no2self.net

A rather off-topic post, but hopefully of value to some fellow parents…

This is Josh. He’s ten years old. He can light up a rugby pitch, climb to about grade 5c/6a and strike a cricket ball with such Gower-like sublime beauty I get tearful. What he can’t do very well, or at least doesn’t really enjoy very much, is reading. This is far from unusual for us boys of course (many of us can’t be bothered with it until we’re in our teens as a rule) but with Josh it always seemed particularly unappealing to him. We didn’t let it worry us too much given that he is, like I said, a boy who on the whole prefers to be running and jumping rather than sitting and reading; but every once in a while I’d catch a glimpse of a look on his face when he was staring at a page that suggested there was more to it than that. Watching closely you’d catch a look in his eyes that suggested he was momentarily experiencing what’s probably best described as some weirdness, and for a split second he’d have to wait for the world to right itself again.

As you’ve probably guessed we’re now coming to the conclusion that he may be slightly dyslexic. Two separate tutors have raised it over the last year so we’re convinced enough to ask the school to look into it and in the next few weeks he’s going to be assessed by the local authority. It’s probably a quite mild case but it’ll be valuable to know if we need his upcoming secondary school to give further support.

This week I realised something about one of the few books he has enjoyed reading that I think is worth sharing publicly, hence the off-topic post here.

One of the only books he’s ever really enjoyed and enthusiastically read is the series by Jeff Kinney called Diary of a Wimpy Kid. At first I put it down to the fact that he was simultaneously enthused by the movie – we got him the first one after a trip to the cinema last year – but now I realise that it’s very likely the layout and the typeface that has made the difference. He got another for Christmas and once again he’s started reading without encouragement from us or protests from him. Looking through it with him a few days ago I suddenly clocked what had been staring me in the face for months: the handwritten font.

I think dyslexia is a little different for everyone, but one aspect of it is the way it can cause letters to appear mirrored. This gets particularly confusing with letters such as d and b which are easily mirrored on the vertical axis. The video from StudioStudio, designers of what seems to be one of the few specialist font projects in this field explains it further.

Here’s a page from Diary of a Wimpy Kid:

The varied angles of the handwritten font could very well be doing a great job of reducing the mirroring problem. Also, the notebook-like design with the line under each line of text combined with the page being broken up by sketches is probably dramatically improving his ability to keep track of each sentence.

Could it be that simple for someone with a mild case? A font choice and careful layout design? If so then the opportunity to explore this in modern eBook readers such as Kindles, Kobos or iPads seems ridiculously easy. An extensive investigation about Diary of a Wimpy Kid, fonts and ebooks (i.e. 30 to 40  seconds in Google) demonstrates two things: 1) that I’m not alone in noticing this but 2) that there’s surprisingly little comment about it.

I found a couple of mentions in some forums by people noticing how their dyslexic child enjoyed the book and also a blog post from August last year from a father who made the same connections and has seen results by combining a Kindle with an overlay; but beyond that there appears to be little debate.

With the appearance of beautifully crafted reading apps such as Readmill, the step from there to an additional visual setting designed to assist dyslexia sufferers is surely very small. It would simply (?) need some varied font choices of less perfect, more varied form (guaranteed to irk the purist typographers) combined with line by line support through a staged reveal or other visual aids and perhaps even some investigations into colour choices and brightness (such as those found in palettes like Solarized). An equally intensive investigation of the app store provides a few results regarding dyslexia but they appear to focus on diagnosis or spelling assistance, rather than just reading support.

So, if you’re an app developer and you fancy looking at this more, maybe we should have a chat? Better yet, if you actually know something about dyslexia and can put my armchair/googled understanding straight that would also be much appreciated.

In the meantime, there are things that can be done to test this further and craft something at home. In an hour or so over the weekend I’d managed to create Josh another book with a similar layout approach using Proboscis’ self-publishing system bookleteer.com, some text from Project Gutenberg, a font made from my own handwriting (made using Fontifier a few years ago) and some help from a certain Mr Kipling.

We can view the online version with an iPad or on a laptop, and after some quick folding I’ll be giving him the paper copy later today (PDF link – A3 format).

If he thinks there’s any discernible difference I think it’ll be worth pursuing further, although keeping his attention with only the classics available on Gutenberg could be tricky. Let’s hope someone in the publishing world looks into this further. We’ve yet to have the formal assessment so it’s possible the results will tell us he doesn’t have the condition at all, either way it’s pretty clear from his enthusiasm for the design of Diary of a Wimpy Kid that a more child-like approach to writing and design can make a big difference to child-like eyes.

