When Erandi first contacted me about starting a design blog, I had recently moved to New York from New Haven, Connecticut. More accurately, I had moved to Brooklyn, as both my employment and apartment were located in the outer borough. In my first three months in the city, I moved three times, each new apartment within a block of the old. Sandwiched between the industrial wasteland of East Williamsburg and the multi-family apartments of Bushwick, my experiences at the Jefferson stop on the L-train spanned the array of typologies of New York urban residential housing. There was the boxed apartment conveniently located above the subway. There was the expansive loft with live/work pods whose residents were evicted en masse by the Department of Buildings a month after my parting. Lastly, there was the illegal basement apartment/coach house from which the above image takes its inspiration and in which I would spend the next two years.

Wallpaper for Basement Apartments registers the datum of the ground plane outside through shifts in color and scenery. Above the ground datum, live bunnies hop across blooming wildflowers. Below the datum the bunnies have died and gone to heaven, their corpses nestled between the roots of the wildflowers above. The grey silhouette, beyond representing the ground datum, showcases some of the prominent icons of the Bushwick skyline. Speaking with Erandi over Skype about her life in London at the time, it became apparent how significantly our individual local experiences were affecting our relationships with architecture and design: there would be no companion to the Wallpaper for Basement Apartments produced in London.

While the BI BLOG started out as an exploration of the divergent architectural scenes of New York and London, as we developed the concept further it became evident that geography was but one of many factors influencing local practice. It is our hope that by contrasting the points of view of practitioners of different generations, experience levels and geographies that we will collectively gain a better understanding of our profession and its varied manifestations.

E. Sean Bailey

“I noticed how men, women, young and old laughed at different moments, enjoying the parts that entertained them.”

The Bollywood Conundrum, Nirpal Dhaliwal, The Guardian

Matt Groening: “… what if we do jokes that not everybody gets? What if we do jokes that you can only get if you have read a few books and seen a few movies.”

James L. Brooks: “The good thing is if you are watching a Simpson’s episode, and we are working, and you have different generations represented, they will laugh at different times, but they will all laugh.”

The Charlie Rose Show, Season 7, Episode 17

Taking a cue from that which has entertained me in the past, I like to take an approach that is wildly inclusive while maintaining an acute sense of specificity. This is a method that I regularly apply to my work and this project is no exception. I see the BI BLOG as a forum exploring the far reaches of how people, with varying relationships to the practice, think about architecture. While I recognize (and sometimes worship at the alter of) the larger trends, I would like to see a platform that not only highlights emerging ideas, but also charts the death of current themes and notes the resurrection of others. Meanwhile, other concepts that will receive attention will have an eternal presence in architecture, although perhaps consistently occupying the fringes. Finally, the blog’s format which presents two perspectives on a single topic will hopefully allow for a deeper understanding of some of the tensions existing within a given topic.

Erandi de Silva