bottom drawer

Studio swallows Originally uploaded by hanaloftus The swallows have flying lessons and fluff themselves on the wire outside the studio window where I work. Distractingly lovely creatures.

I thought this story was fascinating and strangely emotional. A team of Urdu calligraphers turn out a daily newspaper in Chennai that is first hand-written, then transferred to printing plates. It has a circulation of 20,000 and a staff of six, led by a 76-year-old editor whose son thinks it is all far too old-fashioned - "I understand Urdu, but have no interest in calligraphy." "In the meantime, the office is a center for the South Indian Muslim community and hosts a stream of renowned poets, religious leaders and royalty who contribute to the pages, or just hang out, drink chai and recite their most recent works to the staff. The Musalman publishes Urdu poetry and messages on devotion to God and communal harmony daily." There is something in this story about how newspapers perhaps should be - not just the endless churning out of barely re-written press releases but something more passionate and personal. It is perhaps how I imagine the offices of our earliest ne...

I thought this was a good piece of true BBC reporting, exploring whether all is as rosy as it seems in the creation of the 'exemplar ecocity' at Dongtan. None of it surprises me - that it will probably become a "suburb for the rich", that it is being accompanied by potentially disastrous development of shipyards and power plants nearby. But I have been surprised that the building and development press have so far been so blinkered as to the reality of what modern China means for projects like this. There is the kind of wishfulness (exemplified by much of what Norman Foster says) for the speed and decisiveness of a totalitarian government in making 'big things happen' - architects and developers appear to long for European systems to work so smoothly. But they seem willing to disregard the trophy nature of these projects; the lack of a strong environmental policy from China in any strategic way; the social consequences of mass relocation of people, moulding of...

DEFRA have launched their new online carbon calculator, as David Miliband proudly announced on his blog. I'll give you the link in a second, but don't all rush - because this has got to be a prime example of how not to design a user-friendly online tool. Think irritating flash popup that does that thing where it fills your entire screen. Then takes several minutes to load due to the volume of gratuitous animation. Then every time you fill in a question, takes ages to move onto the next one, and even more time when you finish a 'section'. And an html version that runs even more slowly, if that is possible. When all you need is a series of simple questions in html, with almost no graphics, running on a nice fast server so that you don't get so irritated that you stop bothering half way through and never do find out quite how much you are damaging the environment. I applaud the idea behind a good online calculator (this one includes a postcode function), but guys - th...

A quick update from a project that I'm working on in my birth county of Suffolk - the new initiative Suffolk: Creating the Greenest County (skeleton website here that we launched a couple of weeks ago) which is starting to gather momentum. Not nearly as fluffy as it sounds, the project is bringing together lots of passionate and active people in the county to strategise some ambitious targets, and the actions needed to get there. As part of this we're holding a conference in October that will spread the message wider to community leaders, business, and the local authorities, and start to get them all to consider what their organisations or communities can do to contribute to the bigger aims. It's very much going to be a hands-on event with a series of seminars on different themes that are all about stimulating discussion, creating learning opportunities and sharing experience from those who've already started to take action. But we're also talking high-level with k...

The debate that Nigel Lawson has so effectively ignited by arguing that we should concentrate on adapting to climate change rather than stopping it, is an interesting one and exactly mirrors a (less polarised) conversation I had a few weeks ago with one of the leading City investors in low carbon technology. It is foolish to claim that Lawson doesn't have a point. Climate change is happening, and even if we do manage to turn the ocean liner around, the emissions that we have already produced will continue to have an effect for many years, and it will be decades, if not longer, before the effect of any cutbacks we make now will be felt. And that's without even getting into the possible effect of feedback loops. It is not enough to put our collective heads in the sand, hope that the government legislates for carbon cuts and that the problem will go away. So like it or not, we have to concentrate on adapting to the effects of a warming climate. Strategies for our water resources...

A treat from the weekend newsround - two of my all-time favorite chefs talking about their cooking together. Going to Kensington Place was always a highlight of my childhood and growing into adulthood - little did I know, to start with, what a seminal restaurant it was but I always loved the buzz, the huge mural, and the quality of the food, consistently excellent and, especially for that era, innovative. I remember a baked tamarillo dessert that introduced us to the fruit (it seems so dated now, but it was so good!) and the signature scallops with pea puree will always be a dish for my fantasy 'best-of' menu. As a kid I loved the hot pink loo decor and still I fail to find its look dated, in the way that a much-loved place always seems just right and of itself. I'm excited about Rowley's new project that is due to open later this year. And for the last seven years, since moving back to London, St John and its Spitalfields sister have been my absolute favorite, staple ...