As you may have noticed from all the (t)wittering a few weeks ago, I was lucky enough to be offered a place on a field trip to Germany to study Passivhaus construction principles. As my practice continues to try and raise the energy efficiency bar in the social housing sector and travel along the seemingly never ending path to zero carbon (thanks to the fact that we can’t agree a destination), adopting Passivhaus strategies makes perfect sense.

Perfect sense – that’s the very essence of Passivhaus thinking you might argue, its seemingly unarguable logic that simply asks that we build well insulated, draft free, carefully detailed, properly ventilated buildings. What’s not to like?

There are a full set of photos available on Flickr, more notes and audio in an Evernote folder (although the audio is too quiet unfortunately) and if that’s not enough there’s even a hand crafted booklet you can download and fold yourself thanks to bookleteer.com. Never let it be said that I don’t give value for money.

The trip began with a presentation on board the mothership – the Passivhaus Institute in Darmstadt. Our host talked us through the key principles of super insulation levels of below 0.15, super air tightness that allowed no more than 0.6 air changes per hour, super rigorous detailing that eradicated connections between the outside and the inside, super seductive triple glazing products and ventilation heat exchangers that performed at an efficiency that was, well, super. The examples shown to us offered timber frame construction for new build and wrapped existing buildings in a cozy blanket and all new air tight skin. The almost hermetically sealed results providing their inhabitants with a life free from cold and heating bills. We left shaking our heads at the insanity of the normal, slapdash world of construction then shook them again at the thought of the work in front of us required to fix it.

A trip to building membrane supplier Pro Clima came next. An impressively detailed, technical description of the science of moving moisture around the building proved to be the perfect accompaniment to the previous day’s discussion on air tightness. Stop the wind blowing in, but let the moisture out. Graph after graph and detail upon detail proved it beyond doubt, but you should never underestimate the value of the ‘you mean it’s a bit like Gore-Tex?’ moment to really convey the core principle.

Lothar Moll, Pro Clima founder, gave us a demonstration of their products and detailing recommendations allowing the geeks amongst us to stroke a few things and get up close. The gale blowing through the tiny punctures he made in the membrane for the final demonstration gave us further proof of the unassailable logic.

He made a passionate plea to use that same logic when considering whether to demolish or refurbish, pointing out that when you do the maths alone it often doesn’t make sense to retain existing buildings. A tidy balance sheet alone doesn’t necessarily make for a healthy society though, despite what our coalition might think.

On from there to some actual examples of Passivhaus buildings, with Ludwigshafen Brunck Quarter first on the list and a tour from the architects Luwogue Consult. A project that had created new build Passivhaus properties:

As well as refurbished existing dwellings:

A key feature worth noting here is the use of level changes and the acceptance of basement parking, lifting the floor slab and the tricky insulation details up out of the ground. Not so straightforward perhaps in a world of Lifetime Homes and Secured By Design guidelines here in the UK social housing sector, even if the rules have been slightly loosened lately.

Inside we found a sensibly laid out floor plan around a well placed service core and kitchen and a better finish quality to important elements like stairs then we might have found at home. The connection from kitchen and hall space to the stairs and first floor must surely create some noise problems though. The temperature? Warm. Everywhere. More on that later.

Next we visited Hoheloogstrasse and here felt the shame of our tardy arrival to the Passivhaus party as our guest seemed genuinely uncertain about what to tell us at first, given that we were making a fuss about a 5 year old project whose principles were now almost standard practice.

We’d spent hours being talked through the Passivhaus Haynes Manual and had poured over every component in this high performance machine for living in but that afternoon had been our first look at all the parts assembled and being test driven. The obligatory canter through the Top Trumps statistics had told us what we’d come to expect of the fuel consumption and efficiency, but what of the aesthetic? A pattern had been evolving in the images in the lectures and the previous project and Hoheloogstrasse continued in the same style.

Rendered external insulation that leaves little opportunity for relief or material change is perhaps the most obvious common feature and combined with the metal clad windows a somewhat industrial style ensues. There’s a more subtle issue here though that’s also a direct result of the science and it’s the simple fact that you can’t fix anything to, or through, the building. Projections – those parts of a building that hint at the heart of a structure and it’s spaces – become divorced from the main body of the architecture. The rigorous avoidance of any ‘cold bridge’ that might allow heat loss to seep out through a continuous material conducting warmth wastefully outwards results in the architectural equivalent of a restraining order.

