no2self.net

lone sledger, originally uploaded by eversion.

Hoping your Christmas involved sufficient sledging.

Blogging like it’s 2004. That’s the answer it seems. In which case I should return to my habit of just lazily scanning cool stuff and putting it on flickr. So, for no better reason than a desire to share some beautiful illustrations, I give you the 1961 Ladybird guide to London:

The authorities of the airport are pleased to see us, and they have arranged everything for our pleasure and interest. We can but refreshments or a full meal. For children who are not above old-fashioned means of transport, they have pony-rides and a miniature railway. There is even a sand-pit for the very young. But the great thrill is the aeroplanes; huge and graceful, immensely powerful and so beautiful to watch.

Never mind the carbon emissions and the extra runway rubbish: huge and graceful, immensely powerful and so beautiful to watch. Oof.

With thanks to Kinver Village book fair. More to come.

Perhaps it’s because I’ve just finished listening to McCloud’s (Sennett referencing) lecture on the importance of craftsmanship, or the exhaustively comprehensive work of Joseph Little I’ve just been reading on condensation in walls, or even just the day to day experience that gives one cause for concern over trade skills; but either way it’s hard not to find the AECB’s statement on carbon reduction attractive:

“So the AECB team looking at this is recommends that the carbon compliance level is set at 10-12 kgCO2/m2.a, for all dwelling types. The reasoning behind this is, that this level can be achieved with a highly efficient house heated with gas/lpg, without being forced to add in PVs, biomass or other bolt-ons.

The 10-12 kgCO2/m2.a level equates to an ‘emissions reduction’ from 2006 building regulations of about 50%. It recognises that the additional reduction we need as a nation is much easier to afford with large-scale offsite renewable plant, than on-site. So the idea is that the remaining carbon reductions to achieve the “zero carbon” target will be via “allowable solutions”, allowing the developer to invest in nation-wide offsite renewable generation, giving us all the best value for the developer’s money.”

I’d better go and catch up with their closing their ‘Closing The Gap’ (PDF) paper.

Catching up on Radio 3′s Front Row earlier today (whilst twittering about a weak spot for religious imagery), I found this simple but valuable observation on the diary form that reminded of the way I felt in the first week of signing up for twitter 4 years ago. It also goes some way to explain the attraction of services like Twournal.

There weren’t many diaries, only at odd moments in my life did I try to keep a diary … the ones I kept as a teenager tend to be completely ridiculous, my opinons are so self-important and ill informed. What I should have done is simply wrote down: ‘Got up at half past seven, had my breakfast, was at school by such and such a time…’, and that would have been really quite interesting.

Actually, as the diaries got on as I got older the length of the diary entries shrink and they turn into something more like engagement diaries, and some of those entries that simply say ’10 o’clock: coffee with so and so, 3 o’clock tutorial…’, turn out to be much more evocative than the long essays. I see those things and whole days come back into my head.

Playwright and novelist Michael Frayn talks to Mark Lawson about his childhood and career, in the light of a newly-published memoir about his father.

As you may have noticed from all the (t)wittering a few weeks ago, I was lucky enough to be offered a place on a field trip to Germany to study Passivhaus construction principles. As my practice continues to try and raise the energy efficiency bar in the social housing sector and travel along the seemingly never ending path to zero carbon (thanks to the fact that we can’t agree a destination), adopting Passivhaus strategies makes perfect sense.

Perfect sense – that’s the very essence of Passivhaus thinking you might argue, its seemingly unarguable logic that simply asks that we build well insulated, draft free, carefully detailed, properly ventilated buildings. What’s not to like?

There are a full set of photos available on Flickr, more notes and audio in an Evernote folder (although the audio is too quiet unfortunately) and if that’s not enough there’s even a hand crafted booklet you can download and fold yourself thanks to bookleteer.com. Never let it be said that I don’t give value for money.

