20
Mar
2010
thou shall not passport
The first day of Smart Geometry is more or less over now, last night’s tutors’ dinner is now just a memory and a crumpled receipt in someone’s pocket.
I’m sat in Oxford, in my house, Winnie-the-Pooh-ing about and putting things in the dishwasher.
This doesn’t seem like very responsible behaviour for a tutor, especially for one of such an exciting cluster as the “Rapid R&D to Rapid Assembly – snap fit, push on….” group. Surely I should be solving wicked problems and grinding out slick moves to make snap fit shuttering carpentry late into the night.
No. If you don’t have a passport – but you do want to travel – then, in a slightly twisted version the words of the great John Nash, “Fuck you buddy“. Read the rest of this entry »
14
Mar
2010
Carbon Buzz interview
On Monday I’m going to go and interview Judit Kimpian about her involvement in the Carbon Buzz project.
Carbon Buzz is a platform where people who design buildings can put their design stage building performance data from their simulations, and then compare it with real, in-use data. Check out the website, and there is the Carbon Buzz handbook too.
I’m interested in it for a number of reasons, mainly because it is one of the only chances in architecture where you get to see a comparison between design intent, and the delivered product. The apparent fact that the simulations are getting it so wildly wrong intrigues me too. If the designers of the simulations know that their calculations are so wrong, then why are they still used, hopefully Judit can shed some light on this!
Since the interview was organised the project has been funded for another three years by the Technology Strategy Board, so we’ll get to see a continuation of this work.
If you have any questions that you’d like me to ask Judit then put them into the comments on this post. I’ll publish the interview in a few days once it is edited.
9
Mar
2010
building performance quiz
Finally it is launched!!
There have been a lot of long nights of faffing about with learning about the technology that runs the internet, But now the building performance quiz is live, working reasonably well in most browsers, and has started producing results!
So “what is it?” I hear you ask!
There are a couple of reasons that I can’t tell you everything about it just yet. But for now it is a quiz that shows up what you know and don’t know about designing for building performance within the emerging low carbon economy.
The key thing is that a lot of people have a go at the quiz, so if you have a screen, and some time, then please do it, and if you have all of the above, and friends, then send it to all of them and beg them to do it too. Please!!!
have a go!
6
Mar
2010
Smart Geometry, TU Delft and Pirates
In November there was a Smart Geometry event at TU Delft. It was a really interesting event as it wasn’t platform specific, so people were hacking away on whatever they fancied (GC, Grasshopper, Processing, C#).
Rudi Stouffs (check out some of his work here) videoed some of the evening presentations.
There are some great talks in this bunch, Sam Joyce’s is particularly worth a go for a bit of a reflective view on structural engineering!
Mine is a dramatic speed up of the talk I gave at UTS last year. If you are interested, the slides are here.
22
Feb
2010
Zombie copy – reanimated
Take a look at this article: Zombie Copy.
It is could have been written specifically for architects!
I particularly like the transformation of…
Every executive knows that constantly delivering superior customer value is an imperative to veritably creating shareholder value.
into…
If you want to make lots of money, you have to please your customers more than the other guy does.
So I suppose that the moral of the story is that; amongst the people who look at your work there are always going to be a few smart people out there that can read, they’ll notice if you use a thesaurus liberally throughout your writing. So save yourself the ridicule later, and write down what you actually mean, it’ll be quicker, and it might actually be interesting!