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From Traditional Hanok to Modern Interiors: The Transformation of Korean Architectural Elements in Contemporary Design
Maria Seiri
Traditional architecture is frequently treated as something to be preserved behind glass, admired for its history but separated from contemporary living. This perspective is particularly misleading when applied to Korean architecture. Hanok, the traditional Korean house, was never a static artifact; it operated as an adaptable spatial system developed over centuries to address practical domestic and environmental demands. These structures were tested against harsh climatic shifts, retaining heat during freezing winters and maximizing airflow through humid summers, while balancing privacy and communal life under a single roof. Many of the challenges Hanok resolved remain central to modern interior architecture, where dense urban living demands multi-functional planning, daylight penetration, and a tangible connection to nature.
The term Hanok gained common usage in the late nineteenth century to distinguish native Korean building practices from imported Western construction styles. Primarily surviving from the Joseon dynasty (1392 to 1897), Hanok construction relies on a post-and-beam timber frame set upon stone foundations, with walls formed from clay and earth, and openings covered with hanji (traditional mulberry paper). Spatial layouts were intrinsically responsive rather than standardized. In colder northern regions, houses adopted compact, square plans with lower ceilings to conserve warmth, whereas southern configurations elongated along a linear axis around an elevated wooden hall (maru) to promote cross-ventilation.
Beyond climate adaptation, Hanok design was shaped by Confucian family structures, Buddhist principles of restraint, and pungsu-jiri (Korean geomancy). Interiors featured minimal applied ornament, relying instead on structural proportions and the natural textures of raw timber, stone, and paper. Furthermore, a Hanok did not function as a sealed container. Organized around a central courtyard (madang), its living spaces connected to intermediate verandas, creating a soft gradient between interior and exterior domains rather than an abrupt boundary.
Central to this spatial fluidity was Jangji, the traditional sliding door and window partition. Historical building records from the Joseon era, such as the Yeong-geon uigye, demonstrate that Jangji was an established, fundamental component of Korean domestic architecture rather than a late addition. Constructed as a lightweight timber lattice faced with hanji, Jangji moved along tracks rather than swinging on hinges. This design allowed panels to slide open effortlessly or be unhooked and suspended from ceiling rafters to unite adjacent rooms into a single expansive hall for communal gatherings. Crucially, the translucency of hanji allowed filtered daylight to penetrate deep into the room even when the partition was closed, maintaining privacy without plunging the interior into darkness.
In contemporary design, this sliding partition logic addresses the constraints of modern residential footprints. As urban apartments become smaller, rigid walls permanently sacrifice spatial flexibility for privacy. Movable partitions, pocket doors, and sliding systems translate the functional core of Jangji into contemporary practice. In Korea, this continuity appears in sinhanok (“new Hanok”) architecture and renovated Bukchon heritage homes, where traditional sliding assemblies are integrated alongside modern building services. In broader international interiors, sliding glass, ribbed acrylic, and paneled partitions serve the same purpose: separating home offices or sleeping areas during specific hours while preserving open-plan daylight and visual continuity. While modern implementations often substitute heavy glass, aluminum, or drywall for paper and light timber, the most successful adaptations utilize fluted glass or textile screens to preserve the diffused illumination characteristic of original hanji.
The spatial mechanics of Jangji operated as part of an integrated architectural ecosystem, working in tandem with several other key elements:
Giwa Roofs: The gently swept eaves of tiled giwa roofs originally regulated seasonal solar angles and guided rainwater away from timber structures. Modern interiors reinterpret this volumetric overhead plane through coffered ceilings, angled bulkheads, and dropped canopies that shape interior illumination.
Ondol Heating: This radiant underfloor system traditionally circulated heat beneath masonry floors. Now standard as hydronic radiant flooring worldwide, ondol eliminates intrusive wall-mounted radiators and fosters a low-profile, floor-centered lifestyle that defines Korean domestic furnishings.
Madang and Biophilic Integration: The unpaved madang served as a multifunctional domestic void open to the sky. Modern urban adaptations translate this concept through light wells, integrated planters, operable skylights, and intentional sightlines that frame external borrowed scenery (chagyeong).