The trip began with a presentation on board the mothership – the Passivhaus Institute in Darmstadt. Our host talked us through the key principles of super insulation levels of below 0.15, super air tightness that allowed no more than 0.6 air changes per hour, super rigorous detailing that eradicated connections between the outside and the inside, super seductive triple glazing products and ventilation heat exchangers that performed at an efficiency that was, well, super. The examples shown to us offered timber frame construction for new build and wrapped existing buildings in a cozy blanket and all new air tight skin. The almost hermetically sealed results providing their inhabitants with a life free from cold and heating bills. We left shaking our heads at the insanity of the normal, slapdash world of construction then shook them again at the thought of the work in front of us required to fix it.

A trip to building membrane supplier Pro Clima came next. An impressively detailed, technical description of the science of moving moisture around the building proved to be the perfect accompaniment to the previous day’s discussion on air tightness. Stop the wind blowing in, but let the moisture out. Graph after graph and detail upon detail proved it beyond doubt, but you should never underestimate the value of the ‘you mean it’s a bit like Gore-Tex?’ moment to really convey the core principle.

Lothar Moll, Pro Clima founder, gave us a demonstration of their products and detailing recommendations allowing the geeks amongst us to stroke a few things and get up close. The gale blowing through the tiny punctures he made in the membrane for the final demonstration gave us further proof of the unassailable logic.

He made a passionate plea to use that same logic when considering whether to demolish or refurbish, pointing out that when you do the maths alone it often doesn’t make sense to retain existing buildings. A tidy balance sheet alone doesn’t necessarily make for a healthy society though, despite what our coalition might think.

On from there to some actual examples of Passivhaus buildings, with Ludwigshafen Brunck Quarter first on the list and a tour from the architects Luwogue Consult. A project that had created new build Passivhaus properties:

As well as refurbished existing dwellings:

A key feature worth noting here is the use of level changes and the acceptance of basement parking, lifting the floor slab and the tricky insulation details up out of the ground. Not so straightforward perhaps in a world of Lifetime Homes and Secured By Design guidelines here in the UK social housing sector, even if the rules have been slightly loosened lately.

Inside we found a sensibly laid out floor plan around a well placed service core and kitchen and a better finish quality to important elements like stairs then we might have found at home. The connection from kitchen and hall space to the stairs and first floor must surely create some noise problems though. The temperature? Warm. Everywhere. More on that later.

Next we visited Hoheloogstrasse and here felt the shame of our tardy arrival to the Passivhaus party as our guest seemed genuinely uncertain about what to tell us at first, given that we were making a fuss about a 5 year old project whose principles were now almost standard practice.

We’d spent hours being talked through the Passivhaus Haynes Manual and had poured over every component in this high performance machine for living in but that afternoon had been our first look at all the parts assembled and being test driven. The obligatory canter through the Top Trumps statistics had told us what we’d come to expect of the fuel consumption and efficiency, but what of the aesthetic? A pattern had been evolving in the images in the lectures and the previous project and Hoheloogstrasse continued in the same style.

Rendered external insulation that leaves little opportunity for relief or material change is perhaps the most obvious common feature and combined with the metal clad windows a somewhat industrial style ensues. There’s a more subtle issue here though that’s also a direct result of the science and it’s the simple fact that you can’t fix anything to, or through, the building. Projections – those parts of a building that hint at the heart of a structure and it’s spaces – become divorced from the main body of the architecture. The rigorous avoidance of any ‘cold bridge’ that might allow heat loss to seep out through a continuous material conducting warmth wastefully outwards results in the architectural equivalent of a restraining order.

Don’t touch me, says the increasingly uptight building, leaving balconies, canopies and even mail boxes to shiver in the cold. It was with some disappointment that our host had to acknowledge a small connection from the balcony structure to the building, included thanks to concerns about wind load, that resulted in a minor flaw in the thermal performance. A brief moment of almost Ballardian eroticism as the coming together of body and metal was acknowledged in slightly hushed tones.

