220 staff, partners and kids from HTA Design went to Amsterdam for the weekend.
We toured the beautiful city by boat and bike.
We all stayed at the friendly and stylish Hyatt Regency.The focal point was Saturday night dinner for everyone in BAUT.
I spent the weekend before with some of the same people at Rosie and Martin’s wedding.
The amusing speeches started at the ceremony, and continued.
There were as surprising number of jokes at the PRS Forum, though they were all delivered in six minutes by Iain Murray.
After that it was a serious discussion about the effort local authorities are making to get this form of housing moving. Mike Galloway pointed out Dundee had granted planning approval for two sites, and both in less than three months.
I’d been there for one of them, Studio Dundee. We are looking forward to getting it on to site.
Edinburgh Festival month.
Fireworks
Sketch Club in London
and my mum taking Jessie Bowden’s funeral. Jessie was 101.
A week in Carrbridge
Covered outside space: essential for the Scottish summer.
A Scottish highland summer is exceptional food…
…a taste of horse riding for the kids…
…long country walks and bike rides…
…and admiring the exotic vehicles that tour through sleepy Scottish villages.
Collecting the Business Breakthrough of the Year award at the AJ 100 dinner.
Listening to provoking debate organised by the Architectural Workers in Cressingham Gardens, designed by Edward Hollamby.
On holiday. Meeting the uniquely engaging Monsieur Girod.
Standing where Cezanne stood, in Aix.
Sitting where the Romans (or at least their subjects) sat, in Orange.
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.
Off to Washington and New York to learn a little more about how Americans live.
People deserve better places to live and there’s lot’s to learn from America. At it’s best there are bigger flats and a higher standard of lower cost accommodation.
It’s never enough to look at the housing: what else can you do if you live here?
In New York people are leaving Manhattan for ‘neighbourhood living’ in Brooklyn. They are choosing streets, corner shops and cafes rather than specced up apartment blocks. We learned a lot.
Back home at the Remembrance Parade in Davidson’s Mains.
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.
To Paris with the office, partners and kids. About 170 of us.
I love Paris, and looking out from our hotel bedroom window, you’d think nothing ever changes here.
But it does and we are here to learn. Two ‘Fondations’. The first is the Fondation Le Corbusier in the stripped back austerity of the beautiful Maison La Roche.
The second, by way of contrast, is the Fondation Louis Vuitton. As excessively opulent as Versaille but anyone can come in and enjoy the spectacular roof terrace views back to Paris, for a few Euros.
These are the exceptions. The character comes largely from the distinctive eight storey blocks that line the Haussmann boulevards.
Paris might have a bit of catching up to do as a cycle friendly city, but we still did almost all of it by bike. 30 miles and two days of interesting places and buildings.
None the less, I’m as happy watching the characters of Paris life as I am looking at the buildings.
Two highlights: talking to a smoking portrait artist in brown cord jacket and burgundy roll neck, outside the Pompidou. A Presidential candidate canvassing the Sunday morning Metro goers at Place d’Italie. Street life.
This is Second Home, in my second home.
It describes it’s self as a ‘carefully curated community’, and a ‘creative accelerator’. It’s certainly an interesting environment to do some sketching in.
A leaving do for Andrew, Massimo and Cheng, all returning to further their education. This is Massimo’s third leaving do. I pretend to be upset but I’m mostly glad they want to come back.
“Any story told long enough becomes a tragedy” said Alice Fraser at the start of her emotional ‘comedy’ The Resistance.
Back home, we’ve been sharing with a cat. Isla drawing a (mechanical) dog.
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