Nick de Klerk

… Only undone by an awareness that while you are outsourcing your own ethics, purpose and responsibility - someone else, somewhere else is expecting the same of you. Consequences will find you one way or the other, it’s the needless damage wrought along the way that bears thinking about.

This first one which considers insulation from consequences is on point and, I fear, already endemic. The idea that fault or responsibility lies with someone else is everywhere - from everyday life in cities, to the professions, government, climate and beyond.

(Aware of the irony of sharing it here, when the second harbinger of the writer’s so-called ‘soft apocalypse) is baked into this very app.)

The quiet catastrophe in your pocket Inventor Pep Torres on three trivial, almost invisible inventions that are quietly dismantling our humanity

Good piece, this: www.ft.com/content/b06c...

A ‘wet floor’ warning sign weighted down with a piece of terrazzo that matches the floor it is positioned on.

Reduce, reuse, recycle - the aesthetic edition.

“When we started on site there was this moment when the whole thing looked like a mix between an archaeological dig, a construction site and a laboratory,” Tuckey says.

Just because we can build pretty much anywhere, for and with anyone, should we, and if so how?

A deeply personal and propositional book but one which has a deep cultural and theoretical hinterland, and asks questions we do not stop often enough to ask:

Book review – Learning from the Local: Designing responsively for people, climate and culture Nicholas de Klerk discusses a new book by Piers Taylor that invites us to re-examine our own principles and intentions with regards to where and how we practise

First review for 2026, of Piers Taylor’s Learning from the Local: www.bdonline.co.uk/briefing/boo...

'The past is an underused tool': An Elizabethan mansion's secrets for staying warm In a deadly cold period known as the Little Ice Age, clever Elizabethan designs kept a magnificent stately home unusually warm – with lessons for how we can heat our own homes better.

Brilliant to see the BBC picking up Ranald Lawrence and Dean Hawkes' fabulously interesting and important #environmentalhumanities work on #HardwickHall. They measured solar gain to understand Elizabethan comfort tech.
The original articles are hugely worth reading too.
www.bbc.co.uk/future/artic...

The little-known story of Giacometti’s rural retreat Paris was not the artist’s only home. Increasingly, he returned to his birthplace in a secluded valley in the Swiss Alps

Grateful, in a never-ending stream of ever more appalling news, for things like this: a quiet meditation on Giacometti’s postwar life, split between his studio in Paris and family home in Stampa: www.ft.com/content/8703...

I left two years ago, and stopped posting a year before that. This place may never replace what Twitter once was but that’s no reason to stay.

So many examples this weekend of how achieving high office does not ‘make’ someone, it reveals them.

That is all.

Vidéo. La maison radieuse de Rezé, au sud de Nantes, en proie aux flammes Vendredi 2 janvier, un incendie s'est déclaré dans la Maison radieuse, l'unité d'habitation pensée par Le Corbusier à Rezé, dans la métropole de Nantes.

Fire at Corb’s Maison Radieuse outside Nantes: www.ouest-france.fr/societe/fait...

Here we go again…

My cat supports this position (apart from the bit about loving dogs).

Interesting piece, thanks for sharing - scapegoating plays a significant role in this too.

Here endeth the lesson.

She did not like having her antisocial behaviour pointed out to her, effing and blinding in response. I also get there aren’t any rules any more and the social contract is basically broken, but I mean, WTAF.

A particularly choice recent example was a woman cycling down a narrow pavement alongside a busy local road, ringing her bell and forcing people with walkers, parents with strollers and other pedestrians to jump out the way.

I have challenged offenders in the past (politely, always) but the aggrievedness that any challenge is met with suggests people know they are wrong - they just don’t like being called out on it.

Kids on trikes and training wheels are one thing but not their parents barrelling behind them, or cyclists without kids in the first place.

I get that the roads are dangerous (why I don’t cycle myself) but making a mental leap from there to deciding you can make pavements unsafe for others is quite something.

Permit me a gripe, just because it’s that time of year: What is it with the increasing number of cyclists deciding that pavements are fair game?

This feels like a global fight, global north at least. There are plenty of bad faith actors, both here and on the continent, trying to exploit instability for their own vested interests.

Shaking hands with Brian Eno when he awarded our 2nd year-end group architecture installation (a bunch of models on a plywood wave) best in show - many years ago now.

The early termination fees are exorbitant too, so in the short term this is likely to have cost more for an indisputably worse outcome…

Truly, we live in an age of great architectural discourse.

‘…a mish-mash of columns, turrets and and angular windows.’

There are too many people everywhere, including me.