Lived In
Design, life, and the space between. A weekly letter on how buildings actually get lived in: the history behind the everyday, and notes from practice in Bali and Taiwan.
Issue 22 ·
The Best Seat In The House
Rome fines you €250 for sitting in it.
Since the summer of 2019 it has cost €250 to sit down on the Spanish Steps in Rome. Police walk up and down them in the afternoons and move people along. Eat a gelato there and the fine goes up to €400. The steps were built between 1723 and 1725 to get people from the Piazza di Spagna up to the church of Trinità dei Monti at the top of
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Issue 21 ·
Demons Travel In Straight Lines
Four words that beat every argument I have ever made.
Demons travel in straight lines. They might be the only thing in Bali that does. Because of this, inside every Balinese house gate there is a short wall with nothing behind it. It is called the aling-aling. It stands square to the doors, head high and a little wider than the opening, so the moment you are through you have to go left or right. From the street you see
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Issue 20 ·
Every Hotel Room Is The Same Room
You could draw it with your eyes shut. One man is to blame.
I have woken up in a hotel room and not known which country I was in. More than once, and sober. It was the floor plan. Try it. Draw the last hotel room you stayed in. Door. Bathroom on one side, wardrobe on the other, a short dark bit where the suitcase clips the wall. Bed against the wall, facing a television on a desk nobody has ever worked at.
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Issue 19 ·
Knock On The Wall
Dull thud or hollow tap. You already know how to read both.
There is a meme about architects. You have probably seen it. We cannot walk into a building without touching it. Stroking the concrete. Running a palm down a timber column. Standing far too close to a wall, knocking on it twice with a knuckle, then nodding, as if the wall has answered. All true. I do every one of these. But here is what the meme misses. The wall has
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Issue 18 ·
Turn Off The Big Light
The room only appears when it goes off.
No room has ever been improved by turning on the big light. The single fitting in the centre of the ceiling, the switch by the door, the one that goes on when someone walks in and off when someone who loves the room walks in after them. In Britain the argument even has a name: the big light war, fought nightly, in every living room, between people who want to
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Issue 17 ·
Take Off Your Shoes
Half of you are about to be offended.
Some of you are reading this with your shoes on. Indoors. In your own home. And roughly half the world would like a word. There is no neutral position on this. Either the floor of your house is an inside, something clean enough to sit on, eat off, put a sleeping baby down on, or it is simply more street with a roof over it. Whole civilisations picked a side,
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Issue 16 ·
Why Is A Brick A Brick?
The oldest brick in the world has thumbprints on it.
A brick is born in the hand. The oldest bricks anyone has found are at Jericho, about ten thousand years old. There is no mould. Somebody scooped up mud and patted it into a loaf, and within a thousand years the makers were pressing rows of thumbprints into the top so the next course would grip. The oldest bricks in the world have fingerprints on them. It has stayed in
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Issue 15 ·
Bamboo Is Ruining My Life
Somebody planted it along a wall. It's now a courtyard.
Bamboo is a wonderful building material. Warm to the hand and warm to look at, and it ages without turning ugly. It bends into shapes that in steel would mean a fabricator, a budget and a very long conversation. Because it is a hollow tube it arrives with the structural section already solved, which is nature getting it right first time and not charging for the drawing. A roof built
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Issue 14 ·
My Hardest Client
Infinite taste, zero constraint, and a house that needed an Act of Parliament to stop.
The worst client of my career pays late, moves every deadline, and second-guesses decisions that were settled weeks ago. He has never once been fired, because the practice can't function without him. He's me. For nine weeks my own website sat at ninety-five per cent finished. Nine projects photographed and written up. Pages built, words argued over, the last few tasks so small I'm embarrassed to list them. Every Monday
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Issue 13 ·
Move Your Chair
Rain dripped on the client's head at dinner. Wright told him to move his chair.
Living on a building site is a special kind of misery, and this week a client of mine is doing it in paradise. There's a leak in the existing balcony of a house I'm extending, dripping off the soffit beneath, and the only way to find it is to rip up the decking above. Water never shows up where it gets in; it travels, then announces itself somewhere nobody thought
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Issue 12 ·
Engineers Don't Trust The Load
The bamboo was in the wrong place. The boat broke down. Neither was a problem.
