“Gabion is an illustrated archive of critical writing on architecture, design and related topics by Hugh Pearman. …Gabion is the site of Hugh Pearman, London-based architecture and design critic. Hugh has been attached to The Sunday Times, London, since 1986, writes for a wide range of other design and consumer titles, is the author of several books, and frequently teaches and lectures. What you find here is a selection — by no means exhaustive — of his writings in various media, including the full, uncut versions of articles previously published in The Sunday Times.”

“It’s not the sort of house you’d expect to find in a leafy New Jersey town: a big, galvanized-steel shed that would seem more at home in an industrial park. But that’s only the beginning. Lift up one of the shed’s big garage doors, and you find a tiny clapboard cottage — much more in keeping with this part of the world — at one end of the cavernous space. But at the other end is a 27-foot-high, 33-foot-wide grid of nine rooms that looks like a cross between a 1950’s elementary school and the set of ‘Hollywood Squares…’”

“‘I would invite you to know something about me,’ said Christopher Alexander, the creator of A Pattern Language, the 1977 folk bible for home builders, lay people and professionals alike. ‘Design is not really my thing.’”

“Experience Design is an emerging paradigm, a call for inclusion: it calls for an integrative practice of design that can benefit all designers, including those who work in the new, interactive media. Unfortunately, the intense time and project pressures faced by designers in all disciplines, together with a parochialism or provincialism that is disturbingly constant among designers, prevents interdisciplinary conversations. Web designers are too busy to talk to architects, who are too busy to talk to graphic designers, who are too busy to talk to automotive designers, and so on. Not only at professional association and trade events, but also on the ‘Net, we miss the opportunity to learn from and work with each other.”

“Cars with jet-like tailfins zoomed past giant tiki gods, rockets and flying saucers on their way to Disneyland. In some ways, the Space Age, or Googie, architecture and design surrounding the park blurred the line between the Magic Kingdom and the real world. The Space Age Inn, Satellite Shopland and the ultra-modern Bob’s Big Boy restaurant were like extensions of the promise of Disney’s Tomorrowland. Likewise, a giant tiki with glowing eyes standing before the Pitcairn Motel was nearly as intriguing to young visitors as the restless natives hiding in the jungles of Adventureland. These are some of the more exotic examples of Googie, a style of architecture that thrived in the 1950s and early 1960s. It began as commercial architecture designed to make the most of strip shopping centers and other roadside locations. It fit the needs of the new California ‘car culture’ and the dreams of the even newer space age.”

“Dear Mr. Architect: Please design and build me a house. I am not quite sure of what I need, so you should use your discretion. My house should have somewhere between two and forty-five bedrooms. Just make sure the plans are such that the bedrooms can be easily added or deleted. When you bring the blueprints to me, I will make the final decision of what I want. Also, bring me the cost breakdown for each configuration so that I can arbitrarily pick one.”

“As we tried to understand the ways in which writing was used to promote active learning in this class, we first turned to Paul’s definitions of visual and graphic thinking in the introduction to his text book Graphic Thinking and then reflected up on their rhetorical overtones. First, the graphic imaging, clustering, and drawing dominating Paul’s course — while neither verbal nor rational (in the same sense writing can be) — are nonetheless understood as cognitive activities. This assumption challenges a centuries-old apartheid between perception and abstract thought.”

“Having insisted in various essays on the need of the architect to impose his personality on a project, Koolhaas now wants to expand on this idea. Much of the appeal of the joint effort with Herzog & de Meuron is the opportunity to impose two sets of values simultaneously. Renowned for classically Modernist buildings clad in beautiful ’skins,’ Herzog & de Meuron could be regarded as the antithesis of OMA. This, for Koolhaas, was a compelling reason to collaborate. ‘We want to see if we can combine with two focuses and generate a third one,’ he says.”

“Cyburbia (formerly called PAIRC — The Planning and Architecture Internet Resource Center) contains a comprehensive directory of Internet resources relevant to planning, architecture, urbanism and other topics related to the built environment. Cyburbia also contains information about architecture and planning related mailing lists and Usenet newsgroups, and hosts several interactive message areas.”

An interview with Christopher Alexander, author of A Pattern Language.

“This informative, innovative site offers an insight into international contemporary design. Incorporating design & architecture exhibitions (past & present), education programmes, entertaining facilities, membership schemes and design shop.” Current exhibition: “How did James Bond inspire a toilet brush? Not the kind of question one might imagine the Design Museum posing, but one which is fundamental to the Museum’s millennial exhibition, Design: Process, Progress, Practice. Design: Process, Progress, Practice takes 20 of this century’s most iconic creations and looks not just at what they are, but how they are and more importantly why they are. Unlike most exhibitions, DP3 is not a celebration of what is good. The items chosen have been identified to communicate something specific about design and the way it affects us all.”

“As ENR [the Engineering News-Record] marks its 125th anniversary in 1999, we will present pages that look back at construction milestones over those many years. Each week, readers can relive the projects, people and issues that built our industry and changed our world, through words and images taken directly from ENR and other archives.”

“This architectural database, originally emerging from records of interesting building projects from architecture students, has meanwhile become the largest online-database for international architecture. This database includes over 8000 built and unrealized projects from various architects and planners. The architecture of the 20th century is the main theme of this database.”

“The Getty Vocabulary Program, working closely with the Getty Standards Program, builds, maintains, and disseminates vocabulary tools for the visual arts and architecture. The vocabularies produced by the Getty are the Art & Architecture Thesaurus (AAT), the Union List of Artist Names (ULAN), and the Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names (TGN).” Be sure to see all the links on the Improving Access Using Vocabularies page.

“The goal of ARCHINECT is to take advantage of the internet to make ARCHItecture more conNECTed and open minds by bringing together designers from around the world to introduce new ideas from all disciplines.”