Not only is the design bad (at the ‘Middlesbrough level of the Premiership – with some more akin to Watford, without, of course, the same fear of relegation’) despite the threat of Housing Corporation funding being withheld for badly designed schemes. But we should be building at twice the rate we are . The National Audit Office has published a rather damning report which says that the government is no longer accurately counting the number of units being built, and criticises the DCLG for "having no cost strategy". Hang on a minute - how can it have no cost strategy at all? Apparently they lack "a single costed plan for the programme to join up local initiatives". Forgive me, but that seems to be a basic omission. So it is business as usual in the marshlands of Essex and Kent - the government playing catch-up to the developers who are racing ahead on their own isolated patches, with a total lack of effective, strategic leadership, no matter what Judith Armitt may ...

Colin St John Wilson, seminal professor at Cambridge architecture department (where I studies though not, of course, under him) and best known or infamous as the architect of the British Library, died last week. It is funny how the press fell over themselves to eulogise him although most of them were very dismissive of the BL when it opened. But the reminiscences of him were largely just - his wide scope of interests (including an extraordinary mid-century art collection), his belief in a humane, nuanced and warm architecture, his admiration of Alvar Aalto (which prompted many borrowed architectural motifs) and his work at Cambridge. Like myself, and indeed like a former assistant to Wilson and subsequent Cambridge professor Peter Carolin, he actually applied to Cambridge to read History and switched to architecture. I most recently went to the new wing at Pallant House which houses his art collection in a building he designed in collaboration with MJ Long, his 'life' partner,...

I'm fairly sure that most of my friends think we're quite strange, suddenly deciding to get a house in the middle of green fields (and in much-maligned Essex, no less) when we should be living some crazy hedonistic London life. But right now life feels pretty crazy and hedonistic being here - much more so than the reality of many London weeks where the busy-ness becomes over-much, the difficulty of coordinating diaries with good friends or finding mental space or physical time to do half the things that the city tempts with, and the constant leaching of money become all that one remembers. Currently, weeks seem to pass quickly as before, but contain so much. Things change fast. I've watched the weather and felt relieved when it rained though needing to scurry out and rescue the washing from the line; I've taken advantage of sunny spells to dig the garden and plant seeds and seedlings; we've ripped up carpets and scrubbed floors and moved furniture. We've gone fr...

Talk about the five 'eco-towns' that Gordon Brown would like to propose has filled the trade press and had significant mainstream press coverage too. Common mis-perceptions have been that these are actually new towns (they aren't - they are existing development sites or areas that he would apply new 'green' rules to), and he has also attracted criticism (epitomised by Jonathan Glancey ) that this is merely greenwash over the same old 'unsustainable' growth areas. Because Brown commissioned the Barker reviews of both housing supply and planning, and those reviews raised the hackles of people who, fundamentally, want to contain development and seem to believe it is impossible to build new housing developments that actually do have a sustainability of their own, sections of the commentators have already cast Brown as the bad guy who doesn't care - who wants to erase our green fields at any cost and carpet the land with Wimpey homes. But it may be that actua...

I've been following the debate summarised in this article for a while. Fundamentally, it is about whether there exists a 'standard' and 'correct' form of English, whether standards of written and spoken English are slipping among young people and students, and what the impact or place of the new forms of English used in India and China, among other places, is or should be. This is a debate that I got into when I lived in the USA too, where I once had a heated argument about the validity of what is strangely known as 'ebonics' over 'standard' English. Should African-American children be taught, or forced to use, 'classical' grammar and spelling in school or is a petition to government, say, equally valid if written in a colloquial African-American vernacular form? As you can imagine, this was a highly charged subject - taking my point of view (which was that a standard form of English provides a level playing field upon which social and poli...

No, this is not about a failing inner-city school that has been found to have no outside space, but the most expensive new flagship school that is being designed not to have a playground. I thought this was quite an extraordinary story. The Foster-designed school in Cambridge will treat its pupils like employees so, it is believed, they will not require free time outside. What this says about our approach to workplaces is also somewhat weird. Most workers leave their office for lunch, even if only to stroll to the local sandwich shop - a degree of freedom the school's pupils will not be allowed. There are sports pitches, but no playgrounds - and an argument is being made that this will reduce bullying. But bullies do not need playgrounds to operate - and children do need spaces to learn to socialise and negotiate public behaviour. And in a word of warning the article ends: 'A school without a playground has been tried before - at Unity city academy in Middlesbrough, said to be...

