bottom drawer

Over the last couple of years I've become slightly obsessed with thinking about how things end. How organisations, businesses, masterplans, policies and, of course, buildings come to the point where they are redundant: superseded by the change that happens around them.  Cassie Robinson's brilliant blog How do we help things to die?  crystallised a lot of those thoughts for me and I've been considering how this applies across a whole field of things ever since. I admired how FAT announced their disbanding rather than fizzling out through mediocrity like so many architecture practices. I've been involved with some charities and one came perilously close to shutting down, prompting a lot of thought about when a charity's mission is complete, or when it no longer becomes relevant.  I've watched buildings be built for all the right reasons, but with little thought to the sustainability of the organisation that they were built for, resulting in disillusionment in the...

I really enjoyed reading Dan Hill's piece on  Small Vehicles of Sandhamn  this week. Our family spend a disproportionate amount of time discussing our vehicle choices, trying to interpolate between what we all know about the hideous carbon cost of car travel, what I learn through my work as a planner about mobility trends and possible approaches to reducing car use, and what the pressures are of living in a rural house with two early teenage kids, and working in jobs that involve site visits and physical stuff in a way that few 'professional', supposedly desk-based jobs do. Every year at about this time, we sit down and look at the new weekly schedule to try and organise the logistics with the aim of minimising the amount of car use. Its a fiendish job that involves a lot of tortuous negotiation and trade-offs, and refinements (usually, more car use) once the flaws in the perfect plan are exposed through being tried out in practice. School: not exactly too far to cycle but ...