A series of drawings made to illustrate the Japanese dry landscape garden style, karesansui. Posted also on my Instagram page (https://www.instagram.com/adamic_studio/). ***

It has been a while since I have written a longer article. This week I have some reflections on a classic but still very much relevant problem: beauty in the built environment. What makes a place beautiful is a question which the general public cares very much about, and which it seems like most professional designers want to avoid as much as possible! I am not sure when environmental design stopped being about having fun creating beautiful constructed environments. In this essay I argue that a mastery of the fundamentals of spatial design, a focus on craft and a rediscovery of play are three elements which can return us to the simple objective of creating beautiful places. ___________________ Beauty and ugliness in the constructed world The built environment is a constructed habitat, the result of the modification of original material resources into a spatial organization that is intended to support human existence. When considered in this way, a city itself becomes a complex artefact

Recently I have had the desire to experiment with creating more graphic novels and short visual stories. Here is my lastest one: a short story about the struggle to find meaning in modern urban life. Perhaps an alternative to the endless anonymous grind is possible. I draw these pages on an iPad with the Procreate app, and then I import them into Photoshop where I write the text. I have created a page for my other stories here. ***

A series of illustrations that I created for my Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/adamic_studio/) to give a short introduction to the elements of the Japanese-style tea garden. These spaces represent a wonderful combination of two of my favourite things: tea and gardens. ***

A series of posts about the primary elements used to design gardens in Japanese style, recently created for my Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/adamic_studio/). For me, the Japanese garden represents the result of a stunning combination of human intention and natural qualities. These are spaces of extreme serenity and visual peace, which can provide a meaningful respite in our age of anxiety. All these elements can be combined to create an endless variety of rich experiences in a garden. ***

It is amazing what does not actually exist in the world. I am prone to overthink things far too much for my own good. It is a natural inclination to imagine a bad possible consequence of a situation instead of an equally probable good one, but for me this instinct often acts in overdrive: I tend to hop directly to the negative, and spend far too much time ruminating on the worst possible thing that could happen. It has become almost a cliché to say so, but while things often do not go the way that I hoped for, upon further reflection it is rarely the case that the results are ever as catastrophic as I imagine. In modern life, people are exposed to an unprecedented level of psychological noise. I consider myself incredibly lucky to have been raised in the last generation that was able to experience early life before the Internet became a form of pervasive pseudo-reality that people spend most of their time immersed in, as opposed to being an alternative means of momentary escape and ent