Alastair Townsen

alatown.com · American English

Alastair Townsend

rss2 wordpress content slash wfw atom dc sy

Open the feed

https://alatown.com/feed/

Last post: May 17, 2024
Posts in 24 h · 7 days · 30 days: 0 · 0 · 0
Our last check: Answering
Served from: United States
Site title: Alastair Townsen – Alastair Townsend
Text score at discovery: 13,135
Format: rss2
Features in the feed: content, slash, wfw, atom, dc, sy
Community: wordpress

Posts

What our queue read from this feed. Open one to read it here, or go to the site that published it.

AA Diploma Project (2002)
May 17, 2024 · original
Looking Back on My Final-Year AA Diploma Project The seeds of my current work in building communities were sown during my final year at the Architectural Association (AA) School of Architecture in London. My Diploma project addressed the issue of trailer homes in the US, which often trap owners in a cycle of poverty due to high-interest loans and depreciating value. This experience awakened me to the crucial link between finance and housing, inspiring me to create a new home building company founded on a more equitable business model for developing communities. Below is a slideshow of my AA Diploma project, the culmination of a year’s worth of research and work focused on the rural Southern US. Throughout my subsequent architectural career, I have worked on other novel and inventive housing projects that integrate prefabrication , sustainability, and community building. It’s remarkable t
Featured in The Wall Street Journal
Apr 21, 2015 · original
The Wall Street Journal recently published an article summarizing my observations about the economics that stimulate Japan’s eccentric residential architecture. In addition to featuring my work, the correspondent – Lucy Alexander – also interviewed our clients. The Onjuku Surf Shack certainly isn’t as unconventional as S-House , a curious see-thru split level home designed by Yuusuke Karasawa. However, both projects are used to illustrate the fact that Japanese clients have greater freedom to build their homes around their own personal tastes and aspirations. Our client expresses this quite well when she says, “I always wanted to design our own house to suit our lifestyle—a place where we could relax and enjoy life.”
Testing Buildings to Destruction
Feb 20, 2015 · original
Japan has engineered the world’s largest earthquake simulator, the nation’s first line of defense in a geophysical war. Many older homes in Japan don’t meet modern earthquake code and have proven a major liability in deadly earthquakes like Kobe suffered in 1995. Full-scale testing to destruction at E-Defense gauges their widespread risk to society and the efficacy of reinforcing them with retrofits. On January 17, 1995 a 6.8-magnitude earthquake struck Kobe, Japan. Damage exceeded expectations, tragically exposing structural vulnerabilities across various building types. The majority of the destruction occurred in older houses. Their heavy tiled roofs were a traditional precaution against frequent typhoons, but it made them precariously top heavy. Many homes toppled due to insufficient cross bracing in their wooden post and beam frames. Lower stories gave way as they struggled to suppor
On the Spline
Jan 9, 2015 · original
I recently published an academic paper answering the question: where do curves come from? I started this research well over a decade ago when I was working everyday with 3D design software at Grimshaw architects in London. The research began when I gave an internal presentation to overcome the architects’ reticence about using 3D software to design their curved buildings (something the practice was already famous for). My quest to demystify curvilinear geometry by explaining its origins and mechanics was fascinating, but also challenging, as I don’t have a technical background in mathematics or computational geometry. I hope that this article will help designers and anyone interested in understanding the origins of our contemporary design language. [Note: The full-length published article is framed by an introduction and conclusion that relates the research to developments in the field o
A+U Magazine: Data-Driven Cities
Nov 5, 2014 · original
I edited the November 2014 issue of a+u ( Architecture & Urbanism ) magazine . The issue’s theme – Data-Driven Cities – is broad, designed to encompass a range of technological drivers reforming urbanity. It’s also a provocative title which elicited many contributors to implore that human agency, not big data, should sit firmly in the driver’s seat when harnessing computation to analyze, develop and improve cities. Unveiling Intangible Barcelona by Pablo Martinez-Diez & Mar Snatamaria-Varas It was a privilege to commission and edit the writing of so many distinguished commentators and practitioners in this field. The culmination of over six months’ work, this rather textual edition (14 essays and interviews) is a departure for the publication, which tends toward photographs of notable architectural works. Nowadays, not only is the photographic medium migrating online, there are precious