A few items caught my eye recently among the burgeoning quantity of green-themed news... Seattle has approved an interesting new green building code that requires developers to provide elements from a menu that includes green roofs and walls, permeable paving, biodiverse habitats and garden space. Clearly modelled on the Malmo BO01 code, developers are awarded points per element, weighted according to their 'greenness'. BioRegional Quintain are the poster boys (and girls) of the zero-carbon development sector but CABE has criticised a current project for not carrying through its sustainable ideals in a more holistic way, in the masterplan. The 40 acre, 750 home scheme near Middlesbrough was masterplanned by Studio Egret West. The Think conference came up with a so-called 'action plan' in relation to environmental issues. Not sure what, if any, impact this will have. I'm intrigued by the idea of buildings having a master 'off' switch - something I've b...

The 'controversy' over HIPs and, in particular, the energy performance certificate part of them continues to rumble on in the media and in Parliament, though my hunch is that they are unlikely to be halted. I find it all a storm in a teacup (or should that be a hipflask?) and this Telegraph article to me sums up the fallacy of the arguments being made against them. So older buildings come out badly on energy performance? Well, that's not a flaw in the rating system, that's the point of the system. We know that old buildings are not efficient, and we also know that it's often hard to retrofit them so that they will ever be so. But that's the idea - to encourage people to buy houses that are more energy-efficient, and provide the incentives to upgrade the kind of stock that can be retrofitted easily. The idea isn't particularly to make life hard for the owners of £900,000 thatched farmhouses featured in the Telegraph - but they may as well come to terms with...

Billed as the 'world's first zero-carbon, zero-waste city' - I think Dongtan (covered recently by WIRED ) might have words to say about that - this is a Foster-planned project , to house 50,000, in the desert state. The hubris of the Gulf states knows no ends - and has ended up with a perfectly square walled mini-city (50,000 surely isn't really city-sized?) in the middle of nowhere, with a science and technology institute developed in conjunction with MIT, "research facilities; world-class laboratories; commercial space for related-sector companies; light manufacturing facilities and a carefully selected pool of international tenants who will invest, develop, and commercialize advanced energy technologies." Oh, and lots of monorails, which will provide the "personalised rapid transport system" for this car-free development. And "surrounding land will contain wind, photovoltaic farms, research fields and plantations, enabling the city to be enti...

xkcd 's daily sketches are always amusing but yesterday's was a stroke of nerd genius. Worth clicking on to view its full glory. Where do you live? I can be found often adrift in the Blogipelago, with pied-a-terre's in the Myspace Bands peninsula, Delicious Island and Flickr...

I am a naughty blogger. But life has been busy in both personal and professional spheres with lots of exciting stuff. And to be honest I don't know when/if this is going to change massively but I will try to keep up. And in the thought that most people read this blog via RSS I'm resurrecting an old del.icio.us tag and splicing it into the feed so that at least I can track some of the interesting stuff that I come across but don't have time to post about properly. Very 'lazyblog' of me, I know...but needs must. Sorry. Meanwhile, one thing that caught my eye recently was this article by Madeleine Bunting touched on many issues that I'm interested in, though I don't agree with all of her analysis. I guess it depends on how you start thinking about the middle class, partly, as well as how you start to define 'rural' - and the countryside, in a broad-ish definition, is certainly not as homogenous or NIMBY-ish as she presumes.

Isn't it ironic that, for me, the most exciting things in my life tend to stop me from blogging about them? Like, for example, the boy buying a house in Essex fields on his birthday, and our lives suddenly becoming bi-locational? Because, of course, the new abode doesn't have internet (yet) and the whole affair has made me so busy that blogging on any of the various places I post my scribblings (apologies to the worldchanging crew and any developing news readers) has been impossible. Well, now I have a spare hour in the London abode to tell you about it all - and I don't even have any decent photos of it all. But we are now proud and slightly dazed occupants of an eccentric house named Hungry House, complete with conservatory with vine and an inherited black cat. And an asparagus bed in the vegetable patch, and an apricot tree, and many other excitements. It looks like this. It is very exciting. Further installments of news will follow - including 'Why is it called Hu...

The £1bn Liverpool Baltic project has collaped into administration . Unbelievable, really, that such a massive project can be so badly planned and run. Everyone already knows this but in case you don't, British Land beat out Stuart Lipton's Chelsfield Partners to bag Euston Station's redevelopment . Apparently commercial development is at its highest level for three years. And Prince Charles will appear, bizarrely, by videolink at this year's Think regeneration conference, on May Day.

