All you ever wanted to know about recent construction in your Seattle neighborhood

 Under Development

The daunting design and construction process, unveiled

 Resources

Happy City by a Charles Montgomery

A recommendation from a friend always leads me directly to satisfaction and time well spent. A book I recently read came by way of a colleague when she heard me complain of a recent issue I had with my on-going urban planning research. I was just beginning to get into The Culture of Cities by Lewis Mumford, an…

Walls walls walls

Walls are ubiquitous as cell phone clutching is for anyone under thirty. Almost anything in front of us is a wall. Look up now. Is it the bus front (wall) or the wall in your bedroom? Perhaps you are at a park and there is a wall you are sitting on? Or at a cafe with…

Peeling back and opening up

Many projects that have a giant impact on our current human condition use transparency, a physical implication that is meant to represent openness. Millennials value openness as one of the pillars of our social and demographic makeup, along with trusting our friends and, even though we have been labeled self-absorbed, being socially consciousness. For architecture…

Book Review – What Is Architecture?

There is an admirer I have in Austin. He is an architect who designs mostly single family houses in Austin neighborhoods and does a wonderful job of melding contemporary ideas into his work without being stark or cheap. You may think, really? These are your tenements? But yes, really, they are. It is quite a…

Shifts in residential typologies

How has residential typology changed and what are the impacts? For one, we aren’t adding new single-family housing stock. This halt is unprecedented in US history until now. Secondly, to meet the demand for more housing stock with greater density, modern cosmopolitan cities like Seattle are investing in more town-homes and condominiums. This changes the…

Open Source Architecture

This book came to me by chance. I followed a new instagram account: designboom. I hardly read my feed, but that day I happened to surf a minute. There was a designboom post showing their summer reading list. I could only make out one title (the point was not to actually give real information, but to see…

delightfully entertaining

 Mixed bag

The lovely things we find that make enrich our everyday

 Architecture & Design

Another part in a new series I am using on a trial run is examining the headier topics, putting a microscope on the things that really matter and adding fuel to a fire hoping the discussion will start and take root. This one centers on a changing Seattle city and with it, similar cities all…

– Architecture of the Industry

  Tantilizing bait latches onto people’s ambitious side, whether ambition be the forefront of that mind or deeply concealed and protected. Ambition deep down, ambition bottoms up. Either feed the drive. Side drive. Seattle drive. Together pulled into an urban hustle, but with the promise of endless wilderness exploration. The first paradox, Urban Escape. The only thing not in delicate peril is…

– Red Tape Tube Architecture – A brief manifesto on why there is no progressive architecture in Seattle