Retreat! Re-peat!

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

dyslexia, eBooks and typography

A rather off-topic post, but hopefully of value to some fellow parents… This is Josh. He’s ten years old. He can light up a rugby pitch, climb to about grade 5c/6a and strike a cricket ball with such Gower-like sublime beauty I get tearful. What he can’t do very well, or at least doesn’t really …

Reworking

(The Isolator found via Anne Galloway’s always brilliant tumblr) We’ve been using 37signals products at the office for years now. I’m a big fan of their products and their philosophy. For some reason though I remained dismissive regarding the business self-help book Rework they published last year. Probably the fault of that usual suspect: ego. A …

more evocative

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 …

paper bagged

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 …

Facing up

Facing up, originally uploaded by eversion. There’s something very satisfying about the way this building keeps facing you as you round the bend. Successfully enfronting the site I think Charles Moore would say. update: Yep, enfronting it is: I should get this out of my system. It must be getting quite dull, all this relentless …