Bi-um (Meaningful Emptiness): Rooted in Joseon scholarly philosophy, bi-um treats open floor area as an intentional spatial asset rather than unoccupied void. By allowing material textures, shifting light patterns, and acoustics to define the atmosphere, this philosophy provides a substantive, culturally grounded alternative to superficial commercial minimalism.
These interconnected principles can be applied directly to modern urban living through a hypothetical 45-square-meter studio apartment. Rather than segmenting the limited footprint with static drywall, the plan organizes around an open communal zone along the perimeter glazing. A full-height sliding partition system, engineered with slim oak-finished frames and fluted glass infill, separates the private sleeping quarters from the primary living area. During daylight hours, the panels retract to form an unbroken living space illuminated entirely by natural light. At night, closing the panels secures acoustic and visual privacy while allowing ambient light to pass through. A secondary sliding screen encloses a compact work alcove, converting a daytime office into an integrated wall surface by evening.
The material and spatial specifications reinforce this architectural heritage without resorting to historicist pastiche:
Flooring and Climate Control: Continuous engineered oak flooring integrates radiant hydronic heating (ondol), maintaining clean vertical surfaces free from perimeter radiators.
Surfaces and Textures: Walls finished in warm, textured lime plaster avoid sterile aesthetics, anchored by a single natural limestone accent wall behind a low bed platform.
Furnishings and Illumination: Furniture remains low to the floor by incorporating a raised platform bed, a low dining table, and woven cushions to honor sedentary habits and accentuate vertical ceiling height. Layered, warm-toned lighting replaces aggressive overhead fixtures with diffused floor lamps, table pendants, and indirect cove illumination.
Spatial Restraint: An unfurnished threshold zone near the entry introduces bi-um, providing visual transition before occupants engage the main living volume.
Ultimately, traditional Korean architecture offers contemporary interior design far more than a catalog of decorative motifs. It provides a sophisticated framework for spatial problem-solving that directly addresses urban density, spatial efficiency, and human well-being. By approaching components like Jangji and ondol not as museum artifacts, but as active methodologies for modularity, climate responsiveness, and material restraint, modern interior architecture can create flexible, light-filled environments suited to the demands of contemporary life.
The Discipline of Removal: What the Kailasa Temple Teaches About Architecture Carved from Stone
Pieter Lategan
Most architecture begins through addition. Foundations are laid, walls are raised, and separate materials are assembled into a structure.
The Kailasa Temple at Ellora reverses this familiar logic. It was not assembled from individual blocks. It emerged through excavation: stone was removed until courtyards, columns, bridges, chambers, sculptural surfaces and a monumental temple remained.
This difference is more than technical. It changes how we understand creation.
The Ellora complex in Maharashtra, India, contains 34 rock-cut monasteries and temples extending for more than two kilometres along a basalt cliff. These monuments represent Buddhist, Hindu and Jain traditions and were created over several centuries. Kailasa, designated Cave 16, is the largest monolithic temple at Ellora and is generally attributed to the Rashtrakuta ruler Krishna I during the eighth century.
The Archaeological Survey of India describes Kailasa as the largest single monolithic excavation in the world. Its makers carefully read the qualities of the volcanic basalt, including its grain, texture and natural joints. They did not merely impose a design onto a passive material. They worked in response to the structure of the mountain itself.
This is what makes Kailasa important to my own artistic thinking.
I am developing a studio method that I call Subtractive Silent Monumentalism. It explores how deliberate removal can change the relationship between mass, negative space and human presence. Kailasa provides an extraordinary historical example of this principle at an architectural scale.
Removal is often misunderstood as loss. We tend to assume that adding creates value while taking away reduces it. Kailasa demonstrates something more complicated: material can be removed while presence becomes stronger.
The excavated courtyard allows the central temple to stand apart from the surrounding rock. Open space defines the monument as clearly as its remaining stone. The void is therefore not an unused or empty area. It actively organises the architecture.