Don’t touch me, says the increasingly uptight building, leaving balconies, canopies and even mail boxes to shiver in the cold. It was with some disappointment that our host had to acknowledge a small connection from the balcony structure to the building, included thanks to concerns about wind load, that resulted in a minor flaw in the thermal performance. A brief moment of almost Ballardian eroticism as the coming together of body and metal was acknowledged in slightly hushed tones.

I’m exaggerating to make a point of course but this seems significant. The insulation strategy predominantly used in this type/size of building combined with the casting out of architecture’s most fickle elements that usually flirt with both inside and out threatens to create a depressingly homogenous Passivhaus Style. However, a problem can soon become an opportunity once you’ve spotted it and I wonder about a future that capitalises on these issues and plays with the possibilities. An embracing of the stand-off facade that dances to its own tune in a manner not too dissimilar to the work of FAT perhaps? Or the suburban stage set imagined by Archigram?

On smaller scale buildings and simple masonry cavity construction the question of material choices should be wider though and the buildings listed in the UK Passivhaus Open Days this weekend certainly seem to provide some variety of language and vernacular. I’d be interested to hear from anyone who visits one. Then next week we’ll talk about that perfect temperature…

A long time ago I wrote a blog entry on the back of a paper bag. It was a review of a chapter from a Calvino book – the author who, as Kieran Long once twittered, architects always turn to when they want to appear arty and sensitive. At the risk of further proving that theory I can honestly say it remains one of the most satisfying posts I’ve ever written. Lately I’ve been trying to get our office to think about paper (and bags) more.

For most of the latter half of 2009 I was working on the city’s new housing development project, the Birmingham Municipal Housing Trust. Like many other local authorities around the country, Birmingham hurried to stake its claim for a share of the funding made available directly to local authorities for the first time in many years. Alongside another local practice we had 5 sites to take from nothing to a detailed planning submission in about 6 weeks. This is an insanely short amount of time. Weekly design team meetings with numerous departments ensued and the process was, to put it mildly, intense. Turning to others for moral support, encouragement and inspiration was an absolute must; as was the occasional bottle of Rioja.

Giles Lane helped by offering me a new notebook. Not the regulation issue Moleskine, almost as cliched as the Calvino reference, but a bespoke notebook just for us which we could make with our own bare hands. Giles and Proboscis have been using their Diffusion notebook format in consultation work and arts projects for some time. Printed (crucially) on single sided A4 the format is carefully designed to cut and fold quickly into a small, robust A6 book that can be either landscape or portrait.

Here’s a video showing how to fold one:

Diffusion eBooks from stml on Vimeo.

Got it?

We made a blank one, experimenting with different templates to assist with writing and drawing and I carried it around in my jeans pocket for most of the 6 weeks, proving that the design is perfectly robust enough despite only being crafted from a few folds. What I’m most interested in though is what happens when it’s finished. I can unfold it, and because I can unfold it I can easily scan it in and share it with others or work over it again with other tools. Chunks of it would quickly get extracted and thrown into presentations to the client and ultimately some of the sketches informed the design and access statement that went with the planning application. That’s interesting; the ease and speed with which you can align the analogue with the digital.

Then there was Owen Hatherley. I asked Owen to help me fill in the back story for the other team members and make sure we knew where we’d been before we decided where we wanted to go. He wrote a short essay on the history of municipal housing, talking us through projects such as Eric Lyon’s Span housing and Sheffield’s Gleadless Valley. Initially I gave it to Birmingham City Council in standard A4 format, but later when self-publishing a booklet became possible with Gile’s bookleteer.com I could create my own notebook, this time by uploading a PDF then getting it back immediately in the Diffusion format to fold and issue myself. You can download a copy yourself from the diffusion.org library. That’s interesting too, I self-published a book.

More recently, when the dust had settled and it came time to tell other people what we’ve been doing lately at the West Midlands Built Environment and Design Fair I published a newspaper in about 48 hours with the help of newspaperclub.co.uk.

Like bookleteer.com, newspaperclub.co.uk connects a web interface to a production process but this time it gives you the power to command a newspaper printing facility usually reserved for massive print runs. You can upload a PDF of any design as long as it follows the template size or you can use the newpaperclub interface to upload text and images from your machine or source either from other locations on the web such as blog entries or flickr pages.

I’ve rarely seen a web service in early beta stage nail the interface design so succesfully first time. It adjusts the 4 column layout and shows a clear snapshot each time you make an adjustment. I pulled in text from here at no2self.net and lifted images from my practice flickr account and turned out a 12 page newspaper in little more than an afternoon. 2 days and £120 later I had 100 beautiful objects to give away to clients and colleagues. We gave them out along with bookleteers by the staff in paper bags that had been rubber stamped with our logo.

