I do go outside, you just wouldn’t know it from the drawings. New Year’s Day with the family.
Drawing in the sketching friendly Design Museum. Looking at beautiful Ferraris. Enzo Ferrari was neither a great driver or a great designer but he created the world’s most desirable brand.
Beautiful old cars…
…and the process by which they make them. And some racing cars, Ferrari’s only form of advertising.
Fraser missing football, because it’s January and the pitch is frozen.
Isla waiting for gymnastics to start, and me waiting for Isla.
Listening to a planning committee.
I like the trend towards open kitchens and seats where you can watch someone make your dinner. They provide some entertainment for travelers eating alone. These friendly folk were in Paso.
Travelling, by tube and plane.
Sketching is quite popular these days and the nice guys from Meinhardt invited me along to their thriving sketch club at the British Library. It was great,, but I’m looking forward to drawing outdoors again.
Fiona and Paulina sleeping on the way to the HTA Design London party
Recovering the next day on the long trip home.
Earlier in the month I’d gone to Islay with the guys I began studying architecture with 30 years ago who are still architects.
We got thrown out of the pub and the police were called.
This sort of thing didn’t happen 30 years ago. That’s middle age for you.
By the time we flew home we knew just about everyone.
Recovering in London, trying to understand the detail of our new office. You don’t learn that much in 30 years.
It’s the time of year for shows: Fraser in his school Scots Night.
Brother in law and nephew excelling in panto.
A Christmas lunch or two, though this is the only one that made me cry. It raised money for charities So Precious and CHAS. Click on the links for more information on these excellent organisations.
It’s time for some time at home…
…chatting to friends…
…recovering…
Brewing our own beer, HTAle, at Stewart Brewing.
Recovering after the Hairy Haggis relay, with HTA.
Looking at art: Michael Sailstorfer at Jupiter Art Land.
Learning about the third Forth bridge, with the Beavers.
Taking the time to sketch Derby’s old Co-op.
Tom and Laura’s wedding (a bit I’d missed from before).
And using sketching as an excuse to avoid doing all the jobs in the garden.
With HTA sketch club looking at one of Edinburgh’s successful incidental spaces.
After that, island hopping in the Hebrides in the spring sun.
The whole thing is great. The islands are beautiful, the weather is dramatic and the ferries that sail between them come in all shapes and sizes.
The smallest is on the five minute crossing to remote Jura.
The biggest on the sail to Arran.
Most of our time was spent on Islay, which is a much softer variety of the Hebridean harshness I’m familiar with from time on North Uist, and mixed with an astounding world class whisky industry.
It’s a short cycle between Ardbeg, Lagavulin and Laphroaig. Time to look out for the wildlife. Buzzards, stags, golden eagles. And geese.
Islay came up with this and a few islands further north they invented Harris Tweed. A tiny number of people producing products that are renowned the world over. In beautiful surroundings.
It was a great place for Fraser to recover from his minor, but fairly dramatic, head injury.
In Derby for work, but holiday habits are hard to kick so I popped in to have a look at Ayrton Senna’s ’93 McLaren at Donnington Park, scene of it’s finest hour.
Before that Christmas holidays and birthday parties.
For three year old Ellan…
… and my 89 year old dad. He’s forgotten a lot but we all sang songs together.
Christmas Day: mum showing her grandchildren photos of the old days.
Grumpy in traditional post lunch pose…
…and talking planes with Fraser.
Back to work and ideas about the future of London.
Time to get on with winter training for my 1500km cycle down to Cannes in March. New year, new regime.
Waiting in China Town and sketching delivery bikes. You can’t finish them because they keep racing off at the standard speed for ‘L’ plate food deliveries: flat out.
Faster: a turntable ladder at Crewe Toll fire station. This is the highlight of Fraser’s trip with the Beavers.
I’m here because he’s been a bit ill, so I’m checking he’s alright.
