Weak, as in a summary of my physical state come 4pm most days, thanks to lifting, shifting and fixing on site. After 2 years of extremely challenging work the budget for a contractor on my refurb of a late 60s timber frame house has been spent, meaning I am now on the tools. In many …
I’m gonna feed our children non-organic foodAnd with the money saved take ’em to the zoo Totnes Bickering Fair The Council Chambers at the RIBA HQ turns out to be the quietest place in the building to record a podcast, and the antechamber (where in years gone by many an architect must have waited in …
Lately, I’ve started to appreciate how dependent I am on a side quest to help boost creative energy. They come in many different forms but the key criteria for any side quest is that it should be tangential, of uncertain outcome and ideally include a companion to help you chart a new part of the …
Wetlands, grottoes, rural remediation, extremophiles, methanogenesis, will o’the wisp, flora, fauna, funga, fenlands and the sublime. Retreat! Re-peat! The sunken land begins to rise again* The Fens, Norfolk – endless sky and sunken landscape, drained for agriculture and taxes, a common land divided by channels and dykes. A future victim of greater human intervention: climate …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …