Bog standard
They no longer make toilets in New Zealand. In fact, we don’t seem to manufacture very much at all anymore. We’d rather bring...
20 years ago
The Barcelona Chair was created some 90, and not just 20 years, ago for the German Pavilion at the 1929 exposition in Spain. However,...
Mine is bigger than yours
Last year I visited the World Financial Centre in Shanghai. One hundred storeys high and, for about five minutes, it was the tallest building...
Connections
I recently read the biography of Steve Wozniak — titled somewhat coyly iWoz.
A self-proclaimed genius — he was quick to tell us that his...
DIY porn
Architect Don Bunting notes that DIY stores are based on the principle that you get the customer in looking for one item and have...
Bad acting
The latest attempt to provide a more robust regulatory framework for the construction industry is the Building Amendment Act 2013.
The amendment is...
Outer space
To misquote Wordsworth, I recently “wandered past a lonely cloud” to the end of Queen’s Wharf in Auckland. Queen’s Wharf was the centre of...
Star quality
According to the media, today almost anyone can be a star. Appear in a daily soap opera; instant stardom. Read out the weather on...
Generation why
A trait common to all recent generational groupings — Gen X, Gen Y and Gen Millennium — is that they tend to have a...
In code
When I first started in architectural practice, engineers still used punch cards to hold the codes defining their calculation data. Containing a series of...