So it’s a useful PR tool and in the same way Moo mini-cards still do after all these years it’ll help me cause a stir in a generally conservative, predictable industry; but what else? What interests me most about tools like newspaperclub is how I might be able to connect it with the hyperlocal debate and the work a practice like ours does with neighbourhoods like Blurton in cities like Stoke on Trent. If I can plug the outputs from amateur community blogging quickly and cheaply into professional looking trusted formats like a newspaper then the credibility, the reach and the power of the voices being supported become reinforced. Not only that but you can leave it on a bus for someone else to read and you’re not likely to do that with an iPad.

Before you wrap your chips in it however, there’s something else you could do when you retrieve it from the bus. The bookleteer experience teaches the value of being able to easily send the paper format you produced with the digital tools back into pixels to be worked on again. There are more layers to be added, further annotation to be inserted and new ideas to be traced.

When I spoke about the blurtonvision.co.uk project at Be2camp Birmingham last year I finished by enthusing about the Walking Papers project created to allow people to annotate simple paper copies of their chosen section of Open Street Map. Once complete they can be scanned in again and traced over thanks to the QR code that aligns the analogue with the digital automatically. Self publishing formats like bookleteer and newspaperclub are perfect for this type of process, flipping constantly between screen and paper (and indeed the experiments at SXSW have begun to explore this), but what I’ve come to realise is that I need the process to take place at many scales. What I need is a walking papers process that works on a building scale.

This collaboration between paper and screen knows no limits. It won’t care about file formats and it couldn’t give a damn if you’re a Mac or that Windows 7 was your idea. There’ll be no more excuses for a lack of communication.

And I’ll be able to go back to writing on paper bags.

Of course back in the day, the oldest and wisest of us knew that instinctively.

(picture circa 1997, taken from 2005 blog entry “Death of a Drawing Board“)

There’s something very satisfying about the way this building keeps facing you as you round the bend. Successfully enfronting the site I think Charles Moore would say.

update:

Yep, enfronting it is:

---

I should get this out of my system. It must be getting quite dull, all this relentless referencing to Charles Moore. I’ve been wallowing in it for over a year. Let me explain.

I’m building a house. I’m attempting to be both client and architect and it’s not easy living this split personality. So I’ve been turning to seminal texts for support – comfort blankets if you like – wrapping myself in them at night and sharing a bath with them occasionally.

You’ll know the books I speak of – Poetics of Space, In Praise of Shadows, The Place of Houses to name but a few.

If you follow my twitter feed you’ll be heartily fed up with it by now. Elsewhere, more discretely, I’ve been noting stuff down for the last year and a half over at home4self.tumblr.com and over the festive season it finally started to fall into place. Gaston started talking to Charles, Junichiro got on better with Peter and the seeds of a home have begun to grow.

Of all the spirits I’ve called on though, it’s the ghost of Charles Moore that has been most supportive. The Place of Houses, written with Gerald Allen and Donlyn Lyndon is the best book on housing architecture I’ve got and the best book you should get. Its influence has been broad and many levelled; for example:

At Ecobuild last year I cited the ‘saddlebag’ technique in my talk about passive solar and it me helped explore the social/spatial benefits of the bolt-on, extra space that sunspaces provide. A buffer zone of many uses that breaks social housing out of its tight regulatory framework and minimum/maximum room sizes.

After the Stirling Prize was announced it explained to me one of the reasons that I, like the judges, had decided who should win.

And with its words on ‘inhabiting’ in the closing chapter it found a new way to make me think about what I’d been trying to convey in past discussions about legibility and ownership.

The fundamental principle is that in places where people live all space should seem to belong to someone or something; space either should seem to be inhabited, as if it belonged to or could be claimed by particular groups of people, or should be understandable as part of a coherent larger order, such as the natural landscape or the traditional fabric of the town or system of altogether new urban spaces.

So if I get that all off my chest here on this blog then perhaps I can stop sounding like a broken record. I’ll be making no such promises over on home4self though, as I’ll no doubt need plenty of help from Moore and his colleagues to take the sketches you see there and work out the order of rooms, the order of machines and the order of dreams.

Should you find yourself at Ecobuild tomorrow afternoon, be sure to stop by the Thames Lounge and say hello. I’ll be there from 1pm, starting with a talk on passive solar for the ‘Making Sustainable Affordable’ session followed by another on BIM and social media for the ‘Information Modelling for Greener Buildings’ seminar.

I’m particularly looking forward to the latter of the two as I’m hoping it will give me the chance to bring some be2camp ideas to a more mainstream (?) crowd.

See you tomorrow.

