Paul Dobraszczyk
The past haunts us, but always misremembered. This is the premise of Backrooms, a new film set in the early 1990s and based on a fictional location popularised by 16-yr old Kane Parsons in 2012 on the image board website 4chan (Parsons, now 20, also directed the film). But the idea goes further back than this, beginning in 2012 with an anonymous web user’s interpretation of a photograph of an…
A deep dive into Stone Tape theory and how it might not be as ridiculous as it first seems.
Beetles may be the most profligate insect in terms of diversity of species; but it is ants (the Formicidae family) that are the most...
Beetles eat buildings from the inside out - they are architecture’s most troublesome parasites, liable to infest buildings.
Copenhagen is home to the world’s first, and oldest surviving, children’s junk playground – a place of escape for the city’s youngest inhabi
Today, around 30% of people living in cities across the world are housed in informal settlements – self-built cities made out of breeze-bloc
With the alarming warning from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in late-2018 that we have only 12 years in which to act to avoi
Seeding high-rises and ploughing the city’s streets: a collage from Street Farmer 2 (1972) The early 1970s witnessed the first widespread...
Farmers’ tractors surround structures in the ZAD to protect them from the police In the first week of April 2018, over 2,500 armed French...
Laurel & Hardy in Dirty Work (1933) Still from Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936) Perhaps more than any other pioneer of slapstick...
Hanging Lodge, The Open City, 2006 The Open City of Amereida occupies 670 acres of dune fields, wetlands and pine forests along the...
Community hub building at Lammas, built in 2009 Lammas is a low impact, off-grid eco-village at Tir-y-Gafel in Pembrokeshire in southwest...
With over half a million visitors every year, Freetown Christiania in Copenhagen is the city’s third largest tourist attraction. A...
Bamboo scaffolding in Hong Kong Scaffolding erected during the construction of the British Museum Library in the late 1850s In recent...
Benders and tents at the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, 1982 One of the original benders constructed at Landmatters in 2005...
No. 5 Walters Way, including a treehouse built by its current residents Walter Segal (1907-85) was an architect who developed a system of...
The Holzmarkt development, fronting the river Spree near Berlin’s Ostabahnhof station, is an unprecedented experiment in anarchic urban...
Grow Heathrow is an off-grid community and protest site that has, for 8 years, occupied a few acres of vacant land in the village of...
Lebbeus Woods, Quake City, 1995 This month, I’ve started a new 2-year research project exploring self-built structures of all kinds. Like...
Stockport central library, funded by Andrew Carnegie, built from 1913-14 and designed by Bolton-based architects Bradshaw, Gass & Hope Of...