The Tall Building Politically Reconsidered

The tall building has been an expression of machista one-upmanship since its earliest beginnings. San Gimignano’s stone towers are a built testament to the rivalry that existed between ruling families in Medieval times; a rivalry that continues to this day, only now it’s happening in

A Whimsical Water Tower in…Barcelona?

I spotted this fantastic water tower the other day while walking around Poble Nou, Barcelona’s industrial graveyard. Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen (authors of a major public sculpture in this city) could not have done a better job than

Top-Down Tower, L’Hospitalet de Llobregat, by R+B Arquitectes

[Originally published in Mark Magazine #27] Social housing is among the most regulated–and least glamorous–areas of architecture. While all housing is normally subject to a set of minimum room dimensions, social housing is additionally governed by stringent maximum dimensions which

Water Tower and Bridge Pavilion

[originally published in Mark Magazine #16] Bridge Pavilion by Zaha Hadid, left, and Water Tower by Enrique de Teresa. Water Tower One of the ironies of world expositions is that while they apparently act as a catalyst for large-scale urban