I’m exaggerating to make a point of course but this seems significant. The insulation strategy predominantly used in this type/size of building combined with the casting out of architecture’s most fickle elements that usually flirt with both inside and out threatens to create a depressingly homogenous Passivhaus Style. However, a problem can soon become an opportunity once you’ve spotted it and I wonder about a future that capitalises on these issues and plays with the possibilities. An embracing of the stand-off facade that dances to its own tune in a manner not too dissimilar to the work of FAT perhaps? Or the suburban stage set imagined by Archigram?

On smaller scale buildings and simple masonry cavity construction the question of material choices should be wider though and the buildings listed in the UK Passivhaus Open Days this weekend certainly seem to provide some variety of language and vernacular. I’d be interested to hear from anyone who visits one. Then next week we’ll talk about that perfect temperature…

Some interesting stuff to be found in this Bachelard inspired flickr pool:

Poetics of Space

I was recently contacted by some students from Birmingham School of Architecture and asked to take part in an exhibition they’re organising called Made in Birmingham for an upcoming RIBA/BAA event. The request was simply to pick my favourite building in the city and provide a 50 word explanation. Here’s what I’ve just submitted:

Bournville Junior School Carillon

It lifts the soul every time I see it. Bulky swaggering scale, delicate details, bold asymmetry, endearing charm and a machine on the roof worthy of a Dr Who episode. Also, in these dark times we all need reassuring that the free market can occasionally be philanthropic. Different George though.

—-

4 years of twittering efficiency encouraged me to go for exactly 50 words. I hope my fellow architects are equally precise. I’ve never been inside however and this is gut instinct stuff about how I feel when I drive past. To my utter delight it turns out that the machine on the roof, the Carillon itself, sounds perfectly like the synesthetic stimulation of the very swagger, delicacy, asymmetry and charm I’m describing above.

It even has its own facebook page: Bournville Carillon

A long time ago I wrote a blog entry on the back of a paper bag. It was a review of a chapter from a Calvino book – the author who, as Kieran Long once twittered, architects always turn to when they want to appear arty and sensitive. At the risk of further proving that theory I can honestly say it remains one of the most satisfying posts I’ve ever written. Lately I’ve been trying to get our office to think about paper (and bags) more.

For most of the latter half of 2009 I was working on the city’s new housing development project, the Birmingham Municipal Housing Trust. Like many other local authorities around the country, Birmingham hurried to stake its claim for a share of the funding made available directly to local authorities for the first time in many years. Alongside another local practice we had 5 sites to take from nothing to a detailed planning submission in about 6 weeks. This is an insanely short amount of time. Weekly design team meetings with numerous departments ensued and the process was, to put it mildly, intense. Turning to others for moral support, encouragement and inspiration was an absolute must; as was the occasional bottle of Rioja.

Giles Lane helped by offering me a new notebook. Not the regulation issue Moleskine, almost as cliched as the Calvino reference, but a bespoke notebook just for us which we could make with our own bare hands. Giles and Proboscis have been using their Diffusion notebook format in consultation work and arts projects for some time. Printed (crucially) on single sided A4 the format is carefully designed to cut and fold quickly into a small, robust A6 book that can be either landscape or portrait.

Here’s a video showing how to fold one:

Diffusion eBooks from stml on Vimeo.

Got it?

We made a blank one, experimenting with different templates to assist with writing and drawing and I carried it around in my jeans pocket for most of the 6 weeks, proving that the design is perfectly robust enough despite only being crafted from a few folds. What I’m most interested in though is what happens when it’s finished. I can unfold it, and because I can unfold it I can easily scan it in and share it with others or work over it again with other tools. Chunks of it would quickly get extracted and thrown into presentations to the client and ultimately some of the sketches informed the design and access statement that went with the planning application. That’s interesting; the ease and speed with which you can align the analogue with the digital.