Oh, the Canadians. I had the task of submitting a tender for a Cultural Planning Toolkit to be funded by DCMS last year. We didn't get it, though we got close... But now I see that the Canadians have got there first and, from at least my very brief glance, done it better than anything resulting from a trial-by-committee British approach to such things. Here is their version of a CPT . Wonderfully, it doesn't even mention the word 'art' in the introduction, except in a sentence about European approaches. It talks about cultural planning as a "way of looking at all aspects of a community's cultural life as community assets...Understanding culture and cultural activity as resources for human and community development, rather than merely as cultural 'products' to be subsidised because they are good for us...and when our understanding of culture is inclusive and broader than the traditionally Eurocentric vision of 'high culture' then we have increase...

Oh, sorry...I've been way too busy to post recently. And am about to escape for Easter to a place with no internet. So here's a rather dry round-up of some recent things that caught my eye. Vinoly has beat Fosters on their own territory, winning the contract to develop plans for Battersa Power Station under its new owners. It will remain to be seen whether his plans will get built, however - given the lengthy history of discarded schemes that the site carries. Another in the list of white elephants, the always ridiculous scheme for a huge indoor ski slope in Sheffield is going down the pan, as the developer Menta is on the point of entering adminstration, with huge financial problems. The competition for designers for Barking Riverside has been launched. And in the Kent gateway, Land Secs is going to venture into housebuilding in order to keep closer control of the quality of its huge Ebbsfleet sites. With the growth of mixed-use as a sine qua non in contemporary development...

Sometimes the BBC does some wonderful bits of journalism - like this photo essay about the schooling of a seven-year-old boy in the remotest part of the Falklands, where he gets taught, in a class of one, by a travelling teacher for two weeks out of every six. Strangely alluring.

The Low Carbon Buildings Programme is in even more disarray. Pathetic, on behalf of government, not to fund and manage this properly when there is so much demand out there. Faithful and Gould have put out some rather arguable stuff about how zero-carbon developments will cost 30% more than normal ones built to current Part L. But this is because they claim that the only way for high-electricity use projects (such as dense mixed-use or office) to be carbon-neutral will be to use photovoltaics. I know that wind turbines won't do enough but what about CHP as well? Surely the future for this kind of thing will be mixed-modal energy sources. The Observer on eco-homes (as reported here ) seems to have highlighted an issue that all of us actually working in this stuff know - that stuff heat loads, the real problem with new-build homes is cooling. And yet, the government is so keen for us to never use a/c that it won't fund low-carbon cooling solutions like reverse-cycle ground sourc...

That is, if you count offsetting. The carbon-neutral rhetoric is here certainly being used as weak greenwash. British Land announce they will go carbon neutral by 2009. One really telling aspect of how they are approaching this came out when I read some of the details : Their head of planning and environment Adrian Penfold on BREEAM. "If there's a criticism it doesn't focus enough on issues like climate change. It's watered down by other factors," he says and advocates adopting a "modular" approach to eco-measurement.. "There could be a module directly focused on global warming and other modules dealing with other issues, which would form part of an overall rating." Herein, to me, lies the rub: BREAAM admirably tries to create a holistic understanding of sustainability. Hence it is not all about those carbon targets. It does matter where your building is sited, whether there is adequate public transport, and all those other aspects that I susp...

The Guardian is really embracing - and innovating - in the whole field of news and media across platforms. As Alan Rusbridger says, "The print-on-paper model [for newspapers] isn't making money and isn't going to make money. It's no longer sustainable. Though the future is unknowable, we are taking an educated guess about what we should be doing and where we should be going." It is interesting to read about how they are tackling their new 24/7 model from the human perspective. As a feature writer apparently said, "I've already lost track of where my working week begins and ends... how do we begin to define what working week is, and what it will be?"

A couple of big projects that I'm involved with are kicking off at the moment and might be of interest. I'm working with 5th Studio on this very exciting new park along the Lea River from above the Olympics down to the Thames. A Lower Lea Valley Park has been an idea on paper for a long time; now we will try to set a framework for it to become real over the next decades. It's a big and ambitious project and will certainly be an interesting process. And I'm working in my home county of Suffolk on another ambitious initiative: Suffolk: Creating the Greenest County . A cross-cutting programme that is aiming high, we are just starting to figure out what making a 'greenest' county might mean. But with a group of very radical and committed local people who are already engaged in ground-breaking work from local food hubs to eco-schools, waste and serious amounts of renewables in the form of the Greater Gabbard wind farm among other projects, this is no hot air pledge...

