Nick de Klerk
@nickdk.bsky.social
Architect, writer, occasional critic; hotel specialist / sector head at Purcell Architecture. Views all my own, ofc.
https://nicholasdeklerk.com
https://nicholasdeklerk.com
So many examples this weekend of how achieving high office does not ‘make’ someone, it reveals them.
That is all.
That is all.
January 3, 2026 at 10:05 PM
So many examples this weekend of how achieving high office does not ‘make’ someone, it reveals them.
That is all.
That is all.
Fire at Corb’s Maison Radieuse outside Nantes: www.ouest-france.fr/societe/fait...
Vidéo. La maison radieuse de Rezé, au sud de Nantes, en proie aux flammes
Vendredi 2 janvier, un incendie s'est déclaré dans la Maison radieuse, l'unité d'habitation pensée par Le Corbusier à Rezé, dans la métropole de Nantes.
www.ouest-france.fr
January 2, 2026 at 10:22 PM
Fire at Corb’s Maison Radieuse outside Nantes: www.ouest-france.fr/societe/fait...
Permit me a gripe, just because it’s that time of year: What is it with the increasing number of cyclists deciding that pavements are fair game?
December 30, 2025 at 3:28 PM
Permit me a gripe, just because it’s that time of year: What is it with the increasing number of cyclists deciding that pavements are fair game?
Shaking hands with Brian Eno when he awarded our 2nd year-end group architecture installation (a bunch of models on a plywood wave) best in show - many years ago now.
Right folks. Feeling rather down at the moment so bringing back an oldie
Please Quote this with your most minor celebrity interaction
Please Quote this with your most minor celebrity interaction
December 29, 2025 at 11:02 PM
Shaking hands with Brian Eno when he awarded our 2nd year-end group architecture installation (a bunch of models on a plywood wave) best in show - many years ago now.
“Architecture is slow and I’m afraid we are destroying its meaning.”
From @edwinheathcote.bsky.social’s interview with Diébédo Francis Kéré: www.ft.com/content/a286...
From @edwinheathcote.bsky.social’s interview with Diébédo Francis Kéré: www.ft.com/content/a286...
Architect Diébédo Francis Kéré: ‘My life is serendipity’
The Pritzker-winner on building ‘from the earth’, why modern architecture is going too fast — and how it all began with wobbly school benches
www.ft.com
December 18, 2025 at 11:03 PM
“Architecture is slow and I’m afraid we are destroying its meaning.”
From @edwinheathcote.bsky.social’s interview with Diébédo Francis Kéré: www.ft.com/content/a286...
From @edwinheathcote.bsky.social’s interview with Diébédo Francis Kéré: www.ft.com/content/a286...
A little late to this but an excellent piece on the AI race in last weekend’s FT: www.ft.com/content/1258...
Could America win the AI race but lose the war?
The US has gone all-in on artificial intelligence. But the idea of an end-of-times battle with China over tomorrow’s key technology is part delusion, part lobbying tool for Silicon Valley
www.ft.com
December 18, 2025 at 9:17 PM
A little late to this but an excellent piece on the AI race in last weekend’s FT: www.ft.com/content/1258...
The whole series is worth listening to but this one, which positions the Temperance movement as a model for the pushback against addictive screen time / social media, is really interesting. The seeds of this resistance are already visible: www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...
The Reith Lectures - Rutger Bregman - Moral Revolution - 4. Fighting for Humanity in the Age of the Machine. - BBC Sounds
Dutch historian Rutger Bregman gives his fourth and final Reith Lecture.
www.bbc.co.uk
December 18, 2025 at 4:29 PM
The whole series is worth listening to but this one, which positions the Temperance movement as a model for the pushback against addictive screen time / social media, is really interesting. The seeds of this resistance are already visible: www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...
The writer makes a good point, if you want free content to train your LLM, then nationalise the model so that creators have a stake in them too - seems fair: youtube.com/shorts/7eQIU...
Novelist confronts AI researcher over intellectual property | Janne Teller, Timothy Nguyen
YouTube video by The Institute of Art and Ideas
youtube.com
December 15, 2025 at 6:53 PM
The writer makes a good point, if you want free content to train your LLM, then nationalise the model so that creators have a stake in them too - seems fair: youtube.com/shorts/7eQIU...
Reposted by Nick de Klerk
Disney Hall is great. Some of his small projects are perhaps even greater.
If you really want to understand Frank Gehry's genius, look past the titanium showpieces, @cmonstah.bsky.social writes. She explores the remodeling projects through which Gehry made the mundane into the extraordinary:
Frank Gehry’s Best Work Was Not His Flashiest
If you really want to understand the late architect’s transformative genius, look past the titanium showpieces that made him a household name.
bit.ly
December 8, 2025 at 5:00 PM
Disney Hall is great. Some of his small projects are perhaps even greater.
I love and learned a lot from Gehry’s early work, specifically the hay barn and his Santa Monica house, but it’s very hard to look at the Battersea housing project and not think it falls into the first, not the second category.
December 6, 2025 at 1:14 AM
I love and learned a lot from Gehry’s early work, specifically the hay barn and his Santa Monica house, but it’s very hard to look at the Battersea housing project and not think it falls into the first, not the second category.
OK, I’ll take the bait. Do we blame the prompt or the model for toilets with no servicing, endless surplus wardrobes, a master bed against the ‘view’ window, six sinks in the, er, kitchen, a (mostly) column-free, bi-fold pergola? I could go on.
December 1, 2025 at 10:00 PM
OK, I’ll take the bait. Do we blame the prompt or the model for toilets with no servicing, endless surplus wardrobes, a master bed against the ‘view’ window, six sinks in the, er, kitchen, a (mostly) column-free, bi-fold pergola? I could go on.
This is worth a listen for many reasons, but here’s one - behold the compliance culture we have built that doesn’t actually hold anyone to account; what is the actual point of any of it? www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...
The Reith Lectures - Rutger Bregman - Moral Revolution - 1. A Time of Monsters - BBC Sounds
Dutch historian Rutger Bregman delivers his first BBC Reith Lecture: Moral Revolution.
www.bbc.co.uk
December 1, 2025 at 3:07 PM
This is worth a listen for many reasons, but here’s one - behold the compliance culture we have built that doesn’t actually hold anyone to account; what is the actual point of any of it? www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...
James Gowan’s Schreiber House is on the market: sothebysrealty.co.uk/properties/b...
House for Sale in Schreiber House: A Modernist Masterpiece Opposite Hampstead Heath | UK Sotheby's International Realty
House ID 49739 in Schreiber House, Hampstead, London. The House has 5 bedrooms, 5 bathrooms, 5691 SQ.FT built up area. Amenities & facilities Garden, Parking, Grade II Listed and others.
sothebysrealty.co.uk
December 1, 2025 at 9:05 AM
James Gowan’s Schreiber House is on the market: sothebysrealty.co.uk/properties/b...
There is an irony about a project conceived to promote ‘long term thinking’ being funded by one of the key proponents of the on-demand economy. All very *cough* meta.
A giant clock to keep time for the next ten millennia is moving towards completion in a western US desert cavern.
It's meant to promote long-term thinking in an age of short termism. The project, backed by Jeff Bezos, has been a suitably drawn out and enigmatic affair.
www.ft.com/content/22c0...
It's meant to promote long-term thinking in an age of short termism. The project, backed by Jeff Bezos, has been a suitably drawn out and enigmatic affair.
www.ft.com/content/22c0...
The Clock of the Long Now is a 10,000-year-long timepiece backed by Jeff Bezos
Deep inside a Texas mountain, a vast mechanical clock tries to make humanity measure time on the scale of civilisation itself
www.ft.com
November 28, 2025 at 9:52 AM
There is an irony about a project conceived to promote ‘long term thinking’ being funded by one of the key proponents of the on-demand economy. All very *cough* meta.
Also feels like this is accelerating as we are in a political moment where malign actors and useful idiots are facilitating if not encouraging it. Even they recognise this is just a moment and thus existential for the project.
Once you start thinking of AI as a war on humanity, on human thought, on human inquiry, on human labor, on nuance and critical thinking, it slots in pretty seamlessly with the right wing ideological project, oligarchical political projects, big tech's political projects, etc
November 6, 2025 at 6:28 PM
Also feels like this is accelerating as we are in a political moment where malign actors and useful idiots are facilitating if not encouraging it. Even they recognise this is just a moment and thus existential for the project.
Reposted by Nick de Klerk
‘Stark displays of sexism’ driving women out of architecture, report finds
‘Stark displays of sexism’ driving women out of architecture, report finds
Riba and Fawcett Society survey finds many are afraid to report bullying, sexual harassment and unequal pay
Two decades after a seminal report on sexism in architecture, women are still abandoning the profession because of “toxic workplace cultures”, sexual harassment, long hours and unequal pay, according to a report from the Royal Institute of British Architects (Riba).
Female architects still faced intractable barriers, including “long hours being glorified, an imbalance of power between employers and employees, lack of clear policies and proactive action, and stark displays of sexism within practices”, according to the Riba Build It Together report, produced with the equality charity the Fawcett Society.
