New term coming soon

17 Sept '10: We have the new term coming up fast. All our Masters students from the previous year have now handed in dissertations, and we wish them the best of luck during the marking process. We shall find out next Monday how many Sustainable Tall Building students have arrived.
   In the last week, Phil has been notifying parts of the media about our projects using the CTBUH images as a course, and we have a good report on www.inhabit.com about one of the Rotterdam projects.

CTBUH accreditation of the Course

31 Aug: CTBUH have now confirmed their accreditation for the Sustainable Tall Buildings course at Nottingham! Read all about it on the CTBUH news page.

Seminar at the Environment Agency

25 Aug: DNC writes: I was invited to talk at a lunchtime seminar for staff at Nottingham's Environment Agency Office. These are for topics linked to Climate Change and Energy shortage. I had only about 25 mins, but covered four subjects.

• First the West Bridgford Transition group and WB Ecohouses group, and the importance for activists of communicating the message widely, not just doing things privately.
• The Rushcliffe Solar campaign, to encourage people to take up Photovoltaic panels, to increase the home generation of electricity in Rushcliffe, and for them to benefit from the feed in tariff.
• The Charging the Earth project, building Sunboxes to augment the performance of the ground source heat pump - appropriate because at this very moment, my research poster on the sunboxes are on view at the SET conference in Shanghai.
• The Sustainable Tall Buildings course at Nottingham University - where we are trying to teach our students bioclimatic principles for tall buildings - our next project is based in New York, trying to apply Passivhaus principles to the units in a 60 storey structure. 

I was sharing the floor with Penny Poyzer, the owner of the West Bridgford Ecohouse in Patrick Rd. Compared to my technology oriented topics, she was talking about the virtue of growing your own food, plus many observations on green lifestyle. A major learning point from her house is that you can apply extreme levels of insulation to a 120 year old house, and make it airtight enough for heat reclaim to work.
   As a nice human touch, we could see out of the window that the staff in the Environment Agency are indeed growing their own, there was a well managed cuban-style micro farm with members of staff having their own little 2 sqm patch, full of healthy looking vegetables.

Our students in Singapore!

August 2010: We have a good relationship with Broadway Malyan, a global architectural practice with 13 offices around the world, including London and Singapore.
  Jason Pomeroy, the leader of the Singapore office has been a regular teacher on our tall buildings course since 2007, always making at least one visit per year to teach and deliver an outstanding lecture on civic spaces in dense cities and tall buildings.
   Three of our leading students from the recent Tall Buildings unit were offered free flights to join Broadway Malyan in Singapore for a summer of work experience, applying their knowledge in the real context. It is a hot climate, long hours of hard work, but is an experience never to be forgotten!
  We are confident that BM will be very pleased with the three. It demonstrates how very employable one can be with specialised tall building knowledge.
Pictured are Matthew Bryant, David Calder and Arham Daoudi.

High rise in New York

August: We are thinking ahead to the first semester of 2010-2011, and our plan is to do the Isover competition - this is for a 60 storey residential re-interpretation of the Passivhaus idea, fit for city living in a high density location - a very different context from the one that Passivhaus was developed for.
  But wait - it's not as stupid an idea as it sounds! an apartment in a tall block has, theoretically, extremely good insulation above, below, to the sides and to the rear, because it is sharing with others. The only part facing the exterior is the facade, which needs to be very well designed. And shared services such as heat recovery and water recycling can more easily be done in an apartment block than in a single house.... So we'll do it! Decision made!
    It is an international competition, with schools in each country invited to take part. The leading school of Architecture in each country will get an intermediate prize, and then there is a final stage in Prague in 2011. The intermediate prize for UK competitors will include to have one's model exhibited at Ecobuild 2011, London, March 2011. Isover will publish a book next year showing the pick of the entries, so we could hope to get some of our students' work published.  We have been asked to build the site model for the UK version, even if other UK schools take part.

Tall Building Party, between chapters

17 Aug: Some of the Tall Building students are hard at work on their dissertations. Somehow, between writing chapters, we found time to have a 'pot-luck' party on 17 August, with a mixture of Indian, Chinese and Persian foods on show - very tasty!
We had it at DNC's house, a veritable museum of models of tall buildings from previous year's projects.

Putting up the Exhibition

10 June : The Tall Buildings exhibition was pinned up in quick time, by a decent number of people turning up to provide willing hands. All the drawings are pinned on black backing cloth, and we have an excellent space at the east end of the EEC building.
  We have both semesters on show. In the case of the second semester ALL students have their work on show, either full size or printed in reduced size.  The model looks fantastic with the beautifully constructed Skyweb of bridges connecting the towers (thanks to David Calder for completing all the linking skybridges on the model.)

