Farewell URL

Hello 2007. Hello new blog address: no2self.net

When you have a blog that's named so as to remind you not write posts that are too self centred, using your own name as the URL is a little daft.

After 3 years I finally got round to re-launching under a proper address. The RSS feed will continue to be the feedburner address (http://feeds.feedburner.com/no2self) so it should be a seamless transition for most, but please check your subscription as anyone who came along some time ago may still be running on a previous address.

I shall also be swimming with the tide of conformity and switching to Wordpress. Blosxom has served me very well - with just the right amount of geekery involved in keeping it trim and the basic txt file format to avoid locked in content - but the comments options and spam has always been a problem. People who know much more about this than me tell me that Wordpress 2 does a great job with preventing spam. That's good enough for me.

A huge thank you is owed to Brett O'Connor who has very generously put up with me nagging him over the last few years for help to keep the del.icio.us linklog script running. With perfect timing he's just this minute e-mailed me with the latest version. I'll be continuing to use it for behind-the-scenes blosxom blogs I use.

Can anybody recommend a good del.icio.us daily log plugin for Wordpress?

Layout at the new blog is currently based on the One Column theme but I imagine I'll be tweaking it over the coming weeks. Underneath the main content is the latest trail left by my data shadow, with various highlights from the other key sites I use. All the usual suspects.

So, farewell http://rob.annable.co.uk, we're all off to http://no2self.net.

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Day 24

Architectural Advent day 24:

I saved the most fitting sheet of Letraset till last. Merry Christmas and a happy New Year to everyone, I'll see you in 2007.

A quick recap:

1. Letraset 1982
2. Rietveld Chair dimensions
3. Letraset 1966
4. Passive solar glazing
5. Driftwood Ergonomics
6. The Machine at MOMA
7. Letraset 1966 - 2
8. Planning Process
9. Farrell Grimshaw interview
10. Letraset 1977
11. Outrigger extension
12. Outrigger extension v2
13. Letraset Love
14. AR covers 1960s
15. AR covers 1970s
16. AD Book Review
17. Letraset 1982
18. Good Gift Christmas Card
19. AR covers 1980s
20. Living Bath
21. Manplan 3
22. Manplan 4
23. Manplan 5

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MANPLAN 4 + 5

Architectural Advent day 22:

[add your MANPLAN 4 images here]

Architectural Advent day 23:

[add your MANPLAN 5 images here]

----

I need your help. After 21 days of giving, I don't think it's unfair of me to expect a little in return. Volumes 4 and 5 of the Manplan series are missing from our office. Probably loaned to a student decades ago, never to return. Somebody must have a copy they're happy to share samples from.

How many degrees of separation am I from somebody with these issues? Ask around, link up this entry and help me find someone so the architectural advent doesn't have some empty days.

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MANPLAN 3

Architectural Advent day 21:

Nearly two years on from first posting samples of the seminal AR Manplan series, I've finally added volume 3.

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Living Bath

Architectural Advent day 20:

From The Bathroom by Alexander Kira - The Living Bath:

A fascinating book of extensive research on bathroom use. Although admittedly we mostly only reach for it these days when feeling the need to impress in students the value of good ergonomic/psychological analysis. I spared you from the in depth exploratory diagrams of optimum defacation positions in favour of this lovely proposal guaranteed to break the ice at any party. Would be well placed on one of the previous Letraset sheets I think.

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AR Covers: 1980s

Architectural Advent day 19:

The changing face of Architectural Review magazine - batch 3: the 1980s.

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Good Gift

Architectural Advent day 18:

Our office Christmas card is provided this year by goodgifts.org.

Merry Christmas!

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hands down

Message from BLDGBLOG for my students to think about over the Christmas break:

...some of today's most imaginative artistic, technological, and even literary work is being produced in architectural studios. Whether you like their projects or not, in other words, architecture students are out-thinking, out-structuring, and out-performing novelists, hands down. It is now architecture that lets us rethink the world anew.