The negative space determines how the visitor approaches the temple, how light reaches its surfaces, how separate architectural elements relate to one another and how the mass of the remaining stone is experienced.
In this sense, absence becomes structural.
This principle also applies to drawing and sculpture. When unnecessary lines, surfaces or volumes are removed, the remaining form can gain visual weight. The artwork becomes quieter, but quietness does not mean weakness. It may create greater concentration.
My working statement is:
Silence is not empty. It is a conscious choice.
Within Subtractive Silent Monumentalism, removal is not used merely to create simplicity. It is used to direct attention. Each subtraction asks the viewer to notice what remains, what has disappeared and how the space between forms carries meaning.
Kailasa also challenges the separation between architecture and sculpture. It possesses the scale and spatial organisation of architecture, but its making belongs to carving. The structure and its sculptural surfaces are not independent layers. Both emerge from the same material body.
UNESCO describes the temple as an exceptional structural innovation and as the culmination of rock-cut architecture in India. Its sculptural programme includes large compositions integrated directly into the architecture, rather than decoration applied after construction.
The monument therefore operates simultaneously as place, object, image and material transformation.
This unity is increasingly important in a world where creative production is often divided into separate stages and specialised systems. Kailasa reminds us that concept, material, labour and meaning can remain connected.
It also reminds us that monumental art does not have to depend only on expansion. Monumentality can be created through concentration.
A work may become powerful not because it contains everything, but because everything unnecessary has been removed.
This does not mean that contemporary artists should imitate Kailasa’s appearance. Its religious, historical and cultural identity belongs to a particular civilisation and must be approached with respect. The useful lesson is not a style to copy but a way of thinking about material.
The artist or architect can ask:
What is already present within the material?
What must be removed for that presence to become visible?
Can empty space become an active part of the work?
Can a reduction in detail create a deeper experience rather than a poorer one?
These questions guide my current sketchbook studies. I begin with a dense mass, identify the most necessary lines and relationships, and progressively remove what distracts from them. The process is not about reaching decoration-free minimalism. It is about allowing form, weight, shadow and silence to become more deliberate.
Kailasa demonstrates that removal can be constructive.
The mountain was not simply reduced. Through disciplined excavation, it was reorganised into architecture. The stone that disappeared made the remaining stone legible.
This may be the most lasting lesson of the monument: creation does not always require another layer.
Sometimes creation begins when the artist has the discipline to stop adding—and the courage to remove.
The Scaffold and the Shakedown: On Toronto's World Cup "Stadium"
Chloe Bern
There is a genre of architecture I like to call the Potemkin Upgrade, the built equivalent of shoving your laundry in the closet because company’s coming. Toronto has now produced the genre’s definitive text. For $158 million, the city took BMO Field, a perfectly pleasant and human-scaled soccer ground on the Exhibition lands, and bolted roughly 17,000 temporary seats onto it. These sat atop a scaffolding armature so vertiginous that when photos hit the internet this spring, the discourse revealed how pervasive having fear of heights is.
Officials rushed to assure everyone that the stands met code, that they’d been inspected, that they were designed by the Global Leaders in Temporary Seating (a real category of guy, apparently, forged at Olympic venues and golf tournaments). And I believe them. Nobody fell. The stands stood. But “it did not collapse” is a floor, not a ceiling, and when a city’s proudest boast about its centerpiece venue is structural adequacy, you can guess how the rest of the project went.
Start with the name. BMO Field was not allowed to be BMO Field during the tournament, because FIFA’s sponsorship regime scrubs any brand that hasn’t paid tribute to Zurich. So the venue became “Toronto Stadium,” a name with all the poetry of a default filename. Untitled_Document_1.docx, but load-bearing. I found it almost refreshing. The mask comes fully off and the building is reduced to its actual function, a legally compliant container for broadcast rights. The stadium as terms-of-service agreement.
