Play is so important isn't it? I'm looking very hard at the moment for fresh and further ways to make school buildings, new or refurbed, more playful too. Watch this space...
Sunday, 31 May 2009
Sometimes it's the simplest things
Saturday, 30 May 2009
Some things never change
Sailing today with friends in the annual Wivenhoe Regatta we raced up river to Wivenhoe to find, as we do each year, crowds, blindfold tender rowing, raffles for good causes, free beer (for sailors), Punch
and Judy, home made cakes, a barBQ in every balcony, smiles, friends - and this year even a Viking longboat...
Sun and wind were perfect, and so of course was the regatta. Again. You had to be there - and how many times have we heard that already this century? "Live, social and "community" are all back!!! But in some places they never went away.
Tuesday, 26 May 2009
Car factory
The conference was set in a remarkable conversion of an old car factory - which had been reconfigured as an exciting and agile space, but keeping the functional features of manufacture. I liked the "catwalk" shown here, that encouraged presenters to walk away from the screen into the audience. i also liked thw scrapwood trees two of which cn be seen further down the walkway, at the end
The conference also enjoyed a remarkable debate between children and politicians...
Monday, 4 May 2009
Corridors of Dour
I was talking to an HE conference, by video link, just recently and mentioned that HE buildings are too often the analog product of a room allocation spreadsheet, so that the cells of the spreadsheet become the cells into which students are decanted, linked by ghastly productivity-corridors. All the emphasis is on moving people and knowing who is in (and thus should be paying for) each space - no sense of what might be effective for learning at all. I added that architects find designing these cells mind numbingly boring, so they usually add a flourish - typically a grand atrium. And often a sponsor kindly gave the money for all this, so a "statement" entrance, with sponsors name prominently displayed, is a final touch. The conference folk laughed a lot and for an unpextedly long time. I was puzzled but an email later explained: they had just had a presentation of the drawings of a proposed new building... with cells, corridors, atrium and grand entrance. Oh dear.
If UK HE is to survive in a global world, the design of our learning spaces will be a major contributor to that survival...
Friday, 1 May 2009
Ready Steady, slightly late
But tall. Of course one problem with having 9 foot of keel plus a very-large-lump-of-lead hanging underneath and a berth on the really-jolly-shallow UK's East Coast is that you spend a lot of time avoiding the jolly- shallow bits!
But it's worth it though eh?, I mean LOOK at her... sigh.