The best buildings are designed for the load you don't expect. Not the weight that will sit on the beam, but the weight that won't, plus a wide margin for the day it does. Engineers call it the factor of safety, and the whole discipline runs on it — you calculate what the structure must carry, then you build it to carry far more, because the difference between the two
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Issue 11 ·
A Building That Doesn't Need AC
Someone picked a fight with me in the comments and turned out to be wrong.
A hundred and nineteen weeks ago I posted a video about hiding air conditioner units. Someone picked a fight with me in the comments of it. He thought I was talking shit. We went back and forth for longer than either of us should have, and the whole thing sat untouched until last week, when it came back to me for no obvious reason while I was at my desk.
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Issue 10 ·
Your Best Work Is The Work Nobody Picks
Boullée spent his life drawing a building 500 feet tall. Nobody ever built it.
The best work I make in any given week is the work nobody picks. You know the feeling. You sit down with a problem, you come up with the obvious answer, and then, because you're not done, because you can feel there's something better, you keep going. You make a second version. A third. By the time you stop you've got a handful of options spread out in front of
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Issue 9 ·
Notes From A Port City
Strangely drawn to them, all my adult life.
There is a particular kind of city you can only understand from the water. Today I am crossing the harbour to Cijin on a ferry that costs almost nothing and runs all day. Scooters are packed in around me, engines off, helmets balanced on handlebars. A container ship the size of a city block slides past on the right. The cranes on the far shore look like a font. Kaohsiung
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Issue 8 ·
A Finished Room Is A Finished Argument
The room you design from scratch is a room you've already finished thinking in.
The room I am writing this in is not designed. It's the living room. I took the whole thing - desk, screens, tripod, boxes against the far wall - because the light is the best in the apartment. Windows on both sides, morning sun on one, afternoon on the other, which is also why it overheats so fast we had to put aircon in to keep the screens from baking.
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Issue 7 ·
Big Pants
The architects still argue over who designed it. Beijing decided what to call it.
Ten years ago, I cycled past the CCTV headquarters every morning on the way to work. Two hundred and thirty-four metres of building bent into a loop, its top corner cantilevered out over a courtyard that nobody uses. It is one of the most structurally audacious buildings ever built in a city, and on a bicycle at seven in the morning it is genuinely immense. You do not get used
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Issue 5 ·
Houses Are Designed For Thirty-Year-Olds
The body ages. The floor plan doesn't. One of these is a design problem.
Most houses are designed for a person who doesn't exist. Thirty years old, in good health, never tired, never sore, never carrying a small child up the stairs at the end of a long day. The Romans built whole buildings for the person we actually are. We build candles. There are four words an architect wants to hear from a client more than any others, and I want a sauna
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Issue 3 ·
Never Finished In A Lifetime
I've been to Sagrada Família three times. It was unfinished every single one.
On the 20th of February this year, the last section of the Tower of Jesus Christ was lifted into place in Barcelona. 172.5 metres. The world's tallest church. Construction began in 1882. It is still not finished: the tower is done, the Glory façade it was meant to crown is not. I first went in my first year of architecture school, sketching the facade half cut on cheap sangria and
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Issue 2 ·
The Building The Chairs Designed
Five hundred designers. No conversation. Same answer.
The Schaudepot at Vitra is one of those places that hits you before you've processed what you're looking at. You walk in, and there are chairs; hundreds of them, each one a fully resolved argument about how someone should sit in it. An Eames shell next to a Panton next to a Wegner next to a Prouvé. Every designer's personality is present and accounted for, none of them agreeing, all
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Issue 1 ·
A Ferrari Went Through This Wall In 1986
It took twenty years and two generations to finish this house.
The glass pavilion at the Ben Rose House wasn't in the original drawings. James Speyer designed the house in 1953 — steel frame, floor-to-ceiling glass, cantilevered over a wooded ravine in Highland Park, Illinois. Precise, considered, very much of its moment. Speyer had trained under Mies van der Rohe. The pavilion came twenty years later, added by David Haid — Speyer's student (Mies's architectural grandchild) to house Ben Rose's collection
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