WILLIAM TOZER Associates 📍

Open-plan spaces and large openings to the outdoors are actually ideally suited to enabling social distancing and good air flow, to lessen the likelihood of transmissions. A dedicated bathroom for guests, connected directly to outside entertaining spaces would be helpful too.

Interesting shortlist, but I'm perplexed that even in the era of environmental sensitivity, architecture still seems to be considered better if it's new-build. At least some are connected to existing buildings—but couldn't a renovation be the best house? architecture.com/awards-and-…

My ten-year-old’s thumbnail sketches from memory of three houses we visited while we were in Los Angeles earlier in the year. The Eames House, Schindler House, and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House.

These spaces are very familiar to me—I read this book a lot as a kid, and I’ve read it to my kids many, many times. Sorry to hear of the passing of Judith Kerr, and hoping she wouldn’t disapprove of the reworking of London houses that has been much of my own creative career.

Elevations elevate plans. #architecturaldrawing #wordsandbuildings

A plan is a statement of intention. #architecturaldrawing #wordsandbuildings

As an architect in London I’ve regularly asked myself whether what we’re doing is like a grandparent’s axe—the handle has been replaced a few times and so has the head, but it’s still the same axe. This has been on my mind observing the debates on rebuilding Notre-Dame Cathedral.

This totally misses the point. I’m forever telling people that open-plan layouts are much harder than taking down walls. You need to use things like changes in floor and ceiling levels, lighting, and materials to zone spaces. #modernismisnotthateasy google.co.uk/amp/s/www.nytim…

It depends a bit on how you look at it, but Charles & Ray Eames really only realized a few buildings. All were small, & one of them—their own house—has been hugely influential on so much building design since. Again—why do so many architects and critics fixate on large projects?

I started this handle Jan 2019 for my thoughts on architecture beyond my own practice @WTAD. I’ve taught in the UK and US & written for architectural journals like ARQ, industry magazines like Detail and Monument, and a few lifestyle publications. Now mostly self-publish online.

‘[In London] planning becomes a process about the probability of building rather than about building itself. Building is a possibility, a fundamentally tentative and therefore unstable act.’ Reinier de Graaf, ‘Four Walls and a Roof’, 185. #reinierdegraaf #planning #london

I’m delighted by this news. #RewiThompson #newzealandarchitecture

Does this mean frameless windows are hipster glasses? #jeremytill #csmSpatial #graysonperry

This is great. Particularly deserving alternative winners given that the same prejudice that led to so few women being nominated or winning, also meant less opportunity in the profession and the workplace generally—exponentially so the further you go back through those 171 years.

I like this a lot, but the resemblance to a Venn diagram (which they surely didn’t intend it to be) is a bit unhelpful. Or perhaps it was meant to be one but it doesn’t really work because ‘mathematics’ isn’t in there anywhere . . .

My research suggests that Adolf Loos’s work is not convincingly explained by placing it in the lineage of functionalist modernism. #adolfloos #functionalism See page 6. discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1331912/