I generally don't blog about myself - but a couple of big projects that I'm involved with are kicking off at the moment and might be of interest. I'm working with 5th Studio on this very exciting new park along the Lea River from above the Olympics down to the Thames. A Lower Lea Valley Park has been an idea on paper for a long time; now we will try to set a framework for it to become real over the next decades. It's a big and ambitious project and will certainly be an interesting process. And I'm working in my home county of Suffolk on another ambitious initiative: Suffolk: Creating the Greenest County . A cross-cutting programme that is aiming high, we are just starting to figure out what making a 'greenest' county might mean. But with a group of very radical and committed local people who are already engaged in ground-breaking work from local food hubs to eco-schools, waste and serious amounts of renewables in the form of the Greater Gabbard wind farm a...

I was fascinated yesterday to read that Jon Rouse, ex-CABE supremo and current Housing Corporation boss, is moving on again to become chief exec of Croydon Council, at the age of just 38. Croydon is a political hotbed at the moment; having swung from Labour to Tory at the last local election, it has a multitude of large regeneration schemes on the table, not least the controversial and long-running Croydon Gateway saga. It will be interesting to see how he drives forward the council - which, of course, has plenty of other things to worry about other than regeneration - and certainly will be tracked here, when he takes up post in the summer.

While the rest of the mainstream press is more interested in how he managed to wrong-foot Cameron in a way that bodes well for the coming battles between the two, here in the world of building stuff, we are interested in other matters. The Budget was being touted heavily as a 'green' budget, and was alternately hailed as green by the government and not green enough by the RIBA - anxious to be seen to make comment, methinks. Meanwhile other important bits were that Brown's pushing ahead with the planning gain supplement , adding a sweetener to the local authorities that they will get to keep most of the revenues raised. The green stuff included, as expected, stamp duty exemption for 'zero-carbon' homes up to £500,000, VAT at 5% for energy-reducing products, and increased funds (but still not enough) to the massively oversubscribed Low Carbon Buildings Programme. There was also an increase in road tax for the highest polluting cars, the return of the fuel escalator,...

Found via cityofsound : an absolutely wonderful 1972 documentary wherein Reyner Banham - yes, he of all those architectural theory/history books - tours LA in a bushy beard, big sunglasses and hat. "I love the place in a way that goes beyond sense or reason" he declares. When did the BBC stop commissioning such works of genius?

Apologies for lack of posts. I don't think anything really exciting happened last week - or maybe I'm just being cynical, because it was MIPIM and everyone was too busy grandstanding each other. But it's hard not to be cynical when you read this sort ot stuff - Peel Holdings 'announcing' a new multi-billion masterplan of large perspex blocks on a Liverpool dockside, just so they can inflate their land values that little bit more. Let alone Bellway announcing that they have reduced their carbon footprint by a third - through offsetting in Ecuador. Right. (Surely a worthy contender for one of Mark's eco bollocks awards ?) Then there is more traditional MIPIM crap such as overinflated towers being sold as "the defined height of luxury" with foyers "crystallized by Swarovski" and waterfront living that is - oh, 500m from the waterfront? Enough of a distance to get yourself driven in of of the fleet of Rolls-Royces that comes for free. Ugh. Fo...

I went last week to see the production of Les Miserables in Wandsworth Prison, by Pimlico Opera . It was a hugely moving experience, as twenty convicts and remand prisoners performed together with astonishing confidence and energy, not to mention real skill in many cases. While the singing may have been patchy here and there, for a six-week rehearsal period it was an extraordinary achievement. Beyond criticism, I was brought to tears. The production held real power, with the subject matter of a hunted ex-prisoner transforming himself and proving more virtuous than most of the so-called 'authorities' resonating clearly enough without needing to be hammered home. The staging was direct, clear, authoritative and certainly not amateur. It was humbling to see the commitment and ability to learn that was demonstrated by the prisoners, who had to return to their cells after the adrenaline of the performance without so much as a celebratory drink. A worse or more depressing come-down I...

Phew. Its been a busy week and so my sunday blogging is really just a way of clearing my virtual desktop of links for the week ahead. And yes, some of these links are more than a week old... DCLG's new big idea is 'eco-towns' and David Lock is doing a study. These are effectively 21st-century garden cities but smaller - satellite towns of 5-10,000 homes, with good transport links to larger centres, as part of the New Growth Points plan. Precisely what the 'eco' bit means here isn't made explicit but I'm sure Lock will come up with some interesting ideas. David Miliband gave a speech that sounded interesting but didn't have much concrete in it, about changing land use and farming patterns. A city law firm (RPC) has come up with the idea that architects face lawsuits if they don't take account of climate change in their designs, through injury claims. Sounds like they are looking for an excuse to rake in millions more in fees, but we'll see. The ...