You'd better be on form when we start back in January!

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Letraset 1982

Architectural Advent Day 17:

On yer bike.

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The autonomous house

Architectural Advent day 16:

A 1975 AD magazine review of The Autonomous House by Robert and Brenda Vale - a timely discovery following my recent trip to the Hockerton Housing Project (more about which coming up in a future entry).

...their book will be useful to all designers and builders looking to construct soundly, but readers should be wary of joining the more-autonomous-than-thou race.

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AR Covers: 1970s

Architectural Advent day 15:

The changing face of Architectural Review magazine - batch 2: the 1970s.

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sketches blog

Found by pressing the 'related feeds' button in bloglines.com to get a list of blogs similar to my own:

Architecture Sketches quoting Michael Maltzman:

"I can't say that I design in one way or another it is a lot more back and forwards... It is like casting a broad net and seeing what comes up... Some drawings, like plan sketches, are a little more accurate...I prefer the fast and fluid drawings...the best drawings are almost like a field where patterns begin to inter merge in the sketches...the ones that say 'OK here is the building' are the least interesting for me..."

(my emphasis)

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AR Covers: 1960s

Architectural Advent day 14:

The changing face of Architectural Review magazine - batch 1: the 1960s.

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letraset love

Architectural Advent day 13:

Romance, courting, marriage, old age. All in one Letraset sheet. Now that's value for money.

Note to self: when wearing a sweater jauntily over your shoulders, always hook your thumb over the top your belt.

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outrigger version 2

Architectural Advent day 12:

We might as well continue the theme from day 11 with an alternative proposal that takes the full width of the plot. This project is part of the work I did with two colleagues just after graduating. My only bit of advice should you choose to try this layout is to go for underfloor heating. We tried a trench heating solution along the glazing which proved to be tricky and probably doesn't provide sufficient heating load. Under the current, more environmentally aware regulations, the extent of glazing might raise some eyebrows. In our case we were able to demonstrate that the solar gain outweighed the fabric loss over the course of a year.

Only for use in south facing sites!

This one comes with a photo of the finished product - the full set, including concept sketches by Tom can be found on flickr.

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outrigger

Architectural Advent day 11: (will I ever catch up?)

After several years of housing market boom here in the UK, there are lots of people drawing down on mortgages and extending their home. I've been involved in a few over recent years, and in a city who's housing stock is largely made up of Victorian terraces there is often a pattern to the house type that people wish to extend. The outrigger of a standard terrace usually struggles to deliver what people want from a contemporary kicthen. There's never quite enough room for all the appliances and the breakfast bar as well. Leaving nowhere to put your Starck lemon juicer.

The honest truth is that, for me, it's tough to get a project of this scale to be economically viable, as the input involved usually outweighs the fees that you can sensibly propose without screwing the clients budget. So if you happen to live in a property like this and you're thinking about extending your kitchen, here's a few sketches I did for a simple replacement of the coal shed / outside toilet.

Just employ someone to draw it up for planning and building regulations. It'll save you some money.

This particular project was sent to the client by post card - the full set can be found on flickr.

update: 18.12.06

I just re-read this and somehow it has turned into one of the most arrogant sounding entries I've ever written. That wasn't the plan - let me explain...

"...This particular project was sent to the client by post card..." - As an initial proposal! The back-of-a-knapkin drawing is such a cliche. I'd have drawn it up had it gone ahead. On a paper bag perhaps.

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Letraset 19??

Architectural Advent Day 10:

Party people. Partying. Not sure about the date on this one, but it has a certain Abigail's Party quality to it that suggests the late 70s. Check out the lecherous dude in the centre and the girl to his right who seems to be smiling with relief now that he's heading to the chocolate fondue fountain.

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Modern Methods?

