A short digression on humane architecture

This stadium was designed by Zaha Hadid and meant to be built in Tokyo:

I don't actually know, but I expect that the committee felt that it might be a landmark like the Sydney Opera House, famous, forever photographed. The committee scrapped it, though, and decided to build this, instead, and it makes me so happy:

Much more humane. By comparison, Zaha Hadid's white wonder looks like a science-fiction paperback cover. It doesn't look bad, at least not to me, better than e.g. what they build in Dubai, but the humane vision is clearly Kengo Kuma's wood structure.

I'm not sure why this is.

Part of it is wood. You can shape concrete freely and at any scale, wood retains some relationship to the size of a tree, even if modern use of glued laminated wood weaken that relationship. Or perhaps someone who starts out planning with wood has already decided on a humane philosophy for the building?

Part of it is structure. Consider the Empire State Building, perhaps the most widely-known tall building except the current record holder, whose name is invariably forgotten as soon as there's a new record holder. Thirty other buildings have been the tallest after the Empire State Building, and twenty-nine have been forgotten. I think the big reason is they lack humane structure. Wikimedia has a revealing photo of the Empire State Building and some neighbours where you can see how it looks like the brownish building in front, not like the glassy cube to the left. It's tall, to be sure, but its appearance is not detached from human scale. There's some very clever design there that stretches humanity up, far up. There are small structural elements, bigger ones, even bigger, and that continuity of structure connects the street with the sky.

Perhaps: A building is humane if it can be seen to be made of human-sized components. A hundred-meter soaring curve of concrete can be a fine thing, but human-sized it's not.

Personally, I think that Zaha Hadid stadium would look awful when seen from much of the area around it, despite its memorable beauty. It would be immeasurably bigger than and completely disconnected from the buildings in front of it. Behold a Dublin street:

Pictures of bookshelves

This post is just an array of interior photos from a high-quality architecture magazine called Dezeen. The photos below are the first ones I noticed after April 2015 that show bookshelves. There were also a few pictures that show books outside shelves. I didn't include those; this is about how bookshelves are depicted in modern architecture photos, not books.

Books and shelves might seem rare in these houses, but I don't think that reflects reality: There are even fewer TVs and laptops than books so clearly the photographers are choosy about where they point their cameras. No, what these pictures illustrate is how bookshelves are depicted in 2015.

Most of these are private homes, some are other buildings. Two are actually libraries (as is this). Each picture is a link to the relevant article on Dezeen. The top left photo is the one that made me start collecting notes.

Man is the measure of all things

Le Corbusier said so. Noone seems to understand it.

A window sill is not 1m above the floor. A window is properly located so its centre is 1.0 eyeheights above the floor and its size is 1.0 visionwidths, because man is the measure of all things. A good architect resolves these difficult units appropriately to the building.

The same applies to doors, stair steps, GUI animation times and technical writing. The reader's comprehension is the measure, not logical structure or the writer's composition ideal.