There is something especially enticing about a roof that is covered with plants. ______________________________________________ This poor grass-roofed hut of old brushwood may sound miserable, but I very quickly found it altogether suiting my taste. Saigyō (1118-1190) ______________________________________________ There is a variety of understandable reasons for the common dissatisfaction with modern life that many people have increasingly begun to perceive, but it can be said that a significant contributing factor is a growing sense of alienation - both from ourselves as human, biological organisms and from the environments that we inhabit. All too often the spaces where we live are made of synthetic materials with foreign, boring textures and mystical, untraceable origins. We can perhaps imagine the industrial processes that were required to take place somewhere else to produce them and transport them to us, but they do little in themselves to turn our attention to the richness of th

*** Spring rain on the pagoda roof and the shakuhachi’s sound. Will I ever see the Chekiang tidal bore again? Grass sandals, broken bowl, and no one knows. Treading on cherry blossoms, I will trudge across yet one more bridge. Po Ching (1884-1918) ______________________________________________ The sky is not always calm, and storms come along. It is commonly said that one must obtain «a roof over one’s head». The roof is the component of the built environment which is perhaps most closely tied to the concept of shelter. The most primitive dwellings are little more than a roof supported by a simple structure. Many roof surfaces are invisible. They are nothing but a plate covered by gravel on top of some walls, or they rest on top of a building like an awkward hat. They cannot be felt, and as a result they offer no sense of shelter. They are nothing compared to the sense of protection one feels standing underneath a tree with a majestic canopy of leaves, or from under an outcrop of rock,

Going foward I intend to publish a series of visual narratives and essays which I have been working on lately. I am going to post these also over on my Substack, "Archetypal Spaces". *** The birds have vanished from the sky. Now the last cloud drains away. We sit together, the mountain and me, until only the mountain remains. Li Po (701-762) Most good ideas begin on a rooftop. Occasionally at night, perhaps in the early evening, you feel the pull to climb up onto a roof and survey the surrounding world. Up there, it seems that nothing is in the way. Above you the stars stretch out into the cosmos, and they merge with the glow of a distant city. Your mind can flow as freely as the wind, and your ambition wanders with no boundaries. Down on the ground, your perspective is unconsciously limited. It never takes long before your gaze becomes blocked by a hedge, a car or a wall. The world feels small and constrained; you can never move freely. Up on the rooftops on the other hand, you can br

I have always been interested in building worlds, expressing personality and creating unique spatial experiences in architecture and design. For me the most important part of a project is the «big idea» which lies at the base of it all, the holistic concept that provides a place with its initial character and overall organisation. While technical and ecological functions, materials and details are of the utmost importance in determining the final quality of a designed environment, it is of little use to apply these aspects to a weak initial concept. Some of the most immersive worlds and environments that people have ever created appear in movies, graphic novels, illustrations and more recently in video games. In entertainment and storytelling, the design of characters, environments and all other visual aspects of a work is done at the beginning of the production process by so-called concept artists. This is not unlike the design process in professional architecture, where one tends to