I am, perhaps predictably, not in favour of the current proposals for reform of the House of Lords. I enjoyed the Lords before they threw out most of the hereditary peers, and as far as I am concerned, the more idiosyncratic and diverse voices that are heard in the process of government and lawmaking, the better. It is interesting to me how sections of the left-wing press, whom one might have expected to rail against an appointed House and campaign for an elected one, have in fact run articles saying the opposite. I enjoyed this piece by a crossbench peer in the Guardian, as much as reading Tony Benn's inevitable plea . This evening I particularly appreciated Bruce Ackerman's piece in the LRB that cogently sets out the merits of the many forms of second house that exist and could exist. I also have him to thank for articulating much of the detail of the current bill. I'm sure I'm not alone in not realising that the elected 'Lords' would, in current proposals, ...

Architect Kisho Kurokawa is going to stand for governor of Tokyo. I'm all in favour of this. Apparently he wants to abandon Tokyo's bid for the 2016 Olympics. Castle Bidco has had a bid accepted for Crest Nicholson, at the enormous sum of £715m. Apparently architects are experiencing a salary boom . Unfortunately, it seems from my personal experience that this is strictly limited to the large or commercial firms, not the small-to-medium design-led firms who also have lots more work on, but are still often offering shockingly low salaries. I think that people shouldn't stand for that, personally - I know how hard it is to find good staff and so the ones you have should be compensated accordingly. If you've got lots of work in the office and still can't afford to pay people decently, there's something wrong with your business plan. IKEA's BoKlok flatpack homes have got planning permission for their inaugural UK site near Gateshead. The infamous Vinoly Walkie...

It's Friday...so for your amusement, here's how a man built himself a whole new house, without planning permission, inside a dutch barn full of straw bales. Yes, really. Strangeharvest has a great series of images showing the process of carrying off such a feat. He lived there for four years while battling the council after neighbours tipped off the planners, and now has eight weeks to demolish the house.

My latest WorldChanging post here is about Anya Hindmarch's non-plastic bag, and the organisation behind it We Are What We Do. I'm afraid, being me, I'm not that complimentary. Having said that, one of the guys behind it founded the truly fantastic Community Links project in Canning Town, so I didn't allow myself an all-out rant...

I seem to remember Sybille Bedford writing most wonderfully about arriving in Switzerland by car, meeting a friend (I think Martha Gellhorn?) and how the two of them had such wonderful, if slightly disconcerting, times gallivanting around in the country where everything runs just perfectly and there are never any problems. How the hotel staff can do anything for you at any time of day or night; the trains and boats around the lakes run impeccably; food is reliable and solid; fresh air and mountains make you feel oddly sprightly. It is all, still, quite true. This time we took the sleeper from Paris, arriving early in Zurich, which is of course by far the most civilised and lovely way of travelling. Leaving London after work, time for a croque or sandwich at the Gare de l'Est, a Kronenbourg on board the train brought to you by the charming steward and then arriving in Zurich with time for a coffee and croissant before catching the first of your impeccably punctual trains across coun...

Apparently China no longer wants European architects indulging ego-trips on big budgets: ‘Some foreign architects are divorced from China’s national conditions and single-mindedly pursue novelty, oddity and uniqueness.’ The Chinese Construction Ministry has announced new guidelines to stop government officials commissioning public buildings that waste money and electricity. Will Alsop and his long-term collaborator, artist Bruce McLean, are designing a £90m office block artwork. Hmm. The 43 floor building on Old St roundabout contains a business centre, apartments, a hotel and fitness centre, but also has 15 floors for a self-storage facility and so would not require conventional fenestration, thereby providing a large “blank canvas” for McLean. Prescott Lock (not named after Two-Jags) is being re-engineered as a linchpin of the Lea Valley 'water city' concept, as well as helping the ODA meet a target of transporting 50% of its materials sustainably [however that's define...

You've got to love a) the bling photo of Frank Gehry that accompanies this article and b) his totally nonchalant Californian attitude at the age of "I'm feeling fine, by the way" 78. "I've just turned 78 and am about to design the biggest Guggenheim yet. Can I pull it off?" Also love him dissing the new MOMA - "that's like a big, shiny department store." I agree. Dude, way to go (as they say...)

[Also something that I put up on DN.] Last week, Ken launched his Climate Change Action Plan for London. Let's be clear right now, the 60% CO2 reduction by 2025 that has been widely quoted as the "target" is not, in this plan, put forward as an achievable figure without significant nationally implemented change. It is simply the milestone for what London would need to do, in order to reach a Contraction and Convergence -based quota of emissions. He's aiming for a still ambitious figure of 30% through London-only measures. I still think it is a good plan and have written about it here on WC but, because of this issue about what is realistic to achieve, has also been causing some strong feelings elsewhere in blog-world. I appreciate these sentiments but fundamentally, I think Ken is doing the right thing. Plans like this need to be ambitious - what would the point be of a target that was only what was unambiguously, conservatively achievable? A challenge and a high ba...