Architectural Advent Day 9:

An excerpt from a 1976 edition of AD (entitled Whatever happened to the systems approach?) containing an interview with Terry Farrell and Nick Grimshaw discussing their work with timber frame housing:

Farrell-Grimshaw interviewed by James Meller (PDF link)

(Sample from cover and image from interview topic)

My profession has a short memory. I post this in the same week that my office has been asked to attend meetings to discuss the benefits of standardisation in timber frame housing. This time round everybody has agreed to call it MMC (Modern Methods of Construction). Farrell and Grimshaw understood the systems approach - it's exactly that: an approach. Yet despite all the urban design debates about context sensitivity, design quality and environmental performance, it seems there are many who are still chasing the idea of a set of standardised products rather than techniques.

Terry Farrell:

This is perhaps too intuitive to be called a system, but it has systematic elements threaded through it. One of the things we are doing at the moment is low-cost housing, for housing societies on many different tiny sites where, right from the outset, we thought we had to get something constant going through these things. What is the constant element? It isn't the appearance of the buildings, because in England today every little local planning officer is a law unto himself. So we scrapped the appearance side of it and looked for other common threads. Wat we were able to pin it down to, was the frame structure of the building and the internal finishes, but not the external finishes.

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Tagged as: AD, advent, farrell, gift, grimshaw, timber

loosen up

I spent most of today encouraging a colleague to loosen up, pick up a pencil and push aside the CAD software for a while. After lunch I finally succeeded. The next challange was to get her to loosen up her drawing technique and enagage with the action of drawing before worrying about the final result. It's not a means to an end, it's a process. You've heard me say that before.

I didn't have much success, but then it's only day 1. Perhaps I'd have done better if I'd seen the recent post over at 37signals.com: "Forget the detail" and other animation inspired lessons

Quoting from notes posted at animationmeat.com:

The artist, when he first gets an inspiration or tackles a pose in an action analysis class, sees the pose, is struck by its clarity, its expressiveness, then after working on it for a while that first impression is gone and with it goes any chance of capturing it on paper. That’s the reason. we should learn to get that first impression down right away – while it’s fresh, while it’s still in that first impression stage – before it starts to fade...

Much to be learnt - go read. A great compliment to the second section entitled Abstracting the essence would be Rod's recent sketches at a Brian Eno lecture.

Let's hope I have more success tomorrow.

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kindred spirit

Found via Adam's del.icio.us links - Aggregät 4/5/6

You have arrived at a site that has no qualms about the messy connections between spatial practice, cultural criticism, technology studies, art history, architecture, and other realms. Yet this location was conceived under the sign of big "A" architecture. It is maintained by an architecture historian who has difficulty staying within the circumscribed realms of history and theory. Although a visitor will encounter detours and conurbations that may deviate away from issues about the built environment, it must be noted that this site embraces the totality that architecture represents.

Added straight into the ever-growing bloglines list.

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brown field silver porsche

(link) [no, 2 self photos]

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closed, consensual, directed

Architectural Advent Day 6:

Making Urban Places lecture 8. Paradigms of change

End state planning / Phased End State planning / Directed Process Planning / Monitored Process Planning (PDF link)

*update: Of course it would help if I actually remembered to upload the file, and it would be even more helpful if I could now remember where I put it. Will fix when I find - thanks for the heads up Bobby H.

** 12th/12th - link fixed

see previous: Mythical City and Typology Matrix

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In full swing

Architectural Advent Day 8:

I've got some serious catching up to do after spending the weekend in Dublin - will start with an easy one: more 1966 Letraset...

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What lies beneath

Found via Hana's RSS list:

At last I can reveal one of my most exciting innovations. This is a plan for my new self sustaining system for one man that will allow me to travel around the surface without requiring anything from it.

The hat multi tasks by catching rainwater that goes into my water holding rucksack, where it is purified, capturing solar energy from the sun to light my torch and growing vegetables for me to eat on my travels. It also has a refelective surface so that it pushes the global warmup dangers away from me and back to where they came from.

I am the Man from Below.

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The Machine

Architectural Art Advent Day 7:

Excerpts from the stainless steel clad brochure from the 1968 MOMA exhibition The Machine: As Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age. (10Mb PDF file!)

