The Chinese city of Hangzhou is on the Qiantang River that empties into Hangzhou Bay which is a large, funnel-shaped indentation on mainland China’s east coast. Pacific Ocean tides are funneled by the bay to create a tidal wave (a.k.a. tidal bore) that can be as high as nine meters and travel up to 40km/hour […]
High-speed road interchanges have been around for the best part of a century now even though viaducts that allow roads to cross without intersecting have a much longer history. Intersections have been around for as long as there have been roads but the problem with intersections is that give way rules such as “Give way […]
Pasadena Heights is a 1974 project by Kiyonori Kikutake. It’s near the Japanese city of Mishima which is twinned with Pasadena in California. You may have read about Pasadena Heights on this blog before because the first time I wrote about it was in 2015 but over the years there have been various mentions plus […]
Poetry isn’t really part of our lives anymore, if ever it was. I recently read that most educated Chinese people can recite one or two poems about West Lake that I’m currently trying to write something about. Hmm. I can remember the first few lines of John Keats’ La Belle Dame sans Merci (“O what […]
The suburb of Daglish in Perth, Western Australia has much green space in the form of roadside verges, parks, dog-friendly parks and playing fields. Many homes are large and relatively new and this relatively new double-story typology has an entrance, a double-car garage and possibly a master bedroom across the width of the block but, […]
Part 2: Infrastructure Changes in the economics of various AI LLM are happening fast. July 17 saw the launch of the Chinese Moonshot as a free, open-source AI. The full version will be available July 27 – tomorrow, for open scrutiny its claims. Here’s a link to some Australian hand-wringing, some New York Times commentary, […]
Part 1: Architecture GrahamHello 马辰。 It’s me, Graham. I’ve been thinking about how to best convey the essence of our conversations about Chinese language computing and the policy guidelines governing the siting of data centers in China. It’d be great if we could work together in WordPress but WordPress has its own AI agents that […]
The snippets below are what I took away from a 29th June The Guardian article titled ‘There’s this deep mystery of what, actually, is this thing?: the philosopher inside Google DeepMind’. “When I first joined DeepMind, it was not at all clear how you were going to get AI you can talk to. Now, by […]
There are somewhere between 90 and 130 automobile manufacturers in China. Many are groups under the umbrella of one or more the four state-owned manufacturers but there are also many that aren’t. The list and breakdown on Wikipedia seems comprehensive. On China roads in Wenzhou – a fairly prosperous Tier-3 city – I see BMWs, Mercedes Benzes, […]
“Let me activate my copywriting expertise …” Sycophantic ChatGPT was bad enough, but I’m not warming to what Claude Opus 4.8 concludes is a personality. Once again, let’s meet again on the other side. Supergraphics, or How Buildings Learned to Shout Let us begin, as one must, with a definition. A supergraphic is a graphic element scaled […]
Two weeks ago I thought I’d give my handy native Chinese AI assistant Doubao (豆包 = Bean Wrap) the job of writing its version of my post of last week. Apart from the first and last sentences, the prompt was about the same level of detail as a note I might make as a seed […]
We don’t have debates anymore about whether or not architecture is an art, but I don’t remember there ever having been an answer, as if we all agreed to be tired of the question. Yet, I do remember not too long ago when buildings of a certain kind were praised as “sculptural” even though sculpture […]
We humans aren’t good at imagining things outside our experience so it’s only human that we’ve now gone and built this thing called AI that’s not good at imagining things outside its training. A more fundamental issue is that we’re more comfortable with intelligences that look like us. Remember how those aliens in V easily […]
The future arrived last week in the form of WordPress with enhanced AI functions. I was not happy that this future downloaded and installed itself as a non-consensual update. The AI STUDIO button appears in the toolbar by default but disappears when you close the sidebar. I used the next paragraph to run some tests. […]