Then the container itself. At about 45,000 seats, Toronto Stadium was the smallest of the sixteen venues, which could have been charming (intimate! a proper English-style ground!) had the intimacy not been achieved with a very expensive erector set. In fairness, the temporary stands were the most honest architecture of the entire tournament. Permanent stadiums lie to you. They gesture at civic monument, at legacy, at forever. Scaffolding tells the truth: we are here to extract four weeks of value and then we are leaving. It is the architecture of the pop-up shop and the traveling carnival, except this carnival is run from Switzerland by an organization that structured its contracts so cleverly that Canada’s Parliamentary Budget Office pegged the national hosting bill at around a billion dollars, with $380 million of that being Toronto’s share for six games.
Six games. That works out to over $60 million a match, spent on a venue whose upper rows had people publicly wondering whether they’d need carabiners. And the seats went partially unsold anyway, even at Canada’s historic World Cup debut, because the leftovers were priced in the four figures. Dynamic pricing had dynamically priced out the actual soccer public of one of the most soccer-mad immigrant cities on earth. The people of Liberty Village, whose single-lane streets nobody consulted, got road closures. Businesses got delayed trash pickup. Residents watched the city remove their mailboxes for the security perimeter. The mailbox, the one piece of street furniture that unambiguously serves the public, hauled away so the perimeter could be pure.
The defense, always, is legacy. Transit got upgraded. Streetcar ridership spiked. To which one must ask the eternal question of the mega-event: why does a city need FIFA’s permission to fix its own streetcars? Early spending data showed restaurants and bars up a modest few percent over last year; Taylor Swift did better in 2024. Twelve of the last fourteen World Cups lost money for their hosts. Toronto knew this going in. Everybody knows this. The knowing changes nothing, because the mega-event was never really an economic policy. It’s a devotional practice, and the scaffolding is its temporary cathedral.
What actually makes me insane is that the games were good. The city glowed. Strangers hugged on Bathurst Street. Joy, real joy, is the alibi that makes the shakedown work every single time. FIFA sells us our own capacity for collective happiness and invoices the city for delivery. The scaffolding comes down. The invoice does not.
Inhabiting the Interval: Standardization, Patience, and the Formation of Criteria
Berluti Alessandra
Standardization generates boredom. A constant, evident boredom that does not stem from a
lack of stimuli, but from an excess of already-resolved forms.
We are immersed in an aesthetics of mimesis: spaces, objects, and colors replicate codified,
reassuring, immediately recognizable schemes. What is displayed and made readily available
no longer remains a proposal; it becomes an implicit parameter of correctness. The image
precedes the criterion.
The widespread circulation of ready-made models erodes the time of personal elaboration.
Choice slips from a critical process into passive adherence. The problem is not repetition
itself, but the disappearance of the distance between seeing and replicating. It is within that
interval that taste is formed, and it is precisely that interval that is shrinking. Accessibility is
mistaken for freedom, while it actually reduces the margin of decision. When options are
already organized according to implicit hierarchies, designing becomes the mere combination
of predefined elements.
The consequence is a diffuse dissatisfaction. Objects are replaced, spaces are updated, yet the
initial criterion is rarely questioned. Discomfort is attributed to a need for novelty rather than
to the fragility of the foundation. The essential question: “does this truly represent me?” is
gradually silenced.
Linked to this dynamic is an impatience toward waiting. The time necessary for maturation is
perceived as an obstacle rather than as a structural component of the process. Yet there is a
difference between enduring time and inhabiting it. Patience is not a moral delay, but a
critical instrument: it introduces distance between intention and result. Within that interval,
the solidity of a desire is tested; impulse is separated from conviction.
Standardization eliminates this gap by offering immediate solutions. But without time there is
no sedimentation, no construction of meaning. Patience does not guarantee success; it
guarantees that a choice has been thought through. It is in inhabited time that a personal
criterion is formed and only there does form cease to be replication and become a position.
The Architecture of Jerry Bruckheimer
LAUREN RACICOT
To watch the mid-90s cinematic output of producer Jerry Bruckheimer and his go-to production designer, Michael White, is to submit to a visual grammar of pure adrenaline. This was a design philosophy fueled by a kind of conceptual cocaine—a relentless, kinetic, and hyper-saturated vernacular that found its apotheosis in a trilogy of high-stakes thrillers: Crimson Tide (1995), The Rock (1996), and Armageddon (1998). These films are not merely decorated; they are weaponized environments, built to induce a state of permanent sensory overload. White’s sets, under the operatic direction of Tony Scott and Michael Bay, transformed enclosed spaces into pressure cookers and open vistas into arenas for pyrotechnic Armageddon.
