bottom drawer

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.