Our collective lockdown experience is perhaps, and hopefully, something we won’t experience again. In some ways it felt like being a participant in a social experiment, but at another level it gave us time to reflect on our “self”. At the suggestion of Jonathan Ellis-Miller who was coincidentally having his portrait painted, we thought we would ask […]
Our year-out students ran a drawing exercise on a Friday evening – to imagine your idealised home-working environment. In lockdown, as the classic painting; ‘St Jerome in his Study’ appears to propose, many of us staged our desks within larger pieces of furniture, with the prospect of a distant view or a more direct connection […]
We are now caught up in a complex metabolic whirlpool where systems of free-living equilibrium have collapsed to a radically disordered state. Viruses like Covid-19 are not free-living entities; they are parasites which invade and inflict harm on life as we know it. Cosmologists believe that such chaotic states are an inevitable consequence of life […]
I am not of course isolated; I live with my wife. I am though isolated from most of the people and activities that filled my life before lockdown. It was only as I read the other blogs that I realised that my instinctive response to isolation has been to reach beyond it. To connect, to […]
In Digital Photography ISO measures the sensitivity of the image sensor. The same principles apply as in film photography – the lower the number the less sensitive your camera is to light and the finer the grain… By choosing a higher ISO you can use a faster shutter speed to freeze the movement. We are […]
Some years ago, I sat next to a Scot, whose introduction to conversation was “So where do you belong?” This kind man, who had only once in his life left the Moidart on the west coast of Scotland, was not asking a philosophical existential question. However, his local Scottish turn of phrase made me wonder […]
There have been long discussions over the years, and even more in the days before the lockdown about our profession being collaborative and based on everyday interaction and how it is close to impossible for architects to work from home – or from anywhere else for this matter. And then, as we were all forced […]
Today I got lost, which to my delight, was a very pleasant experience.I wasn’t properly lost in a busy foreign market or a remote, rugged landscape; I was lost in Abney Park Cemetery in Stoke Newington. Ridiculous, I know. As I chatted to a friend on the phone, I realised I’d been on the same […]
“The biggest problem in the world is isolation and disconnectedness – socially and physically.” This is a quote from George Monbiot a few years ago but seems more poignant now in light of the COVID-19 crisis. It’s against this context and climate emergency that the work I’m doing with the VeloCity placemaking team rings true. […]
It is only a short walk away but my studio lies silent. Despite the proximity it is a forbidden territory: I am in isolation as my neighbour in the flat below has suspected Covid-19. Artists are as far removed from key workers as you can get. But our ‘job’ is still relevant: One of the […]
