Cyrene in BBC R4's "From Our Own Correspondent"

There was a good article on Saturday's From Our Own Correspondent (09/07/11) on BBC Radio 4 about our old stomping ground, Cyrene, in Libya's Jebel Akhdar or Geen Mountain region. Justin Marozzi had evidently called in on the ancient Hellenistic & Roman city ruins en route to Benghazi and met up with names known to us through our work there in 2009-2011.

In 2009, Cullinans prepared visitor strategies and masterplans proposals for four of eastern Libya's ancient city sites - Techira, Ptolemais, Apollonia and Cyrene - as part of the Green Mountain project with Ramboll UK. More recently, our masterplan for a new, carbon neutral city for 60,000 people - Shahat Garden City - just 7km south of Cyrene, would have introduced innovative, low enegry urban design solutions to the the region, helping to tackle the Jebal Akhdar's housing shortage as well as future energy needs.

Marozzi found the Cyrene site to be just as we knew it, only before February there was the odd international visitor or achaeologist to be found there: red earth, goats, wild flowers, increadible views north to the Mediterranean and an amazingly complete city in need of better care.

Who do you think you are

Over a hundred of us gathered in the heart of Penoyre and Prasad's cool naturally cross-ventilated deep plan office last evening to hear 4 excellent presentations - a real cornucopia followed by delicious carpaccio, gorgonzola, wine and conversation.

Richard Sennett kicked off with softly spoken and eloquent thoughts on the book he is currently writing; cities work when they operate with porous boundaries rather than impermeable barriers like that Israeli wall. Liminality is key but that was a new concept to me - "a psychological, neurological, or metaphysical subjective state, conscious or unconscious, of being on the "threshold" of or between two different existential planes" Wikipedia tells me. In discussion he posited that the sealed plate glass window was a challenge to the desired porosity denying aural and olfactory connection to the city, while pretending to be transparent ie a barrier to be banned. By contrast he described an exercise his LSE Cities Programme had done about how to put an Aids clinic into Bluewater Shopping Centre with housing in the car park - good thinking!

Brand Consultant Ralph Ardill explained how corporate branding had changed from the profligate '80s where you could sell pretty much anything with the right brand to today when social media expose fakes ("the inauthentic") pretty much instantly. He described his highly successful but accidental collaboration with an architect to devise thhe Guinness Storehouse in Dublin.

The beautifully poised choreographer Siobham (Sue) Davies spoke about place and 'body memories' over a mesmerising film of 4 dancers rotating around a centre point , twisting and interweaving. She invited everyone to visit her studio in Lambeth by Sarah Wigglesworth

Finally Vincent Lacovara of AOC and Croydon Planning Dept described his annual Open House guided walk around the Seven Hills of Croydon; that is a trip around and up to the roof of the seven car parks in central Croydon, each year the experience being different, enriching his understanding of the place.

All four set thoughts running but Sue and Vincent offered related insights as to how we come to understand our sense of place in the city. In discussion Sue began to open up the elephant in the room which was that the new media were yet further encouraging us to consume ever more - next time perhaps?

Heathcare in Bath

Together with other members of the EOA (Employee Ownership Association) ECA's Community Healthcare Team enjoyed a tour of CircleBath Hospital last week. As members of an architectural cooperative we were interested to see another cooperatively run company in action. Circle is co-founded, co-run and co-owned by clinicians. The consultants and healthcare professionals who work for the organisation own the facilities they work in and from what we were told and shown this seems to motivate and empower the staff to put patients first in everything that they do.