Then there was Owen Hatherley. I asked Owen to help me fill in the back story for the other team members and make sure we knew where we’d been before we decided where we wanted to go. He wrote a short essay on the history of municipal housing, talking us through projects such as Eric Lyon’s Span housing and Sheffield’s Gleadless Valley. Initially I gave it to Birmingham City Council in standard A4 format, but later when self-publishing a booklet became possible with Gile’s bookleteer.com I could create my own notebook, this time by uploading a PDF then getting it back immediately in the Diffusion format to fold and issue myself. You can download a copy yourself from the diffusion.org library. That’s interesting too, I self-published a book.

More recently, when the dust had settled and it came time to tell other people what we’ve been doing lately at the West Midlands Built Environment and Design Fair I published a newspaper in about 48 hours with the help of newspaperclub.co.uk.

Like bookleteer.com, newspaperclub.co.uk connects a web interface to a production process but this time it gives you the power to command a newspaper printing facility usually reserved for massive print runs. You can upload a PDF of any design as long as it follows the template size or you can use the newpaperclub interface to upload text and images from your machine or source either from other locations on the web such as blog entries or flickr pages.

I’ve rarely seen a web service in early beta stage nail the interface design so succesfully first time. It adjusts the 4 column layout and shows a clear snapshot each time you make an adjustment. I pulled in text from here at no2self.net and lifted images from my practice flickr account and turned out a 12 page newspaper in little more than an afternoon. 2 days and £120 later I had 100 beautiful objects to give away to clients and colleagues. We gave them out along with bookleteers by the staff in paper bags that had been rubber stamped with our logo.

So it’s a useful PR tool and in the same way Moo mini-cards still do after all these years it’ll help me cause a stir in a generally conservative, predictable industry; but what else? What interests me most about tools like newspaperclub is how I might be able to connect it with the hyperlocal debate and the work a practice like ours does with neighbourhoods like Blurton in cities like Stoke on Trent. If I can plug the outputs from amateur community blogging quickly and cheaply into professional looking trusted formats like a newspaper then the credibility, the reach and the power of the voices being supported become reinforced. Not only that but you can leave it on a bus for someone else to read and you’re not likely to do that with an iPad.

Before you wrap your chips in it however, there’s something else you could do when you retrieve it from the bus. The bookleteer experience teaches the value of being able to easily send the paper format you produced with the digital tools back into pixels to be worked on again. There are more layers to be added, further annotation to be inserted and new ideas to be traced.

When I spoke about the blurtonvision.co.uk project at Be2camp Birmingham last year I finished by enthusing about the Walking Papers project created to allow people to annotate simple paper copies of their chosen section of Open Street Map. Once complete they can be scanned in again and traced over thanks to the QR code that aligns the analogue with the digital automatically. Self publishing formats like bookleteer and newspaperclub are perfect for this type of process, flipping constantly between screen and paper (and indeed the experiments at SXSW have begun to explore this), but what I’ve come to realise is that I need the process to take place at many scales. What I need is a walking papers process that works on a building scale.

This collaboration between paper and screen knows no limits. It won’t care about file formats and it couldn’t give a damn if you’re a Mac or that Windows 7 was your idea. There’ll be no more excuses for a lack of communication.

And I’ll be able to go back to writing on paper bags.

Of course back in the day, the oldest and wisest of us knew that instinctively.

(picture circa 1997, taken from 2005 blog entry “Death of a Drawing Board“)

“This time, though, Keill avoided those streets. He was looking for a different source of information – local facts, this time, rather than space talk. Every world had its own forms of communications media – holo-screen or the more out-dated ultravid. The media people were the ones most likely to know what he needed to know.”

With apologies to fellow ‘social media surgeons’ for my lack of attendence at tonight’s surgery.

If you know anyone who needs to learn how to tell their holo-screens from their ultravids, be sure to tell them that the next Social Media Surgeries will be on the 11th February and 9th March.

Alternatively, if you’re still not convinced by any of this ‘its-all-about-the-conversation’ nonsense, you may prefer to read ‘The 5 Signs You’re Talking To A Social Media Douchebag’.