Nick de Klerk

@nickdk.bsky.social

832 Followers 633 Following

Architect, writer, occasional critic; hotel specialist / sector head at Purcell Architecture. Views all my own, ofc. https://nicholasdeklerk.com

View of the concourse level of westminster tube station with light filtering down between the exposed structure of concrete columns, steel struts and the expressive framing of escalators and staircases.
A ‘wet floor’ warning sign weighted down with a piece of terrazzo that matches the floor it is positioned on.
Gehry’s Hay Barn
As a result, the poor image has manifold significance. It rejects the image economy’s widespread commercialisation, but also foreshadows an information landscape that thrives ‘on compressed attention spans, on impression rather than immersion, on intensity rather than contemplation, on previews rather than screenings.’
Sam Altman: ‘l have the coolest, most important job maybe in history’
Interior of the Rotunda at Ranelagh (1754); Canaletto (1697 - 1768)
Brick vault detail under the London Bridge railway viaduct
View east from Putney Bridge
I begin by asking Corbet: why archi-tecture? "Because of how similar the process of making a movie is to building a building," he says. "It requires the same amount of personnel, roughly it's about 250 people to make a movie and 250 people to build a building of scale. My uncle is an architect, and whenever we chat, we have a lot of the same gripes and experiences... so this was a way of my wife [Norwegian filmmaker Mona Fastvold] and I writing something that we were extremely familiar with."
Colonnaded walkway leading to the Queen’s House
Who is all this for? Within a couple of years, AI infrastructure is expected to use more energy than the Netherlands and more clean water than Portugal. What are these huge resources being spent on? If the answer is advertising, it’s hard to see what an internet of bots offers to brands. In the long run, how many companies will pay to reach an audience of software that has no money or interests of its own? How many users will be happy for their pet “AI” to hawk cat litter or crypto on their behalf? Perhaps the answer is that Meta believes the internet can be made even more unnaturally compelling, that everything on it can be made even more obviously fake, but that consumers will be kept hanging around in an increasingly weird and coercive relationship.
Interior of Neville Holt Opera
View of the City of London across the thames from Canary Wharf, shrouded in a dense fog.
The cover of Ivan Vladislavic’s novel, The Exploded View.
The cover of the novel Hotel Andromeda by Gabriel Josipovici.
Cover of Hilde Heynen’s book Architecture and Modernity
The cover of Pier Vittorio Aureli’s The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture
The cover of Roland Barthes’ book Image, Music, Text - translation by Stephen Heath. The same edition that I bought over twenty years ago.
Intense orange glow of low winter sun over Blackheath
Smithfield Market in 1956. Photo: Bert Hardy/Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Cover of W.G. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz
Archive image of Le Corbusier with a pipe, looking upwards with a santa claus hat collaged over.
The cover of Damon Galgut’s novel, the Quarry.
The cover of Marlene van Niekerk’s novel Triomf
Cover of Robert Harbison’s book Thirteen Ways
Jeff Wall’s Morning Cleaning, Mies van der Rohe Foundation, Barcelona, 1999
The cover of Edward Said’s book Orientalism
Cover of J.M. Coetzee’s novel Disgrace
Street level view of the proposed redev of Fenwick’s Bond St site
Cover of WG Sebald’s On the Natural History of Destruction
The cover of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel The Unconsoled.
Cover of Rem Koolhaas’ Delirious New York