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Tagged as: advent, art, brochure, exhibition, gift

Travel tips

I'm spending this coming weekend in Dublin. Anybody have any good suggestions for places/spaces/buildings/restaurants to visit?

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improve your grip

Architectural Advent Day 5:

Lessons in ergonomics for product design students...

Step 1: Visit your local bookshop and purchase as many books on ergonomics as possible.

Step 2: Take books to somewhere relaxing, such as your nearest beach.

Step 3: Collect driftwood found on the shoreline and buy some matches.

Step 4: Light fire with books.

Step 5: Study the driftwood.

Here's an example of a nature perfected piece I found a few years ago. It's perfect along every axis and deserves to be copied as some form of handle or small hand held object. The direction of the grain would need replicating though to get the best result. Does anyone have a 3D scanner?

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Wolverhampton Gallery

Opening (I'm told) in March 2007, here's a preview of the nearly completed extension to my local gallery.

I'm looking forward to reviewing it next year, as the original proposal was the subject of one of my first blog entries in 2004:

Triangular in plan, the new building sits in an existing courtyard space with one side parallel to the existing buildinq - the other two travelling towards the street and colliding just past the building line of adjacent properties. The wedges of remaining space will provide an interesting tension between old and new. You might describe it as being one third respectful, two thirds cheeky. Which seems like a fitting recipe for a building to house pop-art.

You'll note that back then I believed this journal would be all about words with the occasional carefully placed image. Could I have been more wrong?

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Passive solar design

Architectural Advent Day 4:

There is more to windows than meets the eye. An 3 page excerpt from a 1979 study that's as relevant now as it ever was thanks to continued climate change - passive solar spaces:

All pages available as a PDF: docs/windows.pdf.

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Letraset 1966

Architectural Advent Day 3:

Letraset People 1966.

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Rietveld instructions

Architectural Advent Day 2:

Photo and dimensions - make your own piece of Rietveld furniture.

From a 1960s study of the chair collection at Delft University (I think).

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Letraset 1982

Architectural Advent Day 1:

24 days, a little gift every day*. I've started a collection and I think I have enough interesting stuff here in the office to keep us busy for the next 24 days.

Here's number 1: Letraset People 1982.

* unless I get accused of copyright violation by someone along the way

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inthewrongjob

Bloody. Hell.

from the Coroflot survey via Archidose.

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urban cottage

Found via campodf's flickr photos / via The Art of Where / via thingsmagazine ... some great looking 'urban cottages' by Alvarez Morris to be built in Denver. Warm, rich, charming, progressive, versatile - I'd love to see the internal plan. Although in the UK there'd be some Secured by Design concerns about the slightly secluded position of the front door.

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Tagged as: architecture, housing, render, streetscene

knowing when to be

Changing a tyre in the pouring rain is not a good way to start the day. Buying yourself a new book, swiftly followed by good coffee and cheescake is the only way to improve your mood. In fact I can't think of a better way to improve your mood in any given situation than the book-coffee-cheesecake maneuver.

Spurred on by the recent completion of Swann's Way, I swaggered through the book shop and reached, without fear, for Don Quixote. The first line to receive a pencil mark however, is from the introduction by Harold Bloom, rather than Cervantes himself.

After a lengthy explanation of the comparisons between Don Quixote and Hamlet:

I would rather be Falstaff or Sancho than a version of Hamlet or Don Quixote, because growing old and ill teaches you that being matters more than knowing.

A statement that's difficult to dispute whilst the taste of cheescake remains on your tongue. And yet...and yet, surely the development of knowing allows a more tangible appreciation of being? Or does my formal recognition/classification of the book-coffee-cheesecake maneuver turn it's magical healing qualities into little more than text, caffeine and mascarpone cheese?

More on Don Quixote here: Radio 4's In Our Time.

More on cheescake here: Spoon the mix into the ring.