I found another one… Po-mo blast off!

Inside, Charles Moore reviews Jenck’s ‘The Language of Post-Modern Architecture’:

Whatever it’s called, it is probably more useful to to consider how to do it. Here I think Jencks prescription for a ‘radical eclecticism’ is incomplete. His concept of ‘multivalence’ seems to be entirely to do with architecture as communication – simply a matter of horizontal connections. And although the richness and variety of that communication – as proposed by Jencks – is far greater than that we’ve lately been offered, what seems to be missing is the way we feel about buildings – how light animates them and the breezes flow through them, and how they engage our bodies and give us a sense of where we are and cause our spirits to soar, as perhaps the spaces themselves soar.

Moving from the simple horizontal connections to the spaces that make our spirits soar is, I think, where Russell Davies is heading with his new schtick. Read on.

Provided mostly as a supplement to the latest post by The Sesquipedalist, I’ve dug out some old cover images from AD magazine in the 70s.

Much better qualified to explain the history of architectural journalism than I, The Sesquipedalist sets the scene:

During the “book business model” of the ’70s, where the magazine almost completely eschewed advertising, the covers became outlandish and featured Cedric Price, Archigram, Foster Associates, Buckminster Fuller, Royston Landau, Alvin Boyarsky, The Smithsons, Aldo van Eyck and some attractive ones too.

Another fascinating entry from a great blog, I encourage you to add it to your feed reader if you haven’t already. I’ll merely add the simple observation that the predominant use of illustration rather than photography serves the magazine well in its exploration of potential futures, ideas rather than things.

There’s much to learn from the 30 year old pages. Of particular interest to me have been the pleas by foresighted ecologists proposing basic environmental science improvements that are to this day dealt with as fringe concepts – such as the benefits of passive solar in the ‘Housing Provision’ issue of August 1976 by Gerald Foley. The landscape issue from the following month (cover by Ron Herron) contains a piece by Sutherland Lyall, whose name might be known to fellow bloggers thanks to his column in the Architectural Review on architecture web sites.  Which gives me another opportunity to thank him for his kind words back in November 2005:

I realise now that I’ve completely ignored his advice about using blogs for company websites.

The December 77 cover showing a beautiful Erskine drawing has been uploaded more extensively before, also you may like to contrast and compare these with somewhat more sombre approach taken by the AR during the same decade.

You can see all the covers I’ve uploaded over the last few years in a flickr collection.

Time to put my money where my mouth is, as they say. Here’s the fourth and concluding part of the ‘architecture re-housed’ trilogy – photos of the completed houses.

Of course, although I’ve been quoted on the Building web site this week about the need to focus on existing housing, that doesn’t mean I’m not delivering new build as well. The trick is to make sure you’re getting that right too. It’s a modest scheme, there were some changes along the way, but I’m very pleased with the end result.
For the eco geeks among you these properties scored an ecohomes ‘exellent’ rating and a SAP rating of 87 – band B.

Further images and the original sketches are in a flickr set: Queens Road

Richard Horden in BD on the development (2 years on) of his micro compact home:

Horden is now working on the family compact home, where kids have their own cube. ‘I’m constantly coming up with variants,’ he says. ‘Next is a low-carbon version. It could be built like a car on a production line, but we don’t have enough orders.’ So how many have been sold? ‘We’ve only built 15 and haven’t sold any… yet. I get emails saying what a wonderful idea. Of course when they see it, it’s much too small for most people.’

Size: 2.6m x 2.6m

Price:

“m-ch units are available to purchase for delivery to geographical Europe at a guide price of EUR 25,000 to EUR 34,000 (subject to contract). This price includes all interior fittings. Subject to site conditions, the price excludes delivery, installation, connection to services, consultant’s fees and taxes.”

Cost per sq m: 3698.22 EUR

photo credit

Grantham Caravans on their Sterling Onyx micro compact home:

We always have an excellent selection of new and used caravans for sale. The comprehensive touring caravan accessory shop is well worth visiting. We display all the latest caravan and leisure equipment and run special offers throughout the year. We are specialists in touring caravan insurance. We also have a coffee shop.

A warm welcome awaits you at Grantham Caravans – we look forward to seeing you.

Size: 5.51m x 2.29m

Price:

EUR 20,232.26 – deliver it yourself, no need to connect to services, no consultant’s fees or taxes.

Cost per sq m: 1603.45 EUR

Found on a dusty shelf…

Scrapyard Windpower Realities: Building Windmills with Recycled Parts by Hugh Piggott (1992)

Complete with diagrams:

And Basic computer program to help you design the blades: