The Rural Studio programme started yesterday...and I'm still here...but I now have an estimated time of departure. I'll only be a week late!

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A couple of mini rants

This campaign to stop architects working on prison designs (via Design Observer ) seems rather inconsistent to me. OK, so prison might not work very well and for sure there are too many people locked up. But I would bet a lot of money that the kind of architects that would sign up to this boycott have never been asked to design a prison in their lives, and I am sure there will be no shortage of people willing to sign off drawings for new prisons, given that I can't see clients starting to boycott architects who design prisons. Hell, there are probably architects who only design prisons. Surely we should be actually looking for better prison designs. Will Alsop has, I have seen, being working on precisely that, with prisoners themselves. Isn't this a more intelligent and clever way to turn the prison paradigm around into something positive, using the power of good design to make an environment that allows prisoners to see some hope, experience some creativity and be stimulated ...
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On MyWeb vs. Google Personalized vs. Del.icio.us

OK, so as everyone blog-related and probably no-one not blog-related knows, Yahoo has launched the public beta of it's answer to the huge social bookmarking thing , and Google now has Google Personalized . I just did a half-hour test-out of them both, and will keep testing them as I go. This is very much a lay-person's view of these services - I am not one of the many bloggers who has been secretly beta-testing for weeks. But I think, as an amateur enthusiast, it's useful to see how these work for the majority of web users who are even less tech-savvy than me. [And I've also not been paid by either company to say nice things about them.] First, Yahoo: I until now had no Yahoo account. It was irritating that I had to sign up, tell them my Zip code and the name of my favorite sports team, etc, just to access enhanced search. Sign up to del.icio.us and all you need is a username and password. Plus, once I'd done all the signing-up, there was no immediate evidence of w...
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RIP Pimlico School

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The wonderful Pimlico School , the Brutalist building by John Bancroft and the GLC architects, is finally to be demolished. Amazingly, the iconic and seminal building was given a certificate of immunity from being listed by the goverment a few years ago. It has numerous structural and environmental problems but it really is a superb piece of architecture and I only wish something could be done to save it and renovate it for another lifetime. The campus it creates, the sense of enclosure of the sunken playgrounds yet connection with the streetscape is fantastic. Go visit it now before it disappears.
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