I spent the afternoon talking to a carpenter about religion and football and fell into what Dawkins calls the I'm an atheist but- trap. That aside, whether you have faith in perfect circles or imperfect footballs, or the belief that former is the abstraction of all the latter, or the latter is the inescapable reality of the idealistic former; what matters is the taste of the pie at half time. It's all about knowing when to be.

Librarything's Unsuggester service proposes The New Interpreter's Bible to me as the alternative to Don Quixote.

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Tagged as: books, cheesecake, ideas, quote

Buddhists 2.0

Last night I dreamt I was abducted by gang of Buddhists. They found me via Google. I was taken to a shanty town of poorly built concrete block houses containing roughly hewn wooden tables and meditation spaces themed like the Crystal Maze. At the end of the tables were flat screen monitors built into the wall. They were into Web 2.0. I was shown some around some of the meditation areas.

...And this group are building a meditation space to feel like a kitchen. The subtle noise of the condensing gas boiler in the cupboard helps them maintain a discrete control over their physical awareness before emptying their minds...

It was then that I realised who I had to blame.

I formed an allegiance with another Buddhist who, like me, just wanted to be left to learn to let go on her own. We made a dash for it in a Rover 214. It took two attempts.

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Tagged as: buddhism, dream, meditation, nightmare

Shared Architext

Stuck for suggestions for Christmas gifts? Here's the current list of most commonly shared books between members of the group I started on librarything.com a little while ago:

• The most beautiful house in the world by Witold Rybczynski
• The poetics of space by Gaston Bachelard
• The Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping / Harvard Design… by Jeffrey Inaba
• Why buildings stand up : the strength of architecture by Mario Salvadori
• The death and life of great American cities by Jane Jacobs
• The Image of the City by Kevin Lynch
• Site planning by Kevin Lynch
• An atlas of rare city maps: comparative urban design, 1830-1… by Melville Campbell Branch
• The timeless way of building by Christopher Alexander
• Great streets by Allan B. Jacobs

I have no Rybczynski, but do have some Bachelard and I'm currently proposing a trade on the group forum.

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Tagged as: architext, books, librarything

pin head

A sketch that will make me pause to think every time I include a figure on a drawing from now on:

Stolen from: blackbeltjones.com

I (architect) draw people like the one on the left because... 1) it's all about the body in space, 2) hands are always in pockets where they can't do any damage, 3) heads - and therefore eyes and sight lines - are tightly controlled, and 4) I learnt it at school copying examples handed down from the previous generation.

You (interaction designer) draw people like the one on the right because ... [answers on a postcard to the usual address please]

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Tagged as: architects, designers, people, technique

vision on

Thursday hyperlinked:

Listened to radioopensource.org podcast called Photography 2.0 - disappointingly but predictably flickr-centric - would have appreciated some recognition of the work that's been done over the years by moblog.co.uk (even back in the day when flickr was still spelt with an e) to further the discussion about citizen journalism - especially as I flagged it in the comments and they discussed the impact of the London bombings - some great arguments however from Fred Ritchin about quality over quantity and the predominance of the self in the million images a day being uploaded to flickr - attended Housing Forum conference - heard Regional Director talk about how we need to deliver 30% more housing with only 15% more cash - if we move any faster I'm seriously worried about quality being stuffed by quantity - look closely if you buy a new house in the UK over the next few years - also heard Left Bank Two by Wayne Hill which took us all back to Take Hart - impossible to remember Tony without Morph - arrived back at my desk to find a mailshot in my inbox from the London Architecture Diary pointing me to a furniture company called Morph - they sell recycled and restored furniture - site chokes in firefox though - find a link in Alfie's blog in my blogline subscriptions to the latest moblog.co.uk collaboration - live photos from the invasion of Didcot power station by Greenpeace - still delivering citizen journalism.

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Tagged as: flickr, furniture, moblog, photography, tv

falling

(link:) [no, 2 self photos]

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Tagged as: moblog, photography