Follow-up to Freakonomics: What about Financing?
Feb 27, 2014 · original
I listen to a lot of podcasts. They keep me in touch with what’s happening in the US and UK. I recently suggested to the team at WNYC’s Freakonomics Radio that they look into Japan’s weird housing economics. They liked the idea and did some research. You can listen to the episode below. I’m impressed by how the editors distilled this complex topic and some long interviews into an engaging 30-minute episode. The contributions of Jiro Yoshida of Penn State and Richard Koo of Noruma Research Institute lent a lot of weight to the discussion. It’s a shame they didn’t use the part of Koo’s interview where he calls Japan’s depreciating housing “the largest discrepancy in the free world.” Naturally, there is only so much they can cover in so little time… Listeners might be left wondering what about the role of financing? Japanese people, like everywhere else, typically take out a mortgage to buy
On the Passing of Kathryn Findlay (1953-2014)
Jan 15, 2014 · original
I recently learned with sadness that Kathryn Findlay has passed away from a brain tumour at the age of 60. She leaves an important architectural legacy for a number of reasons. Firstly, the works that Ushida Findlay built in Japan during the early-to-mid ’90s were truly groundbreaking. Since the Modernist era of the 1950’s and 60s, relatively few significant curvilinear buildings had been realised anywhere in the world. The Truss Wall House (1993), stands out as a seminal work of Japanese residential architecture. It’s also emblematic of a strain of eccentric and extreme houses built in the country’s recessionary post-bubble era. Her works presaged a formal approach that gained mainstream adoration with Gehry’s Bilbao Guggenheim and is now epitomised by the proliferative works of Zaha Hadid, who graduated from the AA only a couple of years prior to Kathryn. Ushida Findlay’s control over
CNN Interview on Japanese Residential Architecture
Dec 12, 2013 · original
The CNN interview I gave last week has aired as a part of a piece on Japanese residential architecture (I show up around 1:00 in). The crew got in touch after reading the ArchDaily article and they contacted the owners of some of the homes pictured to arrange access and interviews. Sou Fujimoto was also interviewed in his House NA, so I tagged along to see it for the first time firsthand. Although I was familiar with the design concept, I came away with a deeper appreciation after talking to the client (who didn’t wish to be interviewed on camera). Of course, seeing how a home is actually lived in – as opposed to staged photographs soon after completion – is always an eye opener (curtains, space heaters, the inevitable clutter of daily life). I thought the CNN cameraman caught the house’s lived-in charm rather well. Thanks Paula, Nicki, and the rest of the CNN crew.
Map of Tokyo Residential Architecture
Dec 2, 2013 · original
I was contacted by a number of news outlets after I published my recent article explaining Japan’s crazy housing economics and how I think they facilitate experimental residential architecture. Since many people seem keen to see or photograph these in-person (or via streetview), I have assembled a map that catalogs some interesting examples of Tokyo residential architecture. Google’s new maps engine sure looks snazzy, doesn’t it? Currently, the map is centred around West Tokyo, where most of the famous examples are clustered. By no means exhaustive or authoritative, I plan to gradually update it (time permitting). I welcome any additions to the map that readers care to suggest. Just tweet them to me: @AlaTown
Why Japan is Crazy About Housing
Dec 2, 2013 · original
The following article about Japanese housing economics and how they motivate Japan’s penchant for experimental architecture first appeared on ArchDaily , where it quickly became one of their most popular articles. Unfortunately, copyright restrictions prevent me from including here the photography that accompanied the original article . In architectural magazines and websites, like ArchDaily , we see a steady stream of radical Japanese houses . These homes, mostly designed by young architects, often elicit readers’ bewilderment. It can seem that in Japan, anything is permissible: stairs and balconies without handrails , rooms flagrantly cast open to their surroundings, or homes with no windows at all. These whimsical, ironic, or otherwise extreme living propositions arrest readers’ attention, baiting us to ask: WTF Japan ? The photos travel the blogosphere and social networks under their

Discovered by the rss-feed-index crawler, which checks each feed at most once a month.

Same record as JSON: https://api.agentalog.com/api/feeds/fd_alatown_com_61eb1813b5dcf143. More from this site: alatown.com in the Feeds tab.