Round the Constable exhibition at the V&A with the Our Enterprise team after hearing from Sandy Richardson about the new V&A in Dundee.
No sketching allowed, no explanation given.
Sketching at the Brunswick Centre. I was going slowly so later filled the page with scenes from the Citizen M lobby, still busy around midnight.
Good foyer spaces, small but well designed bedrooms.
Watching people eating, at Kings Cross. Do you take the food to your mouth or your mouth to the food?
Lysistrata is good festival stuff: an audience of thirty, a cast of four, a tiny venue and art with ambition. Maybe this was the Fringe before the stand-ups came to dominate.
Most of the energy comes from Louisa Hollway, who covers the small stage in a few short strides.
The characters are less energetic on the sleeper to Edinburgh. There’s wi-fi in the bar, so you can catch up on the day, but I think mostly people are just trying to avoid going to bed. Earlier I sat outside the kind of independent café I love and admired the flamboyant gables on some Victorian housing in Finchley. I like the fun in this that’s missing from most contemporary brick built London housing.
A week in London, and 3 nice places to spend some time
1. London’s public space has had a makeover since I lived there.
The focus is kids and the device that gets them active is fountains you can play in. People used to point to Spain to show how kids playing could be a welcome part of civic space, but London does it too now. This one is Princess Diana’s memorial, swishest of the five we came across on our travels.
2. Ben’s shed. I spent some time looking at it and thinking about spaces to be creative in (with some help from the White Stripes*).
This might be what Ben would describes as ‘rus in urbe’
3. Eames lounge chair 670. You need somewhere cosy to relax after a day in central London with three under fives.
*
http://www.whitestripes.net/songlyrics.php?id=49
Lots on, loads to do, too many choices. We’ve been spending time with clients working out the right thing to do. A little less action, a bit more consideration.Load, aim, fire, as Bernard used to say.
Looking around, people don’t seem to spend much time considering, they spend their time reacting, mostly to what’s on their phone.
This an office building for sale for residential conversion. There are loads of these around: we are working on four just now. The best ones make better flats than what we end up with when flats are designed from scratch: spacious, lots of light, generous ceiling heights. They’re the ones you want, avoid the others.
By some odd coincidence, I’ve got in three taxis over the last week, and it’s been the same driver every time…
One frustration of being an architect is the fact that the main thing that stands between you and consistently great output is your own lack of talent. Mostly that’s not a noticeable problem as my contemporaries suffer similarly, but every now and then I end up somewhere and the exceptional surroundings remind me of my own inadequacy.
Without realising where I was, I ended up in the crypt of Sir John Soane’s St Peter’s Church on Walworth Road, for some consultation on Aylesbury. The consultation was the start of a process aimed at achieving a great new place, the surroundings were a reminder that everything can be exceptional, even when it’s underground.
Perhaps for balance, I spent the night in Stratford. A different reminder: just because everything can be brilliant, that doesn’t mean it will be.
Mind you, last week I had breakfast in the Brunswick Centre. It used to be pretty bad, but seems well loved now, so perhaps everything will turn out ok for Stratford, and for Aylesbury?
‘A bunch of mid forties blokes banging along like they’re professional road racers and no one has a clue what they’re doing.’ That’s what they told me about the Etape before I went, and whilst they might have been right, it was brilliant fun.
We survived and this is Tom driving me home with the bikes in the back. Nobody had less of a clue than me but I gritted my teeth and got round in four hours and sixteen minutes.
Earlier in the week I spent some time pondering this DRMM building as part of the ongoing Kings Cross regeneration.
http://drmm.co.uk/projects/view.php?p=kings-cross-central-arthouse
Sitting outside St Paul’s with HTA Sketchclub looking at two designs the Londoners love.
People tell me two things about St Paul’s: ‘it’s not really a dome’ and ‘imagine how amazing it was to see this 400 years ago’. It might be less awe inspiring to our eyes, but bathed in westerly sunlight on a spring evening it’s certainly arresting.
That’s my Brompton, a three speed, no titanium. I love Brompton: British manufacturing based on the continuous refinement of an inspired design. London congestion on a tube strike day is a reminder that we’d make much better places if we designed them around the bike: less pollution, better health, quicker travel, less expense, more space to do interesting things with rather than just park cars.
We’re working on it.
These people are talking about how important drawing is for designers.
Will Alsop and George Saumarez Smith did some actual drawing. I enjoyed the stories from James Stirling’s office and the extracts from Ken Shuttleworth’s sketch book of the month.
Will Alsop was quite late, but was the most comfortable with an anecdote. Inspired by such high achieving company, I popped round the corner to bona fide starchitect Renzo Piano’s colourful Central St Giles. It’s not the best thing I’ve seen from Piano, but big, mixed use and see through, perhaps he was warming up for the Shard.
The management of our Build-to-Rent projects will have more to do with the hospitality sector than the housing sector. We don’t want American ‘have an awesome day’ insincerity and we don’t want the tired atmosphere characterised by a solitary bar man slowly cleaning a glass and waiting for something (anything) to happen.
So I’m paying more attention to the places I like being in. Citizen M do it all well: the design, the hospitality, the buzz. No one stays here for long though. Round the corner in Let Me Eat, it’s the same faces every day. What could you do with that?
It’s more fun on the train when you bring the family. We all went to London to help celebrate HTA’s first birthday. The bairns got a first experience of family holidays in big cities: traipsing around, sore feet, trying to find somewhere cheap enough that we could have a meal each…
We visited a house with a hole in it.
It’s a nice enough house characterised by fantastic vibrant colours, but we’re drawing up plans for it’s demolition.
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