Eiffel Over

Tag: materials

  • Seeing the flow

    Seeing the flow

    Everything is in flow. Rivers and streams. The air blowing our heads and tall buildings. Information. Pedestrians and traffic. Materials, from mine, to factory, to building, to disassembly and on. Facades eroding. And even the mountains (the Alps grow by 1mm per year). 

    I saw on the beach yesterday in Devon a stunning reminder of very slow flow: the tightly folded bands of shale and sandstone on the Hartland peninsula. These were formed when two great tectonic plates collided to form Pangea. Massive tectonic forces causing things to move, very slowly.

    However slow the movement, once we realise everything is moving, we can decide are we going to swim with the current, swim against it or try to shift its course. 

    References

  • Notes on building local

    This month I am writing an article on that explores what if we restricted construction material use to those from a local catchment. Rather than a global supply chain of materials that is disconnected between source and use, what if we could use materials that were a more locally relevant, resilient and regenerative resource?

    Today at the third of James Norman and my sessions exploring regenerative design with Buro Happold in Bath, we heard about the example of the machine shed at Westonburt Arboretum that was built only timber from the site.

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  • Preparing the colours for your Professional Palette

    Preparing the colours for your Professional Palette

    There are some inputs to our creative process that we build up over time so that we are ready to draw on them whenever we work on a new project. In this next post in my series on creative thinking tools for projects, I will share with you another source of inputs for the Kalideacope. I call it the ‘preparing the colours for your Professional Palette. These are the set of colours from which you paint your ideas. The image this phrase conjures up for me is of the Impressionist painter spending time in their workshop in Paris getting their paints ready before they get on a train from the Gare St. Lazare, head out into the Normandy countryside and paint a landscape. You have to do the prep in the workshop before you can go out and paint. But how does this apply to us?

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