Last week, Ken launched his Climate Change Action Plan for London. Let's be clear right now, the 60% CO2 reduction by 2025 that has been widely quoted as the "target" is not, in this plan, put forward as an achievable figure without significant nationally implemented change. It is simply the milestone for what London would need to do, in order to reach a Contraction and Convergence -based quota of emissions. He's aiming for a still ambitious figure of 30% through London-only measures. I still think it is a good plan and have written about it here on WC but, because of this issue about what is realistic to achieve, has also been causing some strong feelings elsewhere in blog-world. I appreciate these sentiments but fundamentally, I think Ken is doing the right thing. Plans like this need to be ambitious - what would the point be of a target that was only what was unambiguously, conservatively achievable? A challenge and a high bar needs to be set up in order to spur ...

[I posted this over at DN but thought it might be interesting to some people over here, too...] I've been listening to the podcast of Bruce Mau talking to David Adjaye as part of Artangel's talks series around Longplayer. An interesting bit was about Chicago and Mayor Daley's fantastically interesting initiatives. Apparently Daley takes an artist to meetings with him where he has to make big decisions because "artists see things differently and see things that I don't." He's also insisting that from next year, all new buildings in the city have to be LEED (American equivalent of BREEAM ) certified. It has to be said that most of the talking is done by Mau, which pretty much figures, as Adjaye is a very good designer but doesn't have many verbally expressed opinions. I've met Mau (he even offered me a job although I didn't end up taking it) and one thing he is good at is talking. He is an excellent designer-thinker of, in a sense, the first...

I've been listening to the podcast of Bruce Mau talking to David Adjaye as part of Artangel's talks series around Longplayer. An interesting bit was about Chicago and Mayor Daley's fantastically interesting initiatives. Apparently Daley takes an artist to meetings with him where he has to make big decisions because "artists see things differently and see things that I don't." He's also insisting that from next year, all new buildings in the city have to be LEED (American equivalent of BREEAM ) certified. It has to be said that most of the talking is done by Mau, which pretty much figures, as Adjaye is a very good designer but doesn't have many verbally expressed opinions. I've met Mau (he even offered me a job although I didn't end up taking it) and one thing he is good at is talking. He is an excellent designer-thinker of, in a sense, the first generation of "designer" being a much broader term, and retains much more clear-sighte...

I'm not going to be able to blog for the rest of the week so here's a quick round-up of a few interesting leftovers: London Remade, the capital's recycling agency, plans to deliver 20 new recycling facilities over the next 3-5 years, with the aim of London processing 85% of its own waste by 2020. Useful article in Building on the legal frameworks for zero-carbon housing. According to Mel , Building has downed some of its firewalls so maybe this article is accessible sans password - can someone let me know? if this is really true, I applaud them. I totally agree with ippr's Dermot Finch on Borough Market and the silly hysteria being whipped up by the campaign at sabmac . To make it all clear: the market is not going to close of be destroyed by the much-needed Thameslink upgrade. IT WILL STILL BE THERE if you want to buy overpriced artichokes. A few buildings will be demolished but hardly any - I know, I worked right there until a few months ago. And we need Thameslink...

I'm not going to do a blow-by-blow account of Ecobuild as Phil Clark is doing just that and I'm tired. For the discouraging view of the whole shebang, worth reading Mark Brinkley too. But I just sorted through the vast pile of trade literature that I picked up and have one thing to say: heat pumps. How many heat pump models does the world really need? Ground source and, new this year, air source (the latter don't seem to give particularly worthwhile efficiency, for my money), coming out of one's ears. Meanwhile the one product I really want to see come off, a compact domestic-scale gas-fired micro-CHP unit, is still in development from Baxi. Looks good in the pictures but won't be out till 2008 - yawn. Other stuff: the UK Green Building Council launch; my personal jury's still out on this one and I will wait to see what results it brings before covering it in more detail. I do wonder, however, how many more 'knowledge sharing' forums and so forth we ...

