Posts in Category: Places
Staycation – 3 August 2016
One of my ancestors used to work in Stockbridge Market (1823 – 1906). It’s a very attractive little part of a very attractive place. I’m here with our sketchclub looking at how buildings hit the ground. This ground floor is related to the upper floors, but not the same.
This isn’t related at all.
Staycation:
gardening,
films,
new school haircuts.
And eating out. Innes got so bored waiting in Zizzi’s for a pizza that I let him draw in the sketchbook. “I’ll draw Lewis Hamilton”, he promised.
“Dad, it was going to be Lewis Hamilton but instead it’s a sheep.”
Restart – 20 April 2016
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.
Land Art Generator Initiative – 20 November 2015
The Land Art Generator Initiative combines art, urban design and sustainable energy. We are working on a site in Glasgow that is the subject of a current LAGI competition so I went along to see if I could answer any of the queries for the competing teams and their advisors.
The combination of designers, artists and engineers makes for amazing submissions and a broad range of questions.
I look forward to seeing the ideas for Glasgow in January. Previous submissions are here.
Denis Mason-Jones – 19 November 2015
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.
The kids playing sport.
The People I Know – 5 October 2015
Keith napping after lunch. He’s about to retire: all the leaving do’s have left him sleepy.
An interesting chat with the guys from DC Thomson, although not the guys who do the drawings. I do want to meet them.
A quick look at a tall, elegant office in London…
…and the clock tower of St Pancras, recently framed by the stepped new public space at Kings Cross.
The kids on the sofa. Watching someone else having a tablet shot seems to be almost as good as having a tablet shot.
The main thing that happens in pubs is you spend time talking to drunk people. Some of them are entertaining. This is Marc, on a fun night at The Pig & Butcher with Kev.
Harry Arora, first class Mortgage fixer at Barclays.
I’ll not be retiring anytime soon.
Allez les Bleu – 23 September 2015
Watching France beat Romania in the Olympic Stadium.
One of the World Cup’s more predictable results. I loved the atmosphere generated by 50,000 people, even if more than half of them were neutrals. I backed the underdog, the most common reaction the world over.
Flying home, thinking about what to say at the London Society’s Annual Sketchclub Dinner next Wednesday, 30th September.
Tickets available here. It includes a three course dinner.
HTA in Berlin – 20 September 2015
From Glasgow to Europe’s biggest stationery shop (?) in Berlin stopping only to pick up beer, bratwurst and bikes. A brilliant start to two and a half days in this energetic, creative city.
Next step, a housing tour.
Normally I focus quite hard on these, but they’ve traced the line of the old wall in corten steel and placed plaques that describe the fate of former Berliners. It’s hard to look up when these stories are beneath your feet. The houses and flats are interesting, but it’s the waves of tumultuous recent history that grabs my attention.
The history gets in everywhere over here. We ate together in Café Einstein, an 1880’s renaissance style villa that survived over 300 bombing raids in the second war. I was disappointed to find that it had no real link to Einstein, rather it’s claim to fame centres around links to Nazi Joseph Goebbels. He died near here in 1945.
This is Jean Prouve’s Cite chair in the hotel lobby. Jean Prouve: designer, engineer, craftsman, teacher and French Resistance fighter.
In café Krone, near the flea market. There’s lot’s of history and much of it is traumatic, but for the time being this seems to have resulted in a very pleasant place to be.
Going Places – 16 September 2015
A beautiful day in Dundee, listening to suited men discussing where the city is going, whilst watching people walking along the route to the new V&A. Kengo Kuma’s spectacular building, and the exhibits the V&A will bring, will transform this part of town. Other waterfront developments to follow.
It’s the sunniest city in Scotland, they tell me.
Chatting to Tara the train driver about what it’s like to drive the East Coast Main line trains up and down to London. From my middle aged perspective she seems barely old enough to drive the trolley, but was happy enough with 140mph trains. The old diesel 125s are like classic cars, the electric 225 more like a modern. You can’t go at 140mph because the signals are too close together.
It’s time for us to move on from Fettes Rise, designed by Morris & Steedman in the late 1960’s. By far the best place I’ve ever lived.
Going places in the generational sense. With my mum at her eightieth birthday in Glenfarg, a place she knows well from her childhood. I’m trying to work out the generational steps that got the family got from living in the station master’s house here, in 1890, to coming back for a visit in 2015.
Didn’t quite work it out.
Indian Summer – 10 September 2015
A surprisingly sunny September so I have to sit outside for my coffee, draw what ever is in front of me…
…even if it’s a van. They are building a new Hendersons round the corner from the office. Loads of workies, loads of vans.
The next day it’s still so sunny: out in London looking at tall residential towers. Research for some we are looking at.
Back in Edinburgh musing on a Meuse that would generally be a mews.
Mixed use: offices, houses, garages and green flats.
600 Years – 9 August 2015
Sitting In Advocate’s Close admiring Morgan McDonnell’s sensitive modern buildings on medieval steps. A design from a couple of years ago sitting comfortably on a route from 600 years ago.
Time passes. 
Ruari’s left school, Fraser’s about to start.
Sometimes, more than others, you feel that time is moving on.
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