Co-founded by Ben Reynolds and Valle Medina, Palace is an architectural design and research collaborative that speculates and reacts to issues existing in levels of culture, space and economy, with a specific concern for the relationship between architectural and social forms.
A series of explorations on the idea of "Home Buttons" for JUNKJET nº5. We are used to looking back to understand the origin, we click on the home button as an act of renewal, and reference in real-time...
Objective: To exchange material goods wrapped in the symbols we identify as our contemporary immaterial goods and tools of exchange. Process: Strip off these symbols and slow bits and bobs that are soon to consume our precious space and occupy our living rooms. Take away the flat image-buttons and instantaneously begin to devalue what is inside. Enjoy the sensation of tearing; the sound of ripping. You will only destroy what is contained within. The moment when you dreamt...
Recently I was at a large London architectural office for a meeting to discuss whether spandrels on a residential tower in the city's south east should be expressed in glass, metal or stone. The end of the discussion took a different tack and became an opportunity to discuss how the building was to be represented to the public in an exhibition of the design in its respective borough. It was quickly established that the question of the height of the building ...
There is a peculiar habit of “Austericans” (members of a society whose New culture takes over its indigenous civilisation) Robin Boyd was ever the serial neologiser (Featurism, Austerican, Bushmanist, etc.) whereby they find privacy in their own car. Marshall McLuhan called this a “hidden ground” behind the use of the car. Australians paradoxically go outside to be alone and go home to be social, which explains the average oversized Australian car. ...
Boyd insists, that Featurist things are ‘non-intellectual, non-emotional and entirely optical’ and that ugliness is class relative: ‘Georgian for high income, numb conservatism for the low, and for the great central majority coloured plastics, paint, and flat black steel welded into hard geometrical shapes.’ Furthermore, he notes that non-English visitors regard ‘the difference between an English and an Australian accent [as] a class distinction...