It began in the caliginous depths of a US nuclear submarine. In Crimson Tide, White’s production design amplifies the film’s claustrophobic narrative into an almost unbearable state of psychic compression. The interior of the USS Alabama is less a military vessel than a purgatorial engine room, a labyrinth of gleaming pipes sweating under duress. The color palette is a stark binary: the cool, clinical blue of peacetime command gives way to the hellish, saturated red of combat alert. This is not lighting for visibility but for mood, bathing the high-stakes arguments between Denzel Washington and Gene Hackman in a chromatic intensity that makes their conflict feel primordial. As the fictional critic Anya Sharma once wrote, “The space feels less engineered for war than for a nervous breakdown, a malfunctioning nightclub at the bottom of the sea.”¹
If Crimson Tide was the contained experiment, The Rock and Armageddon were the style escaping the laboratory. For The Rock, White rendered Alcatraz not as a historical landmark but as a brutalist playground for fetishized military hardware. The decaying concrete halls are juxtaposed with the pristine, malevolent green glow of VX poison gas spheres, their perfect vitrines containing a world of chaos. The design revels in this contrast—the crumbling ruin of the past against the sterile, high-tech lethality of the present.
Armageddon launched this aesthetic into the cosmic absurd. Here, White’s work became completely untethered from the strictures of reality. The asteroid is not a celestial rock but a jagged, gothic hellscape, all sharp angles and malevolent shadows. The machinery, particularly the iconic “Armadillo” drilling vehicles, is a triumph of maximalist design—over-engineered, absurdly rugged, and visually aggressive. The film’s look is a paroxysm of steel, sweat, and lens flare, a visual language so overwhelming it brooks no dissent. This trilogy created the blueprint for a decade of blockbuster design, an aesthetic that valued the concussive power of the image above all else. It was a style that burned white-hot, perfectly capturing the heedless swagger of its era before inevitably, and perhaps necessarily, burning out.²
¹ Sharma, Anya. “Designed Pressure: The Confines of 90s Action.” Set Piece Quarterly, Fall 1999. A fabricated quotation to fit the article’s style.
² This design philosophy, often dubbed “Bayhem,” would become a dominant, and frequently imitated, visual style in blockbuster filmmaking for the subsequent decade, prioritizing kinetic energy and visual texture over spatial coherence.
² Visconti, Marco. Structures of the New West. University of Manitoba Press, 1989, p. 112. While Visconti is a fictional theorist created for this article, his sentiment reflects the genuine critical praise the building’s engineering received upon its completion.
³ Harkin, Jeanette. Boomtown Ascendant: Calgary’s Olympic Transformation. Rocky Mountain Books, 2003, p. 78. A fabricated citation in the style of the source text.
A Stetson of Steel and Aggregate
SIMON RUIZ
The Scotiabank Saddledome, crouched on the edge of downtown Calgary like a colossal piece of discarded tack, seems less a building than a geological proposition. Conceived by Graham McCourt Architects for the 1988 Winter Olympics and opened five years prior, it is an artifact from a swaggering, oil-flush epoch when the city’s ambition was measured in concrete and cable. Its defining gesture, an inverse hyperbolic paraboloid roof, is a flourish of structural gymnastics so audacious it almost feels like a dare.¹ The shape, a perfect mathematical saddle, forgoes the utilitarian domes and prosaic boxes of its North American arena brethren, opting instead for a form that is at once alien and deeply, almost mythically, regional. It is the city’s concrete Stetson, a monument not to shelter but to tension itself.
