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Philip Oldfield Profile picture
Philip Oldfield
@SustainableTall
Head of School of Built Environment at UNSW Sydney and Prof of Architecture. Writer, researcher & teacher, tall buildings, housing, embodied carbon, cities
Jul 22, 2025 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
More fantastic social housing in Barcelona, designed by Cierto Estudio

Mass timber structure, with an amazing mint green and red colour scheme - a thread 🧵 Image
Image Eight storeys high, much of the structure is CLT made from 120mm thick pine walls Image
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Oct 24, 2024 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
A remarkable social housing project by Harquitectes in Palma

A dilapidated school stood on the site. Materials from the school were collected and used with concrete to create pre-cast blocks that form the load bearing walls Image
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Image The materials are strikingly beautiful

Concrete with recycled materials embedded within. Timber floors Image
Jun 23, 2024 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
All this talk of nuclear power reminds me of this wonderful table of cost overruns by project type

Nuclear power mean cost overrun is 120%

Solar and wind is 1% and 13% respectively Image One of the reasons for this is solar and wind are made of repeated infrastructure - ie thousands of solar panels, so there’s efficiency in repetition

Nuclear reactors tend to be complex and unique, hence cost overruns

enr.com/articles/55774…
Jun 3, 2024 • 9 tweets • 5 min read
Iranian architect Farshad Mehdizadeh is designing some of the most interesting mid-housing anywhere in the world right now

A thread 🧵

Tabriz residential apartments
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Image This is remarkably under construction. Tehran Eye Vertical Street

(Not really housing, but you get an idea of the architectural ambition!)
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Jan 25, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
My current favourite detail

Steel frame clad in timber fire protection at Shigeru Ban’s GC Osaka Building, built in 2000

You read that correct How was this possible?

Japanese code didn’t allow a timber frame, so it had to be steel

But codes did allow performance based fire protection (rather than a prescriptive code). This allowed Ban to choose timber as fire protection to minimise costs & create an inviting interior