When I was a teenager, I played a lot of video games. The early 2000s saw extremely rapid development in media technology, not least in the world of entertainment. We got to experience a wild progression from the 2d, pixellated world of Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 (2000) on the PC to the detailed 3d world of Halo: Combat Evolved on the first Xbox (2001), Hideo Kojima’s stealth masterpiece Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty (2001 on the PS2), an incredibly ambitious first-person shooter Command & Conquer: Renegade (2002) on the PC (a game that was way ahead of its time), onward to the (for the time) stunning 3d graphics of Halo 2 (2004) also on the original Xbox. Do not even get me started on a certain massively multiplayer online game called "World of Warcraft" that launched shortly thereafter (a game which is still played by thousands of people today in its original version over 20 years later). When one is young, stuck in a suburban house with nowhere to go, with nothing on telev

Recently I have been studying various buildings designed by Canadian architect Arthur Erickson (1924-2009). Erickson became a big name in west coast modernism just after the middle of the last century, and many of his smaller houses caught my attention. There are undoubtedly some beautiful spaces here. Erickson was especially concerned with how a building could be integrated with its context, as a specific response to its environmental conditions. He was also very aware of the value of good design as a source of inspiration in everyday life. While sketching some of these, I often thought, "I wish I could build like this today" (laughs). It is difficult to find construction drawings of these older houses (they probably either do not exist or have never been digitalised), but it appears that many of these buildings are mostly uninsulated. There often appear to be structural elements that are exposed to the weather on one side and directly to the interior on the other, a building method w