The project was designed by Foster and Partners and some of the ambitions of the building reminded us of our Maggie's Centre North East in Newcastle which is due to start on site later this year. Circle has a calm domestic feel with lots of natural light (even in the operating theatres), great views to open countryside and, in contrast to typical healthcare facilities, a palette of warm and textured materials. Institutional corridors and signage are avoided as much as possible, and many of the rooms are multi-use and can be allocated to staff as required. Interestingly, the hospitality side of things is run by a former hotel manager in tandem with a Michelin star chef. The food, rooms and views are so good that many patients literally don't want to leave.

sustainable housing update courtesy of NHBC conference

1. The coaltion want to reduce regulations but some anxieties/upcoming activities from CLG included:

• CLG (Building Regs) Minister Andrew Stunnell very exercised by compliance failure 
• Zero Carbon now means CSH 5 but 'Code 6 is not dead' 
• security 
• rainwater-harvesting 
• ecology 
• embodied carbon 
• ventilation and over-heating 
• health and lifetime homes 

Watch for the release of the National Planning Policy Framework proposals, soon

2. Some news form the Zero Carbon Hub included:

• Carbon compliance is a minimum standard of fabric and technologies but this is now based on emissions/m2 rather than percentage improvements - much better! But the variation in UK weather is a huge problem; SAP assumes we all live in Nottingham 
• Cyril Sweett have reported that the extra over cost of a Code 5 (ie new ZC) home will have come down to £10k by 2016.

3. BRE have studied Greenwatt Way in Slough and concluded, among other things, that MVHR can be problematic:

• the need for a better research into how MVHR works (or doesnt)
• need to insulate MVHR ductwork in cold roofs 
• watch out for noise from fans 
• it can cost £20 to change the filters 
• better not to put the MVHR in the attic for ease of maintenance access - think about putting it in a cupboard, although this can conflict with need for storage space; dont forget the condensate pipe
• try to minimise the duct runs and ensure the flexible ducting isnt kinked etc

4. Lessons from Joseph Rowntree Floundation's Elm Tree Mews in York included:

• Airtighness target was 3m3/m2 but it measured bewteen 6 and 9m3; luckily the ventilation had been designed thinking the target was 10! 
• Co-heating tests showed up massive fabric failure in part due to construction of presinsulated timber cassettes in a wet summer; wet warmcell insulation had to be replaced and there was much more timber in the cassettes than anticipated leading to U-value deteriorating from 0.18 to 0.3 
• locally sourced windows claimed a u-value of 1.5 but that was mid-point not overall as specified, so rated 2.0 overall 
• complex shapes and contextual arts and crafts detailing led to extensive cold bridging 
• solar thermal only worked in one home - problems included a nail through a pipe, kinked pipework and one with the flow and return fitted the wrong way round 
• tenants didn know how to use the winter gardens and used them for storage 
• each dwelling had 4 controllers - heat pump, space heaing, solar hot water and immersion heater! 

Let me know if you want to see the powerpoints.

Lambeth Community Care Centre Open Day

On Saturday 21st May a group from the office went to the Lambeth Community Care Centre annual garden open day, to see the building in action and to enjoy some tea and cake. It was great to see how this innovative centre has been used and the garden has matured, over 25 years on from when it was first opened.

Robin Nicholson, senior partner at Cullinans and the project architect of the Care Centre, took us on a tour of the building and its extensive gardens, pointing out his mature fig tree, laden with fruit, and stories behind many of the plants. The local community got a warm welcome from staff and volunteers and from the gardener Millie who was there encouraging everyone to buy plants to help fund the next year’s work in the garden.

For the opening by Charles and Diana on a cold winter afternoon in 1985, Ted took the newly wed Di around the ground floor to meet the patients and those involved in making the Centre happen. Meanwhile Robin introduced Charles to the design and construction teams in the upper conservatory including the foremen plumber and electrician, while their bosses were out in the rather chilly garden.  All the guests were invited to bring bulbs to plant in the garden.

The wonderful first senior nurse Sheila Woodward, now retired but devoted to the Centre, showed us around the 1st floor ward areas, pointing out various design features that made an impact in the lives of the patients. For example, Sheila told us how the clerestory windows bathed the wards in the dawn light, and helped patients connect with passing of time each day. Apparently dawn is one of the most common times for people to pass away, at the most peaceful time of the day.

