the bait. Do we blame the prompt or the model for toilets with no servicing, endless surplus wardrobes, a master bed against the ‘view’ window, six sinks in the, er, kitchen, a (mostly) column-free, bi-fold pergola? I could go on.

This is worth a listen for many reasons, but here’s one - behold the compliance culture we have built that doesn’t actually hold anyone to account; what is the actual point of any of it? www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...

James Gowan’s Schreiber House is on the market: sothebysrealty.co.uk/properties/b...

There is an irony about a project conceived to promote ‘long term thinking’ being funded by one of the key proponents of the on-demand economy. All very *cough* meta.

Also feels like this is accelerating as we are in a political moment where malign actors and useful idiots are facilitating if not encouraging it. Even they recognise this is just a moment and thus existential for the project.

‘Stark displays of sexism’ driving women out of architecture, report finds

My latest review for Building Design considers Jon Blair’s recent film about Eric Parry’s approach to architecture - The Art of Architecture - and offered the opportunity to ask some big questions, as the film does: www.bdonline.co.uk/briefing/the...

For thousands of years we’ve been building with trabeated stone. For thousands of years it’s been chewed at, chased to abstraction. Repeatedly exhumed and revived, even after Roman concrete, even after Gothic vaults, after Rundbogenstil and Candela’s shells. Keeps coming back from the dead. a 🧵:

‘… everything must change so that everything can stay the same.’ Apparently this also holds for the life extending treatments on offer in the spa-adjacent clinic. A fascinating history of the Brenner hotel in Baden Baden: www.ft.com/content/f1ca...

‘Consider what is lost with a demolition… Histories are inscribed in architecture and to erase buildings is to strip cities of a layer of their culture.’

Despite the delusions AI remains a tool with fairly typical limitations (rubbish in, rubbish out etc), but the ambitions for which are also shaped by the intellect and creativity of its makers - which in this telling do not meet the moment at all.

Hello. I wrote a nice long essay about AI and this very strange moment where we're constantly told we're living in the dawn of a strange new future but the only thing that's actually clear is that everyone feels pretty unmoored and uncertain. I hope you'll read it

‘Even the perspective view - all coloured and enlivened with cloud, tree, and figure - is more like a chimerical prospectus than an honest and bona fide prospect.’ George Wightwick, 1853.

Full piece: www.ft.com/content/7624...

This reads as though Altman prompted his platform to write a paean to the future of humAInity in his own style - very *cough* meta.

Watching Mountainhead - quality joke: ‘Was your interior designer Ayn Bland?’

This feels like the most DS+R project ever: www.theguardian.com/artanddesign...

The thing is though, they have no idea what these jobs actually entail and whatever the AI platform comes up with to attempt to replace them will be a cheap and cheapened copy of the real thing.

In the last half hour of The Brutalist. Please send help.

If the content is so critical or valuable to building LLM’s then let the companies pay for access to it: www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

V good thread. Worth your time.

And this, dear reader, is why people like this shouldn’t be anywhere near such consequential technology. ‘The coolest, really?’ And no, I didn’t read anything in the interview that persuaded me otherwise.

V interesting thread. I think the case for wholesale demo is increasingly diminished - necessarily - as the context shifts to carbon and material scarcity. A building has to be fundamentally unusable not to be retained / repurposed / reused - which is rarely the case.

Late to this (as always) but what a powerful film: youtu.be/gDunV808Yf4?...

What is so great about this programme is that it explores a cultural hinterland, more than practice and output; Theaster Gates on This Cultural Life: podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/t...

I was going to describe it as having a curious lack of ambition (for someone with so much at his disposal) but perhaps the five-year-planning-battle vibe is the definition of ambition.

Every single time they moaned about thought police, they were literally setting out their own policy agenda.

‘Caligula Capitalism’ www.ft.com/content/e7a0...

Very good by @benansell.bsky.social on the current madness: benansell.substack.com/p/simple

Sun setting over the Reichstag in Berlin, snapped while getting lost in Friedrichstrasse station.

Although this is actually quite satisfying. Before they put all the mirrors and glass into it.

Your mention of wit makes me think of Lutyens. I suppose he was more or less given a blank cheque and told to enjoy himself. This plan is symmetrical on the outside (that itself was a choice) and full of ingenious solutions to self-imposed problems on the inside.

There are concept sketches and then there are concept sketches…. www.ribaj.com/buildings/do...

This is a great piece, something of a rallying cry for the kinds of places, like pubs, that we used to call ‘social condensers’ at university.