Author: admin

Sticks and Stonehenge

If you look back in the farthest history of architecture, you might discover Stonehenge. What is this collection of rocks? Well, it is not a random pile of stones that happened upon the countryside in England. Nope. Located in Wiltshire, these are a series of ancient stones that were placed in a semicircular pattern around […]

Frankly, A Good Architecture Book

[amazon_link id=”0870708937″ target=”_blank” ][/amazon_link]Young Frank, Architect, written and illustrated by Frank Viva, is a story about a young man who wants to be an architect but his grandfather is skeptical. They take a trip to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which has a big architecture department, and learn about architects past and […]

Facade of Funny Men

The De Goblin parking garage in Almere, in the Netherlands is quite a cute building. It is not small and cute, it fits over 400 parking spaces. It is cute because the facade is covered in fanciful designs of gnomes and windmills. Metal plates have been perforated with holes and molded into scenes of things […]

Build a House in High School

In Evanston Illinois, two teachers have built an unusual and fantastic new high school course called “Geometry in Construction” (GiC). A hands-on course, GiC integrates Geometry and Construction topics where kids actually BUILD a structure – a real construction project. Kids will engage in their learning and be able to build something useful in the […]

Why a Purple Hotel?

Outside of Chicago, a hotel was built in 1962. Everyone who ever saw it remembers it. It was purple. Bright, shocking, and no-doubt-about-it-PURPLE. The original architect, John Macsai, never planned on it being that color. So how did it happen? How does a building end up not being what the architect designed? As the Purple […]

PreFab-ulous

Prefab is fab-ulous, right? Why? Because it allows for buildings to be built more cheaply and quickly than traditional construction. Walls can be built in factories and the wiring and plumbing pipes can be installed inside of the walls and then these walls can be shipped to the building site and then assembled into a […]

A Great Architecture Book

[amazon_link id=”0547238924″ target=”_blank” ][/amazon_link]This book, titled “If you Lived Here: Houses of the World” [amazon_link id=”0547238924″ target=”_blank” ]”If You Lived Here: Houses of the World”[/amazon_link] has fantastic illustrations. They are collages that are intricate, accurate and colorful, and in real life they are 3-D. Houses of the world includes structures from Spain, South Africa, Canada […]