Dave Leonard visiting

16 Feb 2012: We had a day of reviews of the Site Analysis and Special Studies, and our examiner/guest for the morning was David Leonard, of Leonard Architects, Nottingham. He started the day with a lecture on his work in recent years, with heavy involvement in enormous retail projects, frequently partnering with well known architects, his role being master planner. In addition to the major Westfield projects in West and East London, he has had roles in countless other projects, in Nottingham, Guildford, Bluewater, Croydon, Birmingham, and schemes recently in Mauritius, Kenya, Sharjah, Korea. He has a particularly strong facility for rapid thinking on paper with felt pens, with clients taking part, and this is a reason he is in such strong demand, world wide.

The students presented 3 sets of site analyses in the morning, with varying levels of detail applied to context, transport, massing ideas, microclimate studies etc. In the afternoon, we had three special studies. 

= Group C have been looking at London, and some of the Tall buildings in London, together with pros and cons of tall buildings in that context. They included prominent office buildings, and some residential ones. 

= Group B did a good study, covering the matter of social and shared spaces in large mixed use tall buildings, with some international examples. 

= Group A explained the Passivhaus concept, and their special task was also to relate and upgrade that with ideas for applying it to Tall Buildings, applying Active House thinking to make it work at height. 

The next task is to get a wood model built (for the site) to get the students into small groups (we have 11) and to make a start with their thinking about agenda for the building and an outline brief.