The wards look out over the verdant garden, allowing patients to enjoy the greenery and wildlife from their beds. A terrace runs along the ward where patients can sit and double doors enable beds to be wheeled out onto the terrace from the wards if a patient wants to be outside.

Sheila had had the unenviable task of taking over the building from a passionately determined group of doctors, therapists, administrators and architects who had lived and breathed the design for 5 years and it had taken the founders 5 years before that to get the money.  The plan had been to make a model place where patients would be looked after by the Centre’s nurses and therapists and visited by their GP as though they were in their own home.  The story of the early years is beautifully recorded by Gillian Wilce in ‘A Place Like Home’.

After huge initial success, Sheila moved on and inevitably there were some changes but the Tomlinson report in 1992 thrust the Lambeth CCC right back on the agenda as a model for the future of Community healthcare in London.

The centre is based around an innovative approach to patient care, where patients have an active role in their own care and the running of the centre. It was very interesting to see these principles in practice, innovative in its time and still very much relevant to current healthcare projects such as our current Maggie’s Cancer care centre project in Newcastle, where visitors are encouraged to feel ownership of the building and enabled to help themselves to cups of tea and participate in the gardening.

North East Maggie's Cancer Caring Centre

A special issue of the Architects Journal was devoted to the building 16th Oct 1985.

From Arts and Crafts to DIY

‘Where does my baggage come from?’ was a talk Ted gave in 1986. It’s a good question to keep asking on our journey of practice. One - though not the only - source for our inspiration has been the Arts and Crafts movement. The ‘Father of Arts and Crafts Architecture’ was Philip Webb, who in 1859 designed the Red House with and for William Morris. Webb's view was that architecture is ‘a common tradition of honest building’, and that architecture must be ‘mastership in building-craft developed out of contact with needs and materials’. He wrote little himself but his theories were articulated in a series of articles in 1925 by his biographer, friend and disciple W.R.Lethaby in ‘Philip Webb and his Work’. Lethaby was himself an innovative if not prolific architect - his church at Brockhampton with its unique thatched mass concrete vault was certainly honest building from first principles.

These ideas seem so out of sync with current procurement, where in spite of much good talk of integrated teams, the pressures are often to separate design and construction. With modern construction seemingly trying its best to separate design from making – at the same time as accusing architects of being detached from the process of building – the relevance of remaining grounded in the process and pleasure of making has never been greater. We have a culture within our office of self-building and DIY and we try and share successes, advice and tools. So, rather than keep this within the office I thought I’d add a thread within our blog touching on DIY.

Tom Brooksbank recently lent me a copy he’d picked up of Nomadic Furniture, 1974, by Victor Papanek and James Hennessy – ‘how to build and where to buy lightweight furniture that fold, inflates, knocks down, stacks or is disposable and can be recycled’. You can just feel the wobbliness and rough edges in most of these designs, although I particularly like this space-saving drop down desk.

IKEA has adopted these principles and made them work on a global scale, at the same time internationalising a seemingly acceptable level of wobble.

Here’s a tip for self assembly that is not wobbly and can be used to make self-build furniture composed in our beloved post-Cubist manner using floating planes and disengaged elements. Cut 6mm threaded stud to suitable lengths. Cut a slot in one end wide enough to take a screw driver bit. Set up your pieces with spacers and cramp together - it’s a good idea to prefinish them. Drill an undersized hole of 5 or 5.5mm depending on the material and drive the stud in. Remove the spacers and hey presto!

Here are some bedside units I made 15 years ago using this technique:

…. and more recently a unit for my daughter using some offcuts of shuttering ply.

Mary Lou Arscott taught me this tip, using it for door handle details in our self-built cubicles in office. I copied it for handles on wardrobe doors that turn light softwood framing into a rigid beam. Global wobble? – no thanks!

Think Big

All London dwellers learn to adapt to living in small homes. I recently came across this video of an apartment in Barcelona where simple clicks and folds afford a dazzling array of spaces in one tiny room.