Archinect - News

Vintage photos remind of the profession before AutoCAD

2018-08-20T17:04:00-04:00

Before the advent of AutoCAD and other drafting softwares, the engineering drawings were made on sheet of papers using drawing boards. Many equipments were required to complete a given drawing such as drawing board, different grade pencils, Erasers T-squares, Set square etc.

Check out this fun collection of photographs from the pre-CAD era...

Tracking down Sears Catalog Homes

2016-05-17T15:45:00-04:00

Not long ago, the Sears, Roebuck and Co. mail-order catalog was the ultimate marketplace, much like Amazon is today. You could even buy a house straight from the catalog. Just pick out the home you like, and voila, Sears would deliver it just for you. [...] From 1908 to 1940, Sears sold between 70,000 to 75,000 homes, so there are plenty out there, you just need to know where to look.

↑ This photo shows a Sears "Magnolia" kit house in Benson, North Carolina. (Photo: Rosemary Thornton; image via Wikipedia)

"Sears Modern Homes offered the latest technology available to house buyers in the early part of the twentieth century. Central heating, indoor plumbing, and electricity were all new developments in house design that "Modern Homes" incorporated, although not all of the houses were designed with these conveniences. Primarily shipped via railroad boxcars, these kits included most of the materials needed to build a house. Once delivered, many of these houses were assembled by the new homeowner, relatives, friends and neighbors, in a fashion similar to the traditional barn-raisings of farming families." (via the Sears Catalog Home Wikipedia page)

Zaha Hadid lecture at SCI-Arc, circa 1985, "beams out talent, strength, commanding conviction"

2015-12-17T18:18:00-05:00

Actually, I am blinded by this light" Zaha Hadid's first words at the lecture.

"Zaha Hadid reviews her work at the AA with Rem Koolhaas, and, before that, with Leon Krier. She stresses her interest in the Russian avant-garde. She expresses her need to seriously engage with twentieth century culture. She describes her first independent projects after leaving the Office of Metropolitan Architecture. She explores the ideas of dynamics, also referred to by some as hysterics. She argues for the importance of color as a way of manipulating building and space. She discusses her competition project for the Peak Leisure Club in Hong Kong." - archives.

This is when I saw Zaha Hadid for the first time at SCI Arc in 1985. She beams out talent, strength, commanding conviction that she has got it. She is at her best.

When she was doing this she was part of the times you'd be a lone ranger just thirty years ago and she was one of them in the male wolf den. She talks of her precedents, technological inspirations, and Hong Kong Peak project. She shows 4th and 5th student proj...

Online shop, Das Programm, launches offering vintage, hard-to-find, Dieter Rams products

2013-08-06T13:19:00-04:00

As incorrigible collectors we are all too aware of the gap between the desirability and availability of Dieter Rams' work. das programm was conceived to correct this. We only sell Dieter Rams designs for Braun and Vitsœ, and Braun products issued between 1955 and 1995, the period of Rams’ office at Braun, for the greater part as Director of the Design Department.

Iconic Photo of Construction Workers Lunching Atop a Skyscraper Was Faked

2012-09-21T19:26:00-04:00

“The image was a publicity effort by the Rockefeller Centre,” Corbis’s chief historian Ken Johnston told the Independent. “It seems pretty clear they were real workers, but the event was organised with a number of photographers.”

The Westward-Moving House: A classic revisited

2011-07-05T17:47:02-04:00

Three hundred years ago one Nehemiah Tinkham, with wife Submit Tinkham and six children, landed on the shores of New England to establish a home in the wilderness.

DesignObserver has just republished J.B. Jackson's classic essay "The Westward-Moving House," originally published in Landscape in 1953, which traces the evolution of the American house over three centuries and across the continent. Geographer Paul F. Starrs and photographer Peter Goin at the University of Nevada, Reno, have purchased the archive of Landscape and plan to digitize the archive and make it fully accessible. Fewer than a dozen libraries have a full set of the magazine. Jackson's terrific essay "The Westward-Moving House" was last anthologized 15 years ago and is now out of print. DO will be following later this week with a contemporary riff, "The Eastward-Moving House," by architect David Heymann.