no2self.net

Some threads worth tying together…. Thingsmagazine.net recently covered the plight of MVRDV, who appear to have unwittingly (?) upset a lot of people (again) by designing a pair of towers complete with their own explosion of structure billowing out from their mid rift. Things magazine cuts through the possible conceptual justifications by suggesting Minecraft as the [...]

Taking the time to write something considered and share it online is not easy, so getting reminded why it’s worth it is always welcome.  I’ve certainly appreciated all the supportive comments about my first submission to the housing blog over at bdonline.co.uk and much more importantly I’ve learnt lots in return from people sending links [...]

As you may have noticed from all the (t)wittering a few weeks ago, I was lucky enough to be offered a place on a field trip to Germany to study Passivhaus construction principles. As my practice continues to try and raise the energy efficiency bar in the social housing sector and travel along the seemingly [...]

I was recently contacted by some students from Birmingham School of Architecture and asked to take part in an exhibition they’re organising called Made in Birmingham for an upcoming RIBA/BAA event. The request was simply to pick my favourite building in the city and provide a 50 word explanation. Here’s what I’ve just submitted: Bournville [...]

My name is Rob Annable. I’m an architect, a father, a husband, a rock climber, a blogger and wannabe geek. Although not necessarily in that order. I’m a director at Axis Design Architects. We’re architects and urban designers in Birmingham, UK. We mostly make housing  and we are leaders in the field of online methods [...]

Moral dilema solved: There’s no longer any need to clock up a big carbon footprint travelling to see architecture around the world when CGI rendering gets to this level. The Third & The Seventh from Alex Roman on Vimeo. I need never leave Birmingham again.

Facing up, originally uploaded by eversion. There’s something very satisfying about the way this building keeps facing you as you round the bend. Successfully enfronting the site I think Charles Moore would say. update: Yep, enfronting it is: I should get this out of my system. It must be getting quite dull, all this relentless [...]

I found another one… Po-mo blast off! Inside, Charles Moore reviews Jenck’s ‘The Language of Post-Modern Architecture’: Whatever it’s called, it is probably more useful to to consider how to do it. Here I think Jencks prescription for a ‘radical eclecticism’ is incomplete. His concept of ‘multivalence’ seems to be entirely to do with architecture [...]

Provided mostly as a supplement to the latest post by The Sesquipedalist, I’ve dug out some old cover images from AD magazine in the 70s. Much better qualified to explain the history of architectural journalism than I, The Sesquipedalist sets the scene: During the “book business model” of the ’70s, where the magazine almost completely [...]

I’ve been making notes, with varying intensity, since early 2004. Here’s a Google search box to help you mine it: If you’d like to widen your search to include other blogs, I also run a Google search co-op that includes lots of other great writers on architecture and design: no2self.net/blogsearch