While I was away...the following happened. In a sign of the times, its all about the environment. Zero-carbon mania reached new heights, with Wales deciding to make all new buildings zero-carbon within five years. When will people realise that carbon isn't the only thing we need to worry about? but that's for another post. Feilden Clegg, with Crest and Bioregional, won planning permisison for the "UK's greenest tower", the 'most environmentally advanced development in the UK'. The scheme has 172 apartments, including 54 affordable units, and aims to be a truly zero-carbon development. It will include an on-site woodchip biomass boiler, which will be operated by a community-owned energy company, eight roof-top turbines, and an array of photovoltaic panels. Residents will be able to grow their own food on site, through rooftop mini allotment areas, which will be automatically irrigated. The latter sounds like a bit of a joke, I know, but apparently all tru...

I'm back from a gloriously internet-free week in the Alps. OK, we succumbed to the internet cafe once, but the Blackberry stayed resolutely off and our media intake was limited to reading weather reports in the local papers (not enough snow, spring arriving a month early) and watching a Champions League match in a local bar. This bar is actually part of a complex, in the small town where my partner's family have a flat, which readily illustrates some lessons that rural English towns could learn from the Swiss. It is a small town of around 3,000 permanent inhabitants and a low-key but faithful set of skiing and walking visitors - many with a small flat. Around 2 hours train ride from Geneva, it is properly rural, with cows in barns on the slopes and not an apres-ski bar in sight. But what it does have, in spades, is fantastic social infrastructure. The centrepiece is a bowling alley with bar, cafe and arcade machines, on two floors underneath and overlooking an ice-rink which is...

Some of you might remember my sadly neglected food blog , which was initially titled 'Kitchen Fascist', a label that the boy had given me for my bossiness in the kitchen and insistence on very particular ways of doing things. So I read this and found a new label for myself - "alpha cook". Read and laugh, or weep, depending. I'm just glad I buck the trend in that article by being a female alpha, not a male one. I'm off on holiday for a week. See y'all.

I'm going to be off on a proper holiday - no mobile phone, no email, no internet access - from tomorrow for a week. Back on the 26th!

Six 'young' architecture practices have been invited to participate in a competition for a site in South London, in one of Design for London's first projects. If this is an example of 'start as you mean to go on', it is both encouraging and a little disappointing. The invited practices are all good, characterful designers who aren't on every developer's speed-dial at present, so that's got to be a good thing. But they are not particularly risky or even small - of S333 , de Rijke Marsh Morgan , FAT , Brisac Gonzalez and 6a , perhaps only the last two are at a stage where they need this kind of push up. And there is also no guarantee that the winning architect will actually get to build the project - "A preferred design will be chosen in April and that architect will work up its plans to detailed planning application stage. Subject to a successful planning application, the winning architect might work with an LDA development partner to see the projec...

I started this blog, as a side project, nearly a year ago because I felt there was no accessible online resource for news and discussion around the built environment; policy, planning, regeneration, economics, environmentalism, all the stuff that isn't about the aesthetics and design. What there was, was hidden behind subscriber-only firewalls, and still largely is. The trade press hasn't embraced open-source, it is fair to say. I felt that architects and others who don't want to pay for, or trawl through, a stack of journals each week should have somewhere online that brought that stuff to them. It's nice to see recently that a few more toes have been dipped into the world of blogging. By far the most interesting effort has come from Phil Clark , former deputy editor of Building Magazine (which now has a good set of RSS feeds and a blog section ) and now digital community editor at the Builder Group, which owns Building among others. He's writing exclusively about ...

OK. I resisted it for a really long time. But now I've given in to myspace and can be found, currently looking like Billy No-Mates, here . I really hate having something owned by Murdoch owning stuff about me, but in pursuit of my alternative career path as a hillbillly fiddle player (someone, make me a star, please!) I've gone and done it. Please can you add me to your friends, though, so I don't look so sad and lonely...

Sadly they are neither eighteenth-century in style, nor zippy modernist masterpieces, but nonetheless, I thought this article on how an Amish family makes ranch-style modular homes without using electricity, computers, phones or even billing customers until the house is done, was quite amazing.

I attended the launch last week of an interesting MORI report, commissioned by Sponge , which demonstrated the overwhelming shift in public opinion towards the environment. 64% of homeowners want sustainable features to be compulsory for all new homes, and, more significantly, a majority are willing to actually pay more on the price of a new home and more in service charges for what the report labelled "sustainability services" - green power, car clubs, better communal recycling facilities, apparently. Most people aren't willing to pay that much more on the price of a house - the most popular band being between £2-£5,000 - but nearly 40% would be willing to pay up to an extra £25 per month. Interestingly, it seems that the economic impact of rising energy prices is having an impact on the public's desire for what the report labelled a 'sustainable' home (a slight misnomer, I think, as the methodology got rather dubious when it came to issues such as public tr...