They do an entertaining routine, the fireman. “Kids, the more yellow helmets at a fire, the more chance everyone gets out alive. The more white helmets, the more chance it all burns to the ground”. The bosses wear the white helmets.
On the tube, absentmindedly sketching the guy who happens to be opposite when I realise he’s wrapped his hands in a scarf so I can’t see his big tattoos. Didn’t mean to make it awkward, wish I knew what they said.
Back in Edinburgh we are moving office. I find myself in kids soft play parties looking at how they’ve done the services install. Time for a break.
On the Windermere ferry sketching a Mazda MX5 and a Renault. Imagining (well copying) Donald Campbell’s celebrated K7. We went and had a look at Coniston Water where Campbell was killed on 4th January ’67 in an attempt to break his own world water speed record.
The holiday had begun in Borrowdale Youth Hostel. I love youth hostels: we all get in one room, the foods good, the people are friendly and the prices and locations are great. Citizen Rambler.
Next stop, Center Parcs. It shows how you can make the world around you much nicer just by replacing cars with bikes. Everyone seems to go for it.
The boys on the tablet, though most of the action was in the ‘subtropical swimming paradise’. This is the ‘hut’. J & I got ill here. Being ill at Center Parcs is about as expensive as checking in to a BUPA hospital, so we didn’t make a big deal of it.
I’ve fallen out of the habit of keeping the sketch diary up to date, the online version anyway. I’ve kept the sketch books just the same but painting the six portraits I did recently used up all my spare time. Then I cycled across France.
I had an idea that I’d go back and colour up the old sketches and up load them all here: do a catch up blog. But of course I won’t. The thing about a diary is that the keeper is only interested in recording today, not writing up the past.
So here are the sketches from the current book.
There’s another sketch book that’s almost entirely missing.
So getting back up to date there’s lot’s about HTA, which is about right. This includes celebration dinners…
… and fascinating presentations: this one by Lara Feigel on her book ‘The Bitter Taste of Victory’…
…and this one on Women in Architecture and women in HTA. In the non architectural areas of our business: planning, graphics, sustainability and landscape design the genders are balanced throughout the grades. In architecture they aren’t. Something to sort.
Over the last year, we’ve had Mike Hopkins coming in to train our management team in a few useful techniques. We’re a business run by designers so it’s good to hear how the professionals do it. Contrary to popular perception (big egos/ sensitive souls) designers don’t really need to be treated all that carefully but they are good at questioning the conventional route. Mike has a straightforward style, telling our creative team what he thinks, and this is going down well.
Getting a great guided tour around the first bespoke build-to-rent building in the UK, for be:here.
Fraser and Isla have expertise too. Here they are showing two year old Ellan some advanced present unwrapping skills.
A man in a stripy jersey watching his kid at swimming lessons.
Julie watching the tennis and working out how we’ll get the boiler fixed. We moved into a house in the winter and the boiler burst. It now appears this happens to pretty much everyone.
Maybe the 25% of the population who’d consider buying a new house have got it right?
Fraser is learning to play tennis. I drew Isla watching him, then she drew him, and titled it.
At an office CPD, on lighting. Not a bad one. You learn more, obviously, from seeing the things skilled designers (and their visionary clients) have actually built than you do from watching Powerpoint.
Edinburgh has an extensive stock of ageing bungalows with big back gardens and they’re gradually being bought up by young families. A roster of talented local architects can transform them by taking a bit of back garden and building the kind of bright and open living space people are after these days. Few are as lofty and light as friends Asa & Daniel’s one, by David Blaikie.
Innes (and me), learning to be gardeners.
Thursday: an enjoyable evening looking at the sketches entered in the Denis Mason-Jones sketching competition, in Leeds.
I met Denis’s son and picked the winner.
Tuesday: speaking at the Residential Investment Conference 2015. It was held underground, and the lecture theatre style benches glowed red. I tried not to be too distracted.
Monday night: watching ideas for getting one million more homes into the outer London boroughs, Pecha Kucha style at the NLA.
Saturday: more relaxed time spent in Edinburgh.
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