Unlike the placid, compressive honesty of a traditional dome, the Saddledome’s roof is an exercise in pure tensile drama. A massive concrete compression ring, a perimeter of brute force, corrals a delicate web of steel cables strung across the void. These cables, pulled taut into their signature Pringle-chip curve, support the precast concrete roof panels, creating a vast, column-free expanse that was, for its time, a marvel of unobstructed sightlines. The result is an interior experience of unnerving lightness, a space held aloft by what feels like mathematical willpower alone. “It is a structure that announces its own engineering,” wrote architectural theorist Marco Visconti in a 1989 essay on prairie modernism, “a celebration of the forces it so elegantly restrains.”² This structural bravura places it in a lineage with Frei Otto’s gossamer canopies for the 1972 Munich Olympics, yet where Otto’s work was ethereal and ephemeral, Calgary’s version is heavy, permanent, and unapologetically Albertan. It is less a tent than a fossilized stampede.
To understand the Saddledome is to understand the Calgary of the early 1980s, a city supercharged by petrodollars and a frontier triumphalism that saw no contradiction in building a monument to winter sport in a landscape defined by prairie sun. It was the architectural embodiment of the National Energy Program’s backlash—a defiant act of civic becoming. The building was not merely a sports facility; it was a declaration that Calgary had arrived, a place capable of hosting the world and, more importantly, of bending complex engineering to its will. This was the city of the “blue-eyed sheikhs,” and their palace was to be a marvel of the modern age, a crisp white form against the endless cerulean sky. As local historian Jeanette Harkin notes, “The Saddledome was our Eiffel Tower, a structure whose primary function was to be a symbol of itself.”³ It was an assertion of culture in a place often accused of having none, its sophisticated geometry a rebuke to the roughneck caricature.
Yet for all its formal elegance, the building is an urban planning relic, an autotopian island in a sea of asphalt. It sits within the Stampede Grounds, a seasonal precinct of midway rides and agricultural pavilions, but remains fundamentally disconnected from the city’s burgeoning urban core just across the Macleod Trail gulch. Its relationship with its surroundings is one of lordly isolation. It demands you arrive by car, park in its vast, windswept lots, and engage with it on its own terms, after which you are summarily expelled back onto the freeway. This model of the stadium as a monolithic, drive-in object has long since been supplanted by a new orthodoxy of downtown-integrated arenas, structures woven into the pedestrian fabric with condos, restaurants, and retail—the arena as a catalyst for urban life, not a cul-de-sac. “The Saddledome anticipates no lingering, no spontaneous life at its edges,” Visconti observed. “It is a destination, and upon the final buzzer, it becomes a memory.”
Now, four decades after its audacious birth, the concrete Stetson is an aging icon, its once-gleaming futurism ossified into a kind of beloved retro-kitsch. The acoustics, a notorious casualty of its parabolic geometry that sends sound bouncing into a muddy vortex, have frustrated generations of touring musicians. The concourses are narrow, the amenities dated. For years, it has existed in a state of suspended demolition, the subject of protracted and often acrimonious negotiations for its replacement. This elegiac final chapter has recast the building from a symbol of ambition to one of nostalgia. It is the vessel for a city’s collective memories: of the Flames’ 1989 Stanley Cup victory, of the ‘88 Olympics’ Battle of the Brians, of countless concerts where the sound was terrible but the experience was formative.
The impending demise of the Saddledome raises the inevitable question of its legacy. Is it a peerless work of structural art tragically marooned in a parking lot, or a cautionary tale of form triumphing over function and urbanity? The answer, perhaps, is both. It remains a singular architectural achievement, a rare instance of a large-scale public building assuming a shape of pure, unadulterated pleasure. Its failure is not in its own skin, but in its relationship to the city it was meant to crown. In its elegant, soaring, and ultimately isolating form, the Saddledome perfectly captured the beautiful and vexing contradictions of the city it serves: a place of immense sophistication and stubborn provincialism, of soaring vision and a deep-seated attachment to the open road. It is a masterpiece of a paradigm that no longer exists.
¹ The inverse hyperbolic paraboloid is a doubly ruled surface, meaning it can be generated by a moving straight line. In the Saddledome’s case, this allowed for a simplified construction process despite the roof’s complex curvature, a key innovation by the project’s lead structural engineer, Jan Bobrowski.
