Rob
Notes from ‘Structural Fabulation: An essay on fiction of the future’
It would be great to find more examples of keynote speeches given in my profession that even came close to the care, rigour, sense of shared responsibility and warmth for fellow thinkers and practitioners as that found in Bethany Nowviskie’s talk on Digital Humanities in the Anthropocene. I suspect I’ll be digging around at the […]
Plastic Praxis: MArch teaching at BCU
I’m collaborating with Mike Dring, the MArch Course Director at Birmingham School of Architecture this academic year to help run a studio for years 5 & 6. Over the last few weeks we’ve been crafting a studio agenda which is less about the question of how we should build and more about questioning why. We’re […]
the making of a home4self
Outside the window a machine scrapes the ground flat in preparation for the arrival of a crane. An engineer is marking the ground with laser-guided accuracy and tomorrow the timber frame structure will be lifted into place then bolted to the cross-hairs of yellow paint marked on the 12 cubes of concrete we’ve poured into […]
Pacific BIM: a mutually interruptible neural bridge
I’m hoping to do some teaching next year at Birmingham School of Architecture. Of the many topics that I’d like to include in any brief set for the students, I think it will be important to include a discussion about Building Information Modeling. I like a pencil as much as the next guy, but BIM […]
metamatter that matters
This week I was invited by Birmingham City Council to talk at their Sustainability Forum meeting about our experience of environmental design challenges and the 2016 zero carbon goal. Sadly, the idea that the sector might be in a position to deliver zero carbon buildings consistently 3 years from now is laughable, but the drive […]
The avoidance of doing architecture
The Philosophers Magazine interviewing Nigel Warburton of Philosophy Bites podcast – with a minor adjustment in bold by me: “A lot of professional philosophers architects lack the imagination required to think about what it’s like not to understand something. Some have got into a complacent habit of speaking to each other in a kind of […]
Institutionalised in the Black Maria
Notes made on the 22:30 from Euston to Birmingham, whilst returning home to the provinces after treating myself to an evening of presentations and discussion with Dan Hill, Jeremy Till and Wouter Vanstiphout under the title Institutionalised… Housed in the Black Maria installation at St Martin’s by Richard Wentworth/GRUPPE we were split into eager registrants […]
100 stick house
The beginnings of an idea for a structure built within the rules of UK domestic permitted development, consisting of exactly the same size timber section/length throughout and well suited to standard timber sheet sizes for cladding. Shown here in 3 repeating bays and resulting in 100 x 4.2m long sticks. Well, 99 in fact but […]
Forms that add distance
Blogging dogged eared thoughts – some loose, coincidental noticings that deserve recording… I’m looking forward to seeing some of Hadid’s work further iterated in the future by the algorithms delivering Google Earth’s Universal Texture. It’ll feel like an event horizon in which Parametricism Will Eat Itself. Better yet, if the pirate copy in China gets […]
home4self
I’m nearing the end of the design process for home4self – always a good time to revisit the original sketches.