A story of Roman aqueducts When in Rome … check out the amazing aqueducts! They are not only in that city of course. Most incredible Roman aquaeducts are actually all over Europe, like the Pont du Gard, the Valens aqueduct (part of a 240 km conduit), the Aqueduct of Segovia, the Pont des les Ferreres … Read more Why you don’t want your toilet to fail
“Quality … you know what it is, yet you don’t know what it is. But that’s self-contradictory. Some things are better than others, that is, they have more quality. But when you try to say what the quality is, apart from the things that have it, it all goes Poof! – Robert Pirsig, Zen and … Read more Beauty and value in the modern age
“The valuable space around the bed is good for nothing, except access to the bed.” Christopher Alexander, A Pattern Language When fulfilling one of our essential needs, shelter, we usually pay money to temporarily (rent) or permanently (buy) use a structure to store our stuff and find a place to sleep away from the elements … Read more Why are bedrooms still a thing?
In the context of the lifetimes of trees or even the planet, human lives are very short. Even doubling our life expectancy in the last 100 years (world average 1900: 31y, 2014: 71.5y) has done little to change the role that the limitation of our time on this earth plays in our lives. Most of … Read more Designing with Time
I will never forget what the houses in Australia felt like. A very common type of building there are floating weatherboard buildings. The house is basically on little 30cm high stumps. There is no basement. Then there are the floorboards through which one can see the ground under the house. The walls are simple stud … Read more Quality of housing
I am an engineer. Supposedly people don’t expect much finesse from engineers. What do you think about, when you hear that something is “engineered”? It sounds like it is shiny, efficient, somehow made from stainless steel and works well. I don’t particularly associate “engineered” items with how they look and definitely not with how they … Read more Why design matters
I went to an interesting event organised by finding infinity . There would be two speakers that night, one of them was Sam Gosling, a Magnum PI-ish psychology professor from Austin, Texas and Timothy Hill, serious and strangely funny architect from his own firm Partners Hill. While Timothy’s talk was very interesting in his own right (check … Read more What your stuff says about you