Keeping up my resolution to blog more frequently, today was a somewhat sleepy day for me doing mindless and soothing tasks like digging a small trench for a water pipe and painting the inside of our house. I'm still not sure what timezone I'm in. But being back in Alabama is beautiful - the warm weather, the wildflowers spreading like crazy (vetch growing up the walls, the huge purple thistles everywhere, evening primroses in the verges) and more approaching fun things - tomorrow up to north Alabama for a bluegrass festival on the mountain at Horsepens, and of course, pig roast fast approaching...
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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