Ecobuild round-up
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 really need. There are far too many already; what's really required is somewhere that collates them all and does so effectively and with some half-decent web design. Maybe this is what they will do - but I doubt it, as knowledge sharing is only a part of their mission and probably won't be resourced well enough to enable it to be really good.
And across the hall in Cityscape - why does the enormously fatuous, not to mention deeply politically-dodgy James Woudhuysen and his Audacity colleagues still get so much airtime? How amazingly they all have reinvented themselves after the LM scandal. Peter Bishop did well, and announced he has commissioned Alan Baxter to do a Public Realm Strategy for London - which sounds like a mission impossible. I've had a nightmare week diary-wise so only managed to make it to one day of the whole affair, but that is always plenty of time for the initial excitement of a big exhibition to wear thin on a diet of crap sandwiches and crowds.
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 really need. There are far too many already; what's really required is somewhere that collates them all and does so effectively and with some half-decent web design. Maybe this is what they will do - but I doubt it, as knowledge sharing is only a part of their mission and probably won't be resourced well enough to enable it to be really good.
And across the hall in Cityscape - why does the enormously fatuous, not to mention deeply politically-dodgy James Woudhuysen and his Audacity colleagues still get so much airtime? How amazingly they all have reinvented themselves after the LM scandal. Peter Bishop did well, and announced he has commissioned Alan Baxter to do a Public Realm Strategy for London - which sounds like a mission impossible. I've had a nightmare week diary-wise so only managed to make it to one day of the whole affair, but that is always plenty of time for the initial excitement of a big exhibition to wear thin on a diet of crap sandwiches and crowds.
Comments