no2self.net

Facing up, originally uploaded by eversion. 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 [...]

I’ve been itching to tell you about this for months, ever since Matt last put me up for the night at Hotel Webb and gave me a sneak preview. The other half of the ever-inspirational Schulze & Webb has published the results of his Bendy Maps research and the finished product is even more beautiful [...]

I hinted at one the projects I’ve been working on in a recent post and followed it up with a presentation at Ecobuild. The full write up is on the new BSD blog and images available at Slideshare, but I should offer an excerpt and some further notes here. Vision-lozells.org represents my first attempt to [...]

The dwelling places of Europe have an air of inheritance, or cumulative possession—a hive occupied by generations of bees. In America, the houses seem privately ours, even when we have not built them up, in pine two-by-fours and four-by-eight-foot sheets of plywood, from a poured-concrete foundation. Houses are, as Newland Archer sensed, our fate. The [...]

Times are hard. Your credit is being crunched and there’s nothing you can do about it. Your value is being chamfered. Open the door and run. Run like the wind. Jump. Jump up. Jump up, jump up and get down. Nobody can take that from us, it’ll always be ours. Everything else has gone to [...]

A quick note to highlight some places I’ll be this week, in the hope that you’ll come by and say hello if you happen to be there too… Tomorrow I’ll be taking part in a workshop event leading up to the btween conference in Manchester. I’m very flattered to find myself invited along to play [...]

I’ll be attending Think 08 next week and taking part in the session at 4:30pm on the 7th, thanks to an invite to present from Phil Clark. Here’s the summary of the session: Embracing the existing estate and communities What’s already built is a much greater part of our built environment than new development. How [...]

Despite booking my tickets late, the session on reducing carbon emissions in existing housing was one of the few that still had some places. A few days later, when the proceedings were kicked off by Alan Simpson MP, there were still some empty chairs. Perhaps, I twittered, refurbishment work just isn’t glamorous enough. If that’s [...]

Proving that blogging can be a slow medium too, here’s the second part to an entry written almost a year ago… December 2006, London, RIBA HQ. Flicking through the pages of the book to accompany the Eric Lyons exhibition at the RIBA, I send a text to Rod: In the RIBA cafe, muffins are terrible. [...]

Architecture Week is upon us and we’ll be taking part in Open Practice in Birmingham again this year. Axis Design will be opening it’s doors to the public on Friday 22nd June to talk about our latest work; the topic this year is How Green Is Our Space? We’ve had a very successful year developing [...]