Board Message: Welcome to The Right Angle Journal
We spend much of our lives in spaces created by other people – people we don’t even know. Some of these environments are great and some are not so great. Most of the time, we don’t notice them and we don’t comment on them. We just get used to them. With your help, we would like to change things a little.
Welcome to The Right Angle.
The Right Angle is a journal for the people, places and ideas that shape architecture (full disclosure: our team is mostly made up of individuals who call themselves architects). Like you, we believe the built environment needs to be discussed more openly, and by a wider range of people.
Our organization is called the Built Environment Open Forum, and we intend that our journal will reflect that. Many of our writers will be architects and design professionals, along with others close to the cause. Our topics will be those that interest us and our readers equally, related to the built environment. The writing will be down-to-earth, accessible, light-hearted or serious, personal, honest, and with lots of drawings and photographs.
There is no limit to the number of ways the built environment can be appreciated, enjoyed, examined and evaluated. It very much depends on how you’re prepared to look at it. And there is really no correct viewpoint: every angle is the right angle.
Introduction to: The Right Angle Journal
Raymond Moriyama on the launch of The Right Angle Journal: what a quarterly can do that a magazine cannot, and what he hopes it becomes.
Introduction: Places
What makes a place special is rarely what architects control: an introduction to an issue on genius loci, memory, light, and the spirit of place.
The Grey Lady
Nantucket’s fog, shingles and strict design rules offer an architect both an escape from practice and a lesson in putting context before ego.
The Horse Palace
Toronto’s Horse Palace is a museum you experience through your nose: on smell, memory, and what the city may scent like a century from now.
The Micro-Village
A morning walk past a 1911 county jail, a land registry office and a church spire: what a small Ontario city’s old buildings still know about authenticity.
Memorial School, Niagara Falls
Decades after grade six, the author walks back into his old Niagara Falls school, now a Legion Hall, and finds that memory, not architecture, is what makes a place beloved.
Those Were the Days
A childhood in Hong Kong, where an unremarkable alley between apartment blocks became the best playground in the world through sheer imagination.
Light-Colour-Darkness
Hospital birth rooms are designed as clinical machines, but light, colour and darkness shape the birthing body: a researcher on reinventing birthspace.
Locations: Trinity Square Park, Toronto ON
Tucked between a shopping centre, an office tower, and a church, Trinity Square Park is downtown Toronto’s secret walled garden: on labyrinths, buried creeks, and the architecture of calm.