Dirk and Ivan

12 Nov '10: We were honoured to have a half day Structures symposium as part of our HRI course, provided by Dirk Krolikowski of Rogers Stirk Harbour, supported by two of his very good friends, Ozan Yanlis and Falco Schmidt, both of Arups: with whom he has worked on many real projects, competition entries and educational initiatives. Dirk has worked on the Leadenhall St tower ('Cheesegrater') and we are glad to hear that the covers have been lifted off this project, and it is rising again after a layoff of a couple of years. Dirk has done some structural visioneering that is so seductive that all the clients now expect this sort of imagery! With such an expensive building it helps to have every component thoroughly modelled to fine detail before cutting metal. Ozan is a senior engineer at Arups and has a very good presentation of the integration of architectural ideas with structural realisation. Falco has worked at RMJM, and presented a very detailed explanation of the St Petersburg Tower. Dirk and Falco have run an advanced buildings design unit at Aachen University.
  Ozan had to return to London at lunchtime, but Dirk and Falco stayed for a whole afternoon of tutorials on structure, giving the students some of the toughest structural questioning they have yet experienced, resulting in many vastly improved schemes by the following Thursday - a legacy of the symposium that we are all grateful for.

 I will write about Ivan's visit next time I get time to spend on the blog.

TBI'10 Interim Design Crit

11 Nov '10: We had the first interim design crit, and all nine groups produced a design, in the form of models and some early drawings, and some even included a short video. We had Architects David Leonard and Chris Gaylord as guest critters.

Phil's Podcast lecture on Tall Buildings

November '10: Isover are running their global student competition to be a vertical mixed-use multi-comfort tower for a site in New York. As the University of Nottingham have such expertise in Tall Buildings, Isover asked Phil to do a webcast lecture that would help all taking part. This is visible on:
www.multicomforthouse.co.uk/student-competition-2011/resources/lectures/
We have nine groups doing towers on the New York site, but we would welcome more schools or more student groups from elsewhere trying this project. It is very challenging, and we have had a month already of site analysis and early design.

Group photo of the High Rise issues group

5 Nov '10: Phil gave the last of his High Rise Issues lectures today, as we have a Structures Symposium next week (12th), and after that the students will be presenting Case Studies until the end of the year. Because it's a Diwali and most of us were there, the Indian students proposed a group photo, so we all went to the quadrangle for a photo.
(Theres about 2 missing from the photo).

Mentioned in the AJ

01-11-10: It's great to see that the AJ (Architects Journal) have done a feature on Masters courses in Sustainable design, and have given very prominent coverage to our MArch STB course, with a large illustration of one of the Rotterdam projects from last year. It is in the issue of 28.10.10, page 50. There is also a round up of some recent Passivhaus designs in the UK, so altogether this is an issue worth keeping!

Adaptable tower by Linshuo Wang and Kok Keong Tew 2009

Unfortunately for those without the AJ, it is on the website, but behind their subscriber's wall, although I think you can register for free to see these particular pages.