Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1149

Marc Goodwin – who is part of a photography studio called Archmospheres  – has an ongoing project where he photographs the studios of architects. 

He has photographed well known practices such as MAD, Renzo Piano, and David Chipperfield, as well as a number of geographic niches such as Paris architecture studios , Nordic architecture studios , and London architecture studios . 

He also varies the size of the firm. Some of them only have a few people working out of a small streetfront retail space.

As an architect, you are pretty much required to have a cool studio space. So this is certainly an interesting photography project to take on. The photo at the top of this post is  3xn in Copenhagen.

Image: Marc Goodwin via Designboom

Last weekend I watched Minimalism: A Documentary About The Important Things . I’ve been reading the blog for awhile now (I blogged about it) and so the movie has been on my to-do list since it came out.

Now, I am not a minimalist to the same extent as Joshua and Ryan, and some of the people featured in the film. I have not reduced all of my personal belongings to 51 things and I have not renounced any sort of permanent residency. I own some stuff.

But I am very much attracted to the philosophy that less can be more. That less can make us happier. That quality is more important than quantity. And that we actually need far less stuff than we think we do, especially in a consumerist society like ours.

One word that comes up a lot in the documentary is: deliberate. In other words, we should be more deliberate about the choices we make, the things we buy, and so on. Will it create value in my life?

And that’s one of the reasons I like this notion of minimalism: It’s a challenge. You have to think. Because if you don’t, you will be told what to do and what to buy, and you will accumulate things without even knowing. It’s essentially a constant battle against excess.

Perhaps the biggest potential for excess happens with our choice of housing, which is why small homes feature so prominently in the film. A tiny house isn’t going to be for everyone, but many people have certainly come to the realization that square footage alone does not equate to more happiness.

The Guardian recently published an article on vanity height in skyscrapers . What this is referring to is the unoccupied portions of tall buildings which are built purely for vanity reasons – that is, to increase the face height of the building and claim some superlative title.

Example: 

The tallest building in the world is currently the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. It’s 828m tall. To put that into perspective, the CN Tower in Toronto is 553m. But according to the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, 29% of the Burj Khalifa’s height is actually unoccupied or “vanity space.” In other buildings, such as the Burj al Arab (also in Dubai), the amount of unusable space is as high as 39%. 

For the purists out there, this of course raises the question of what should should be counted when assessing building height. Should it only be spaces where humans typically inhabit? The CN Tower has a lot of unoccupied space, which is why it is frequently excluded from these sorts of ego rankings. 

But semantics aside, this is obviously not a new phenomenon and it’s interesting to think about this race to the sky as a proxy for what’s going on in the world. Below is a chart showing which regions have been able to lay claim to the “tallest building of the year” since 1900. 

Since 1990, it has been all about Asia and Oceania and China and Taiwan…