Final Crit for the Leamouth highrise project

29 May: Final Crit : We took all the drawings and models down to the Trent Building, using the Performance Arts Studio.  This was a new experience, as the drawings were projected on a giant screen, but the Urban group started, and everyone followed the example - panning and zooming over their posters, explaining. There were good videos from all groups, which are going on to YouTube.
   We had Timo Kujala, the original 'client' taking part as our main crit guest. We had Ivan Jovanovic who was important at the early stages, defining the environmental agenda.
    David NC and Phil were pleased with the results and with the performance of all the students, and with the number of projects being of an A grade. We feel that the Performing Arts Studio somehow raised the ceremonial value of the event, our Final Crit for the Leamouth project (we feel we have mined out this excellent site, so it really is the final crit.) So we will use it again next year - the work of moving it down the hill was well rewarded.  Next comes the exhibition!

Dario Trabucco visiting

14 May : Dario Trabucco, a Tall Buildings expert resident in Venice, is visiting Nottingham for a couple of days. He took part in the latter part of our crit on 13 May, and today delivered a lecture on the History of Tall Building Cores. Dario will be publishing this as a CTBUH paper soon.
Although only a small number of students turned up, it was very good lecture with room for discussion. It ended with a discussion of embodied energy of tall buildings, compared with their running costs.
  Dario is hosting a mini-conference in Venice in late June to discuss further research directions in the world of Tall Buildings.

In the picture, Dario has the Campanile of San Marco on his right and the Met Life building in New York on his left.

Leamouth, second interim crit

13 May : We had the second interim crit, all day in the Marmont studio. We had three visiting tutors to help (Chris Gaylord, Sabina Fazlic and Simon Palmer) with our usual inhouse team of DNC and Phil, and Paul helping. We are all pretty pleased at the progress since the start of term, and everybody produced good posters and new models. Thankyou!
   Later in the evening it was the Architects' Ball, at Colwick Hall. Plenty of last year's and last semester's tall building students were there, but I fear that we have tired out our present group as only 4 were at the ball (three of them pictured).

Pictured: DNC, Aurelia, Rain and Ben

End of term Review 1 Apr

1 April 2010: It was the last day of term, but also a review of the Tall Buildings unit. We were honoured to have Ken Shuttleworth (Make) and Dirk Krolikowski (Rogers Stirk Harbour) as our special guests for the day.
   Phil and Paul and DNc were amazed and delighted at the advancement since the week earlier. Every group had a new 1/500 model, and had managed to get printed posters with all buildings computer modelled, rendered and printed out. These all had to  be done earlier in the week for the MAD group, so there was time on Weds evening to assemble a video.
  The day's review started with the videos, which is a good way to get a quick glimpse of what each building is about, especially for the visitors who are unfamiliar with the site as well as the details of the brief, and the agendas of each group.
  We continued through the day at half hour intervals, with every group getting two crits. The guests enjoyed their day and gave plenty of helpful advice throughout the day, concluding with a group photograph and a talk back after Ken's taxi had gone to the station. Everybody was urged to have an enjoyable easter weekend (and relax!) and we look forward to a 5 week period before the next main meeting on May 6th. That will be a tutorial day with the next interim crit on the 13th May.

Tutorials 25 March 2010

The Tower designs have been advancing, but the master planning group are also keeping a close eye on progress of the overall plan, including the skybridge pattern.

The previous week (18 Mar) was a decisive moment, with an almost final skybridge arrangement being agreed on, and modelled live during the day, connecting the tower models with foamboard slabs.

The emphasis for 25th was to advance the tower designs, including Structure (we had Simon Palmer attending), Agenda (this is the time to decide finally), Organisation (planning, section, connection to ground and skybridges etc).... so that they would be ready to present as a design good enough to show Ken Shuttleworth, and to launch the students into the 5-week long Easter vacation.

So far, we have urged the unit to work mostly through Models and Hand drawn scale drawings. Now they are urged to go to computer for the next week.

Master Plans Crit 4th March

Here are some photos, details will be added:

Above: The entire unit ponder the various plans put forward and try to choose a winner - a combination of voting, negotiation, and pure logic.

Left, Group 2 foreground and Group 3 in the background explain their schemes. The final selection was a combination of these two.

Right, Minh and Sim yee explain their super skybridge design.

Urban Site Study presentations

18 Feb 2010: We had a whole day of the groups presenting their Site analysis, including an urban appraisal of the context of Leamouth - history, transport, facilities, population, employment etc. Each group also presented a special study that has learning content relevant to this scheme: (Canary Wharf and other out of centre tall clusters, Residential housing patterns, Civic Aspects of Tall Building design, and Regional Planning policies such as Thames Gateway). Two of the four groups attempted a visualisation of first ideas of how 8 towers could be on such a site.
The day started with an excellent lecture by David Leonard about master-planning in Stratford City and in Sharjah. Stratford is being constructed now, and it is just north of our site. The Sharjah story proved more useful as we saw how an idea grows from the genesis of nothing more than three elements: sea, some flat sand and a corniche - this idea became a kilometre of mixed use and mixed height planning, with a very three dimensional character, and entirely hand drawn at this stage.
On the Monday after this, Phil added a short lecture about ideas on master planning.
Photo above, is one of the groups, FutureScrape, who presented the first Urban Study.

