no2self.net

Birmingham City Council launched a major new project today. I spent the afternoon with Director of Housing, Elaine Elkington and Councilor John Lines at the opening of our passive solar experiment in Kings Heath. This marks the beginning of 3 years of post-occupancy monitoring we’ll be doing in collaboration with the guys at Hockerton Housing. [...]

Should you find yourself at Ecobuild tomorrow afternoon, be sure to stop by the Thames Lounge and say hello. I’ll be there from 1pm, starting with a talk on passive solar for the ‘Making Sustainable Affordable’ session followed by another on BIM and social media for the ‘Information Modelling for Greener Buildings’ seminar. I’m particularly [...]

Happy birthday blog, you just turned 5 years old. Here’s an interesting article on static caravan parks: Trailers have long interested Morrish. He likes the simplicity of long, narrow, free-standing structures. Light and breezes come in from either side. If ceilings are pushed to 10 feet or higher, small rooms can feel much larger. And [...]

Provided mostly as a supplement to the latest post by The Sesquipedalist, I’ve dug out some old cover images from AD magazine in the 70s. Much better qualified to explain the history of architectural journalism than I, The Sesquipedalist sets the scene: During the “book business model” of the ’70s, where the magazine almost completely [...]

eames diagram, originally uploaded by eversion. So it turns out Eames was a fan of the Venn diagram approach to design thinking too. Here’s his interpretation, as presented in The Art of Looking Sideways by Alan Fletcher.

*UPDATE: for those viewing in RSS, click through to the site for the video as it may not appear in your reader* The Pecha Kucha presentations from last week’s be2camp are now available in both slide and video. The guy who wanders on screen in the eighth minute with a beer in his hand is [...]

I’ll be parachuting into the capital on Friday to take part in the first be2camp unconference. I’m really looking forward to being able to properly announce one of my latest projects: YouCanPlan Lozells. A few weeks ago, Birmingham City Council put out an invitation to tender for an extremely innovative and ambitious proposal that would [...]

I’ve been making notes, with varying intensity, since early 2004. Here’s a Google search box to help you mine it: If you’d like to widen your search to include other blogs, I also run a Google search co-op that includes lots of other great writers on architecture and design: no2self.net/blogsearch

Times are hard. Your credit is being crunched and there’s nothing you can do about it. Your value is being chamfered. Open the door and run. Run like the wind. Jump. Jump up. Jump up, jump up and get down. Nobody can take that from us, it’ll always be ours. Everything else has gone to [...]

More notes from Architecture, You and Me by Siegfried Giedion (found in a second hand bookshop in 2005). This time it’s the recounting of a delightful list of important urban design developments since 1850 – books and building – according to Mr Giedion. The New Urbanists amongst you may find the regular appearance of Corb [...]