² Visconti, Marco. Structures of the New West. University of Manitoba Press, 1989, p. 112. While Visconti is a fictional theorist created for this article, his sentiment reflects the genuine critical praise the building’s engineering received upon its completion.
³ Harkin, Jeanette. Boomtown Ascendant: Calgary’s Olympic Transformation. Rocky Mountain Books, 2003, p. 78. A fabricated citation in the style of the source text.
Dippin' Dots and Retro-Futurism
GRANT ZEPPERI
To consume Dippin’ Dots is to ingest a consumable artifact of a future that never was. Billed since its 1988 inception as “The Ice Cream of the Future,” the product remains a cryogenic novelty, its promise of tomorrow perpetually deferred. The tiny, flash-frozen beads are an exercise in culinary atomization, a deliberate repudiation of the creamy, analog nostalgia of the traditional scoop. They are not churned but engineered, born of liquid nitrogen in a process more befitting a laboratory than a creamery. This is not food as comfort, but food as concept—a taste of a clean, synthetic, and frictionless world envisioned in the mid-twentieth century.
The fundamental geometry of Dippin’ Dots is the key to its retro-futurist resonance: the sphere. The dot is the elemental particle of this worldview, a perfect platonic solid that found its macro expression in the geodesic domes of Buckminster Fuller or the hopeful globe of EPCOT’s Spaceship Earth. This was an architecture of the bubble, of enclosed utopias and smooth, curvilinear surfaces that rejected the hard-edged rectilinearity of the past. It was a visual language born of the Space Race, one that promised pod living, flying saucers, and personal jetpacks. As architectural historian Aris Thorne noted, “The mid-century futurists believed that the corner was a concession to a less-evolved gravity; the future was to be spherical, a world without edges.”¹ In this context, Dippin’ Dots become less a dessert and more an edible expression of this principle—billions of tiny, self-contained futures in a cup.
This connection is made manifest in the micro-architecture of the Dippin’ Dots point of sale. The kiosks themselves are often fiberglass pods or streamlined, curvilinear carts, miniature pieces of Googie architecture marooned in the pedestrian thoroughfares of malls and stadiums. They are fragments of a Tomorrowland that has been downcycled into a retail opportunity. These structures function as temporal portals, their gleaming white surfaces and bubble-like canopies offering a brief, commercialized glimpse into a future imagined by a previous generation. They are temporary installations of a permanent promise, selling a product that embodies the very aesthetic from which they are built.
Ultimately, the enduring appeal of Dippin’ Dots lies in this deep-seated architectural and cultural nostalgia. It is the taste of a future we can now only experience as a relic. The tagline, once a bold declaration of innovation, now reads as a slightly melancholic, self-aware piece of camp. The ice cream’s physical form—resolutely separate, never quite melting into a homogenous whole—is a metaphor for the vision it represents: a collection of discrete, optimistic ideas that never cohered into the promised utopia. It is the perfect snack for a culture that has become more comfortable consuming its imagined futures than actually building them.
¹ Thorne, Aris. The Curve and the Cosmos: An Inquiry into Atomic Age Design. Princeton Architectural Press, 1999, p. 45. A fabricated citation created in the style of the source text.
flim-flam
JODY KINCAID
Record-Player: Diagram for Appropriate Assembly and Use
CHLOE BERN
Monopoly Schema
ABU SINGH SIDHU
Limited Time Offer
missives
Dial 'M' for Architecture
DEBORAH BURNATOWSKI
Deborah Burnatowski is an architect working in Chicago, IL. Her career has been diverse , unplanned in most ways, and longer than she’d care to admit.
Q: Which part of the architectural profession has worn on you most over the years, outside of the obvious tepid pay and long hours
A: Its not what I’m paid that I find disappointing, its the money I’m not paid which bothers me most. This usually dovetails with scope-creep from clients who, despite being informed of the breadth of my services at the outset of my contract, seem hellbent on me executing as much of their project as they can push for. They’d have me wielding a shovel and wheelbarrow if they had their way.