Half of all female respondents had experienced bullying at work
A third had been sexually harassed
A majority felt their architecture career progression had been stymied by having children Continue reading...
www.theguardian.com
October 20, 2025 at 5:09 AM
‘Stark displays of sexism’ driving women out of architecture, report finds
My latest review for Building Design considers Jon Blair’s recent film about Eric Parry’s approach to architecture - The Art of Architecture - and offered the opportunity to ask some big questions, as the film does: www.bdonline.co.uk/briefing/the...
October 12, 2025 at 1:33 PM
My latest review for Building Design considers Jon Blair’s recent film about Eric Parry’s approach to architecture - The Art of Architecture - and offered the opportunity to ask some big questions, as the film does: www.bdonline.co.uk/briefing/the...
Reposted by Nick de Klerk
For thousands of years we’ve been building with trabeated stone. For thousands of years it’s been chewed at, chased to abstraction. Repeatedly exhumed and revived, even after Roman concrete, even after Gothic vaults, after Rundbogenstil and Candela’s shells. Keeps coming back from the dead.
a 🧵:
a 🧵:
October 12, 2025 at 1:04 PM
For thousands of years we’ve been building with trabeated stone. For thousands of years it’s been chewed at, chased to abstraction. Repeatedly exhumed and revived, even after Roman concrete, even after Gothic vaults, after Rundbogenstil and Candela’s shells. Keeps coming back from the dead.
a 🧵:
a 🧵:
‘… everything must change so that everything can stay the same.’ Apparently this also holds for the life extending treatments on offer in the spa-adjacent clinic. A fascinating history of the Brenner hotel in Baden Baden: www.ft.com/content/f1ca...
Simon Kuper: in the footsteps of Queen Victoria (and Victoria Beckham) at Germany’s grandest spa hotel
After two years of restoration work, Brenners Park in Baden-Baden reopens this month
www.ft.com
October 5, 2025 at 2:23 PM
‘… everything must change so that everything can stay the same.’ Apparently this also holds for the life extending treatments on offer in the spa-adjacent clinic. A fascinating history of the Brenner hotel in Baden Baden: www.ft.com/content/f1ca...
‘Consider what is lost with a demolition… Histories are inscribed in architecture and to erase buildings is to strip cities of a layer of their culture.’
Great piece: "Architecture’s dark, dusty side is a shadow world in which buildings are demolished to make way for the new."
Adapt or die: the architects pioneering a new wave of building reuse on.ft.com/3VE0r5s
October 4, 2025 at 3:13 PM
‘Consider what is lost with a demolition… Histories are inscribed in architecture and to erase buildings is to strip cities of a layer of their culture.’
Despite the delusions AI remains a tool with fairly typical limitations (rubbish in, rubbish out etc), but the ambitions for which are also shaped by the intellect and creativity of its makers - which in this telling do not meet the moment at all.
Hello. I wrote a nice long essay about AI and this very strange moment where we're constantly told we're living in the dawn of a strange new future but the only thing that's actually clear is that everyone feels pretty unmoored and uncertain. I hope you'll read it
AI Is a Mass-Delusion Event
Three years in, one of AI’s enduring impacts is to make people feel like they’re losing it.
www.theatlantic.com
August 19, 2025 at 9:06 AM
Despite the delusions AI remains a tool with fairly typical limitations (rubbish in, rubbish out etc), but the ambitions for which are also shaped by the intellect and creativity of its makers - which in this telling do not meet the moment at all.
Reposted by Nick de Klerk
Hello. I wrote a nice long essay about AI and this very strange moment where we're constantly told we're living in the dawn of a strange new future but the only thing that's actually clear is that everyone feels pretty unmoored and uncertain. I hope you'll read it
AI Is a Mass-Delusion Event
Three years in, one of AI’s enduring impacts is to make people feel like they’re losing it.
www.theatlantic.com
August 18, 2025 at 9:21 PM
Hello. I wrote a nice long essay about AI and this very strange moment where we're constantly told we're living in the dawn of a strange new future but the only thing that's actually clear is that everyone feels pretty unmoored and uncertain. I hope you'll read it
‘Even the perspective view - all coloured and enlivened with cloud, tree, and figure - is more like a chimerical prospectus than an honest and bona fide prospect.’ George Wightwick, 1853.
July 27, 2025 at 2:50 PM
‘Even the perspective view - all coloured and enlivened with cloud, tree, and figure - is more like a chimerical prospectus than an honest and bona fide prospect.’ George Wightwick, 1853.
Reposted by Nick de Klerk