Field Trip to London Part 3

4 Feb: We started the day at the office of Gensler Architects in Aldgate. Lukazs Platkowski gave his usual excellent lecture on Tall buildings, but as always using completely new case studies to illustrate his advice on TB design. Gensler have just won a competition in Riyadh with his design, and he showed the evolution of the design from a single tower to variations on twin tower or finally a split tower - one with a deep vertical slit between two cores to give good daylight and ventilation.

After the lecture we had a long walkabout, starting down Minories, to Tower of London (noting the Tower Hill office building by RSH), on to Tower Bridge, and into the GLA building - which we entered, as high as the public can go. We walked on past Hays Galleria and the Cotton Exchange to have a look at the building site of the London Bridge tower (the Shard). We took the Tube to Canary Wharf and had an hour's walkabout there. Caught the DLR to Canning Town station for a good look at our site. Then we returned to East India Dock station on the DLR and had a walk along the Thames (seeing this millennium beacon at E India Dock), and spend the rest of the time on the Trinity site - some people went for a walk on the small eco-park to the west of our site. The bus home picked us up from Orchard Place, for a safe ride home.

Field Trip to London Part 2

3 Feb: After Broadgate we walked on north westwards, to City Rd, and then to SOM's office in London. Timo Kujala entertained us with an introduction to the site, visions of the previous scheme for the site (now stopped), and reasons for changing to a new design (now going ahead). The new design will be more viable economically by doing without the expensive parking groundscraper; it was too high an upfront cost for a mainly residential scheme. The bridge to Canning Town station will also be cheaper.
After Timo's talk, we had to use the Tube to get to the other side of London, to Hammersmith, for a walk down through Fulham to the office of Rogers Stirk Harbour. Dirk Krolikowski has been working for RSH for 3 yrs on the Leadenhall St project, producing wonderful visionary 3D details of the construction - at all scale levels - from the megabraced frame, to the secondary frame, right down to how steel and glass of the facade will work and accommodate movement. He delivers a great lecture with plenty of good advice for young designers. He also allowed us to view the extensive model exhibition, mostly made by their in-house modelmaking team.

Field Trip to London Part 1.

Feb 2010: The whole unit took the bus to London on Feb 3rd for a 2-day field trip. We arrived at the Building Centre, which is a good start as it has the large London Model of present and proposed buildings, plus a lot of temporary and permanent exhibition material about London, and construction.

We took the Tube to Bank and had a long Square Mile walkabout from there, past Lloyds (always good to see), Willis (elegantly fitting), Leadenhall (site surrounded by hoardings), Swiss Re (Gherkin), Pinnacle (large hole in ground), and the Heron Tower. That is making good progress and appears to have topped out structurally, but has another year of cladding and fitting out to do.
    We walked on to Liverpool St station and through the Broadgate precinct (no time to go skating) and entered the plaza under the SOM building with the parabolic curve, that bridges across the railway lines. We walked on under the Broadgate Tower, now fully occupied (and not letting us in). The A-Frame supporting the entire east wall of the tower is impressively massive.

The visit to SOM and other parts of the field trip will be on another blog item.

The Final Crit for Term One

25 Jan: We had tutorials on 13th December just to help people finalise the design of their layout, and the Crit itself was on 20th Jan.
We had Lukazs Platkowski, Harjinder Singh, Sabina Fazlic, Simon Palmer as guests to help Davidnc and Phil, and Paul Jozsa helped out in the groups, including photography.

Most students managed to get their drawings up the night before, and Every student made it to the crit. It was a good exhibition, and every student and tutor taking part should be proud of the effort that has gone into the project. We try to achieve a good balance between research/innovation and reality/authenticity. Some of the presentation is extremely good, considering how much of it is dependent on underpowered laptops spending hours doing renderings. Well done everybody!

Below is the display from Rotterdam, the Water Tower group (David, Sam and Sadie).

High Rise Issues - celebrate

Friday 11th, we had the final HRI presentations of the case studies, and a party with beer from Phil and DNC and cakes from Mrs NC and Nu. So, Tall Buildings can be something to celebrate, too!
Photo by Paul Jozsa 

End of Term: all for a white Xmas?

Dec 11th: Well we have reached the end of term and had a crit on Weds December 9th with guest visits from Antony Wood (Chicago), Ivan Jovanovic (BDSP), Sabina Fazlic (Cardiff /B'ham) and Matthew Wells (Techniker). This was the last event before the vacation, and each group had 40 mins with the tutor group - thoroughly checking and discussing the designs and ideas. We had a number of tutorials on Thursday afterwards to clear up any remaining problems before the vacation. It has all been very encouraging, everybody has a scheme, and we are looking forward to seeing how they develop over the vacation.
All photos from David Nicholson-Cole's iPhone.

Ivan and Antony considering the mysteries of Mumbai

Matthew, Sabina and Phil studying Abu Dhabi

Antony and Ivan in Mumbai again...

Antony thinking about Chicago

Phil and Antony looking serious about Abu Dhabi...