Slum. It’s a dirty word round here, isn’t it? Would you like it better if I called it something else? Barrio? Favela? Informal settlement? One thing is for sure: that the word slum gets bandied around a lot when well-meaning people decry proposed projects for housing poor people en masse, and yet these aren’t really slums at all. We haven’t got anything close to approaching what…
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Leviathan
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M.A.M.O.N. – Latinos VS. Donald Trump / Ale Damiani from Taxi Films on Vimeo. A lovely little highly topical film… And this: An engineer explains why the wall won’t work…. “No. Donald Trump is not a builder. Donald Trump could not build a doghouse. Donald Trump is a developer who pays what he would call “very, very smart people†to build things on his behalf. His…
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Leviathan
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Talking about integrity as a President brings up another issue – integrity of Design and acknowledgement of ownership. The new President’s team commissioned a cake that was EXACTLY the same appearance as one made for Obama 4 years earlier. No acknowledgement to the original baker, or icer, or cake designer, and not just similar, but a direct copy, according to Stuff in this article from the…
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Leviathan
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Its taken over 5 years since the first Canterbury quake for some actual real action to be taken on strengthening, and not before time. Now that the laws allow for this to happen, the Council has stepped in and said: Strengthen those weak and easily remedied bits first. Don’t sweat the big stuff right now – work on those floppy high walls of brick masonry and…
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Leviathan
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Like, I suspect, most of you reading this, I am a mixture of appalled and very glad – appalled that the Americans elected a complete narcissistic dickhead to the position of the President, and very glad that I am over here in a land very far away from him and his hired bunch of expensive illiterate thugs. I’m most impressed by the massive crowd of women…
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Leviathan
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It is always a slow start to the year, after some quality time spent at the beach. The malaise of having to go back to work hangs heavy over us all, especially as the weather is (normally!) better once you have returned to work after a summer holiday. This year, reasonable amounts of fairly mediocre weather meant more time spent indoors reading, than the more traditional…
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Leviathan
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The south wind blows strong at the Wellington Airport: nowhere more so than in the architect’s eye. This scheme was sprung on us a year or so ago, with dramatic renderings of a radically leaning building as the new airport control tower. A certain amount of artistic license is expected in the architect’s image supplied, but the sight that is now reaching high into the sky…
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Leviathan
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So: what did you get up to over the holidays? Relax by the beach? Climb a high mountain? Forget about work? Demolish a building? Watch Star Wars at the cinema? Watch Back to the Future on TV? Was it all, perhaps, strangely familiar? It was, perhaps, for me, the strangest Christmas, composed of mixtures of bad weather and good beach days, along with unexpected yet exquisite…
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