no2self.net

Architectural Advent day 11: (will I ever catch up?) After several years of housing market boom here in the UK, there are lots of people drawing down on mortgages and extending their home. I’ve been involved in a few over recent years, and in a city who’s housing stock is largely made up of Victorian [...]

I spent most of today encouraging a colleague to loosen up, pick up a pencil and push aside the CAD software for a while. After lunch I finally succeeded. The next challange was to get her to loosen up her drawing technique and enagage with the action of drawing before worrying about the final result. [...]

The e-mail containing the link to this site was so uninformative as to be almost rude, but one-click away from consigning it to the spam bin I paused and decided to take a look. I’m glad I did. Rapid prototyped furniture from mid-air freehand sketches; just enjoy the artist/geekist collision and don’t ask if they’re [...]

Disclaimer: Whilst the following post may result in a return favour for me from Graphisoft (see update), I’m more than happy to pass on the news that ArchiCAD is now available for free to students. Back in the days of my undergraduate education I bought a student license of version 5 (which cost about £150 [...]

Once again I am but the outlet for the work of others. Here’s another installation in the series of lecture notes belonging to my colleagues at the office (we’re architects in birmingham, in case you hadn’t already heard*). I can announce today that I may have finally persuaded aforementioned colleague to officially release further work [...]

I’ve been trying to get back into the habit of doing competitions. Here’s our* entry to the first brief for the Line of Site competiton. If you’re interested in the McLarenesque ‘how we work’ story you can see the project notes and evolution on the Backpack page I used: Everest Base Camp. There’s a Sketchup [...]

Carbon Copies by Nadine Jarvis: Pencils made from the carbon produced during cremation, A lifetime supply of pencils can be made from one body of ash. The sharpenings create a secondary ash, and displace the pencils as they are used transforming the pencil case over time, into an urn. (via Matt Ward)

Toronto’s Mayor, David Miller: Jane was a champion of diversity, a diversity of buildings, residence, businesses and other nonresidential uses and different people of different ages in an area at different times of every day. She gave us eyes on the street. Her philosophy was a neighbourhood’s safe, active, vibrant and economically successful when there [...]

‘Design software weakens classic drawing skills’ says Jim Christie in the Washington Post (via ArchNewsNow). Abso-bloody-lutely says I. Agree with the article whole heartedly, however, this section championing the role of CAD, actually does the opposite. Computer graphics allow artists to move briskly. By contrast, drawing on paper can be frustrating, forcing concentration, introspection and [...]

More on Gordon Cullen’s Townscape: My 4 year old son has three modes of operation: drawing, climbing and watching TV. That’s it. There are no others. The first two are easily explained by the science of genetics, the third less so, but I write that having spent the last 4 hours mesmerised by my PC [...]