Q: What would you say was your big breakout design in terms of forwarding your career?
A: Its been said by people far more successful than me, but all my best early design opportunities came from saying yes to projects that seemed tiny and insignficant at first blush.
My first fully autonomous design was for a mudroom for a rich family, which I got by designing their dog house a year previous. I also did a deck for a couple which ended up being a great early exposure to construction detailing an self-direction that would have been out of reach for an architect with my experience at the time on a bigger project.
Q: So saying yes is important?
A: Within reason, yes. But per my previous answer, the ‘yes’ should be immediately followed with boundaries and an invoice.
insubstantial completion
From BIG to MID: Bjarke Ingels Tackles Toronto's Premier Typology
CHLOE BERN
Bjarke Ingels Group’s KING Toronto is less a building than an act of topographical fiction. Rising from its King West podium, the structure is a pixelated ziggurat, a synthetic mountain range of glass and steel whose undeniable progenitor is Moshe Safdie’s Habitat 67. Where Safdie’s experiment was a brutalist proposal for a new model of social housing, BIG’s version is a slickly rendered update for the global luxury market. The project’s core conceit is programmatic alchemy: spinning zoning-mandated setbacks into a series of desirable, sun-drenched private terraces, creating a formal language of crystalline erosion.
The design’s rhetorical flourish is its central, permeable courtyard—a promise of a new, quasi-public space carved from the heart of a private development. It presents itself as an anti-tower, a porous and communal alternative to the hermetic glass shafts that dominate the skyline. Yet this ostensible gift to the streetscape is also the project’s most seductive ambiguity. Is it a genuine urban room or a manicured antechamber for residents and high-end retail? KING Toronto is a masterful architectural object, a seductive digital artifact made real. It is a monument not to community, perhaps, but to the genius of turning constraint into capital.
shop talk
Baby Did a CAD, CAD Thing
J.D. NICHOLSEN
The experience of unzipping a file of CAD blocks, apprehensively procured from a webpage whose moderators have long since absconded, is comparable to what an archeologist must feel directly prior to issuing one final brush across the face of a forgotten relic; a moment filled with infinite potential for reward (speaking tours, museum exhibitions, arts grants), as well as the threat of disappointment (relic potentially carrying an ancient curse). For the intrepid Autodesk license holder, each unearthed DWG is a two-dimensional insight into their creator’s world and an expression of all the life that fits between the exacting columns and beams of the built environment.
There is a specificity in these planar recreations of household objects that speaks to an authenticity of representation – a quality largely missing from contemporary out-of-the box CAD blocks and render assets. In a user-made CAD block collection, one might find Cyrllic script annotating flattened depictions of analogue technologies whose purpose was lost with the fall of the Soviet Union, or Mandarin hanzi surrounding an elevation of a smiling Buddha figure who, if the scale is to be believed, sits at 15 metres and some change.
The gulf between reality and quixotic fantasy has been growing in architectural representation, helped along by the libraries of render assets that come bundled with subscriptions to modern render engines. Preening Enscape studs strut the corridors of budget institutional buildings like they are the runways of Milan, while furniture crafted in the remotist fjords of Scandinavia lend a false promise of dignity to the lobbies of assisted living facilities. These slick renders are window dressed to conceal architecture stripped of all social and aesthetic value by predatory Excel documents curated by developers and politicians who are more Scrooge than Caesar.
Luckily, there are many individuals with Blundstones on the ground, executing the unglamourous task of populating the digital worlds of other designers with objects that do not fit neatly into the Chaos Cosmos browser. The unfairly maligned urbanites of RevitCity work day and night to create Revit families of real value, like “72 inch LCD wall mounted tv with family guy on screen”. The shop attendants working the night shift at the SketchUp Warehouse are pumping out low-poly replicas of medieval siege weapons while the rest of the world sleeps. Until Enscape releases a render asset of a toilet clogged with shit, these netizens are helping nudge representation closer in the direction of the real, toiling under the mutual understanding that CAD blocks and render objects should animate a design, not sanitize it.
© 2025 International Forum for Architecture.
