Another great evening yesterday, practising with the Kudzu String Band, clustered round a big woodburning stove in the lakeside pavilion on the farm of one of the members. Staples of the bluegrass/old time music repertoire such as Foggy Mountain Breakdown are now within my grasp, along with some fantastic old modal tunes. After a long and intense day in the studio, it was just what I needed - three hours not thinking about architecture at all.
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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