news
Hansen Yuncken extended
The Hansen Yuncken exhibition at Melbourne Uni has been extended to the 24th. MORE
08.12.10 in exhibition
Comment [1]
Office
Another way to sell your practice. Sell your office. From David Baker and Partners, San Francisco. It comes complete with bicycle hangers and compost bins.
03.12.10 in practice video-clips
Architect / protaganist:
UD conference 2010
Some of the papers from the August conference in Canberra have been published online here . These are text only, but if you want the pics, you can find them over on vimeo .
02.12.10 in conference urban-design
Baillieu bowls tower blocks
Of the many policies being released by Victoria’s new Liberal government, one caught my ear (oh, and the announcement that train stations are so dangerous they need armed guards).
01.12.10 in urban-planning
Spell in AKL
I have just returned from a few days in New Zealand. The house extension I have been working on there for four years got its code of compliance certificate as I left – a major relief as any NZ architect will know. I may pop a photo below when I figure out how to get one onto this Macintosh…
25.11.10 in heritage
Houses for sale
Occasional contributor Neville K. points out that there are two upcoming auctions in NSW and Vic that might offer a rare chance to snoop through some private properties of note.
24.11.10 in real-estate
Dharavi
Kevin McCloud’s “Slumming it” is currently running on the ABC (available at iview for short whiles). I had been turned off by its name but in the end decided to switch on. The word ‘slum’ has always had a derogatory slant to it that doesn’t help these towns and neighbourhoods at all. It can even provide instant justification for the wholesale demolition of them, so that they can be replaced by much posher and much less dense condominiums – it’s happening in Cambodia right now.
08.11.10 in urban-planning
Sage advice
Rather blunt warning to a potential architecture student. Content warning: Language is that of an architecture office on a bad day.
05.11.10 in practice video-clips
Comment [1]
Springberra
ACT Planning Minister Andrew Barr this week compared Walter Burley Griffin to an American cartoon character, in a blog post entitled Walter Burley Griffin is Dead .
05.11.10 in urban-planning weird-wonderful
Rating the ratings
The Fifth Estate today looks into recent claims by the HIA and The Australian that the NatHERS sustainability rating scheme is inconsistent and that there is a, “lack of correlation between actual energy performance of houses and their star ratings”. The CSIRO, developer of NatHERS-accredited Accurate software, says that they weren’t rating the ratings software correctly – “apart from a few minor glitches with the way the software was running, the main issue was due to errors made by assessors and incorrect interpretation of the results.”.
28.10.10 in sustainability computing
PKN 14
As part of the revitalised Architecture Week, Pecha Kucha 14 will take place at Federation Square’s BMW Edge this Wednesday. This episode has taken the PK volunteers weeks to put together, and they have corralled a good mix of speakers.
26.10.10 in talk
Comment [1]
Hello Singapore
Taking an air-conditioned break from my traipsing about Singapore. It is relentlessly humid but hasn’t managed to rain once in the four days I’ve been here, even though there are meant to be monsoonal dumps in the late afternoon. Just as well as the umbrella is stuffed.
19.10.10 in cities
Comment [3]
Highbrow furniture
That’s the name of a store officially selling Herman Miller’s Eames furniture range in the United States, couldn’t resist it. At another U.S. retailer, the Eames office, the cost of an Eames DCW (Dining Chair Wooden) varies between $629 and $1149 depending on the finish. If you shop around in Melbourne you can find similar chairs being sold for between $129 and $929 (if you want one dressed with the hide of a pony). These local chairs, all found from a search at Google Australia, all happen to be fakes, or, more euphemistically, replicas . The authentic Herman Miller chairs, quite lost in the search results, are made in places like the U.S., Canada and Italy. The replicas are made in China, not that they are called replicas there – they go by their original product names, sometimes even incorporating the Herman Miller name.
06.10.10 in furniture
Comment [1]
