The spring here has just burst out and almost overnight, it seems, the 'green fuse' has been lit and everything is covered in shooting leaves. The most wonderful and unexpected part of the spring for me has been the wisteria which grows wild and crazy in the woods, climbing up the pines and dogwoods and covering them in flowers cascading down. Driving with your windows down, every few hundred feet on the county roads you get a dizzying blast of their scent. There are also wild white irises growing by the roadside, huge deep burgundy thistles, ditches full of buttercups and pale blue bugles, vetch, wild sorrel (reminding me of Suffolk) and wild dogroses. The field in front of our site, on which our client grows turnips, greens and onions but which she hasn't ploughed up yet this year, amazes me with the wild flowers that grow on it. The whole field shimmers with their colours - sorrel, buttercups, bugles, some white flowers which I don't know the name of, and deep red clover.
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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