maetl

Architecture

A Stop Motion Story

Graffiti artist Blu has released his biggest and most ambitious film to date.

The City as a Whole

Holism and the case for utopian imagination in architecture.

Horizons of the New Berlin

In the corporate zones of redevelopment, the juxtaposition of architecture stands-out because it is really the juxtaposition of utterly disparate world-views

Webstock 08: The Transforming Web

The carpet has been pulled out from under our feet and the new web is a very different place to what we were used to. On Friday morning at Webstock, eager conference goers were subjected to several…

Frameworks and Seedworks

Frameworks are the shining stars of this current era of web development and there are many benefits for designers and programmers to focus technical solutions around a given framework as a platform…

Escaping the Self Denial Instinct

In Hearing without listening, 37Signals screws up, then admits what they did wrong and how they fixed it. In the end, it's just a matter of several weeks downtime before the application is working…

The Architecture of Happiness

Alain de Botton was in Wellington this week, promoting his new book The Architecture of Happiness, and we heard him speak the other night to a packed auditorium at Wellington Girls College, courtesy…

Floating Farms on Inner City Waterways

A novel solution to the lack of space for food cultivation in modern cities.

Unsolicited Architecture

Using design to provoke public debate about the future of cities.

The Seduction of Maps

Illustrations and musings on the unbuilt expressways of Manhattan, the ubiquity of Google maps and the legacy of Robert Moses.

Webstock 08: The Age of Frameworks

Many of us are still conditioned to think of design frameworks in terms of grid systems, Swiss graphic design, and rigid corporate identity systems. The problems with these are similar to the problems…

A Utopia Without Ideals

The implications of Pig City by MVRDV are a sensory and ethical challenge - architecture that tests the fine line between social criticism and gritty realism. If meat consumption was to stay…

Software is not made of Bricks

Raganwald dissects the misguided metaphor from a software process perspective. I have come to believe that these kinds of problems are even more prevalent in the web development world than in…

Tag-a-long

Our formal attempts at understanding language tend to be hierachically structured, but when it comes to actually organizing language, it is well known that meaning is relational and constantly fluctuates.…

Cheek By Jowl

“The Metamorphosis of Our Town ... It Happened Cheek By Jowl”

Prospects for Paper Architecture

The future for architects is not the future of architecture.

Improving Architecture with Testable Code

Unit testing can have productive side-effects that manifest in the emergent design of classes and API's. Testing objects in isolation from their interactions in the larger code-base pushes you to…

Introducing Historiographica

So I've started another website, a kind of ongoing accident, with the idea echoing so intensely during Webstock as I culled together my 8x5 presentation, it just seemed to burst out of my brain and…

New Zealand Design Review

In a 1950 editorial the "New Zealand Design Review" identified the "horrible forces ranged against good design" as Indifference, Cheapness First, Unnecessary Novelty, Mass Production, De Luxe…

Underground in Canada

BLDGBLOG talks to Michael Cook, the author and photographer behind the Vanishing Point. Michael's spectacular images of tunnel systems and urban decay are a must-see. He views the city as…

Zen and the Art of Template Engines

Without exception, programmers espouse separation of logic and display as an ideal principle. In practice, however, programmers and template engine producers are loath to enforce separation, fearing…