The Ceiling Nobody Looks At
It is the largest uninterrupted surface in almost every room, it carries the light, the air and the sound, and it is the first thing value-engineered into a grid of white tiles.
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An Astro theme for architecture publications: buildings, materials, cities, interiors, practice, and preservation.
Page 2 of 3 · 26 posts
Adaptive Reuse Is Not a Discount
Keeping a building saves carbon reliably and money only sometimes. Pitching reuse as the cheap option is the fastest way to lose the argument in front of a quantity surveyor.
The Site Visit Is the Real Review
Design reviews happen in a warm room with a projector. The building is reviewed on a wet Tuesday by someone in boots who has thirty minutes and a list.
Density Is a Verb
Two neighbourhoods at identical dwellings per hectare can feel like a village and like a warehouse. The number describes an outcome and explains nothing about how it was reached.
Steel Thinks in Spans
Concrete wants to be short and thick, timber wants to be regular, steel wants to be long. Choosing a frame is choosing which of those instincts your plan has to obey.
An Office Is a Set of Promises About Noise
Nobody chooses a workplace by its acoustics and nobody leaves one for any other reason. Every plan is a claim about how much of other people you will have to hear.
A Bridge With Nothing to Prove
No cables, no signature, no name on a plaque. A 240 metre road crossing built for a third of the budget of the scheme it replaced, and the best piece of infrastructure in the region.
What a Cathedral Knows About Air
Buildings designed six centuries before mechanical ventilation move enormous volumes of air correctly, quietly, and for nothing. The principles have not expired — the ceiling heights have.
Fees Are a Design Constraint
A practice paid 3.5 per cent cannot detail like a practice paid 8. Discussing quality without discussing fee structure is discussing the weather.
The Corridor Is Doing More Work Than You Think
It is the space nobody is briefed to design, and it decides how a building smells, sounds, orients you, and whether anyone you pass says hello.
The Estate That Was Blamed for Its Budget
The layout was sound, the flats were generous, and the plan is still being copied. What failed was a maintenance settlement that nobody wrote down and everybody assumed.
The Brick That Outlived Its Argument
Brick was dismissed as nostalgic for thirty years and is now the default cladding on half the buildings going up. Neither position had much to do with the material.
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