I’ve recently read Scott Berkun‘s excellent book ‘A Year Without Pants‘, where he reports from his experiment of working for Automattic (the wonderful guys behind WordPress). He was tasked with the introduction of team structures into the perceived chaos of an entrepreneurial, DIY-minded and bazaar-like organisational culture. The book is remarkable on various accounts: It…
A tweet in my timeline yesterday made me think about the relationship between buildings and their effects and implications, or in short: what buildings do and don’t do. Here is the original statement: Chinese game company’s HQ – beautiful + encourages serendipitous interactions = awesome wired.com/design/2013/01… — Ben Waber (@bwaber) March 17, 2013 Now, there…
I cannot remember when it was or in which context exactly. But some time ago, somewhere, somehow, someone mentioned to me how odd it is that architecture is always photographed and presented under certain conditions: 1) perfect weather, i.e. blue skies, or alternatively: 2) at night or dawn, 3) no trace of usage, 4) no…
Schools are interesting as a building type for a variety of reasons: they have a clear function, i.e. accommodating children and organising teaching and learning; there are clear temporal patterns in usage and stark differences between classroom activities and the times before, after and in between; and the interface of schools is complex, too, in…
Or: Why Architectural Research is Still So Difficult. One of the beautiful aspects of being involved in inter-disciplinary research is that you are a member of different and sometimes quite distinct research communities, each with their own practices, policies, cultures and behaviours. It means being exposed to different ways of doing things, and this can…
Or: The Good, The Bad and The Shiny. Channel 4’s series on ‘The Secret Life of Buildings‘, broadcast in August 2011 is a fascinating inquiry into the way buildings affect people. Three episodes on our homes, our workplaces and places of leisure looked at examples of good design and bad design. I can whole-heartedly approve…
spaceandorganisation 