Weird and Wonderful Architecture
Futuristic London Bridge Sprouts Solar Powered Vertical Farm
Recently Chetwood Architects unveiled a stunning proposal for a futuristic London Bridge that sprouts a towering vertical farm in the midst of the Thames river. The bridge’s solar-powered spires are crowned with wind turbines and house a self-sufficent organic farm and commercial center that takes advantage of renewable energy generation, efficient use of water, solar heating, and natural ventilation.
Floating Urban Beach Barge Sets Sail on the Danube River
Hungary-based design team Urban Landscape Group recently completed an extraordinary summer project that allows visitors to float down the Danube in a portable pool. Dubbed Barge Beach Budapest, the sandy sailing island acts as a contemporary Turkish bath and open air pool situated in the waterways between the river’s edges. The pop up beach is constructed from three recycled barges and provides residents with a brand new public space to bask in the sun.
Blue Crystal: A Sustainable Iceberg Lodge in Dubai?
Temporary ice hotels materialize each winter in frigid northern towns from Russia to Canada. As temperatures rise in the spring the structures melt back into the earth. Now Dubai is poised to get its first year-round ice lodge, Blue Crystal. And considering the amount of energy needed to keep a man made iceberg under 32 degrees in scorching summers on the Persian Gulf, it’s almost amusing to hear Blue Crystal touted as sustainable.
Butterfly Bamboo Homes Are Hope for Thai Orphans
 There is nothing we love more than good design meeting up with a good cause. That’s why we love this student humanitarian design project on the Thai Burmese border: it combines beautifully designed (and super efficient) vernacular-inspired architecture with social responsibility in aiding the plight of refugee orphans. Five students in Thailand are using architecture to make new lives for 24 orphans by providing them with homes to call their own.
Water Droplet Resort Will Convert Air into Purified Water
 Architecturally and thematically designed in the shape of a drop of water, the Water Building Resort intends to become the first building ever to convert air into water with the help of solar power. What sounds like magic will be achieved with the following combination of nature and technology: A sunny, southerly facing facade made of photovoltaic glass will harness solar energy, allowing light to pass through. The northern facade features a latticed design for ventilation as well as unprecedented Teex Micron equipment that will convert humid air and condensation into pure drinking water.
Are Architects Ready to Tweet?
Sites such as Facebook, YouTube and Flickr share the ambition of taking the web beyond a surrogate publishing system and into the realm of an interactive medium. But how effectively are architects using their existing websites, and do the latest web 2.0 technologies have a place in architects’ communication and marketing armoury?
Random websites
A random selection of five practices from the online RIBA directory gives a crude but simple survey of architects’ own websites. One practice didn’t have a website at all. The four sites I did find however had done enough to ensure that a search in Google for the name of the practice (and the word architect) did ensure they were returned as the top result.
One website was just a single page with a link back to the RIBA directory for more information. This one-pager was labelled with the once-ubiquitous words “website under construction” that I thought had long since disappeared from the web.
Of the remaining three sites, one was built entirely in HTML and the other two in Flash. The Flash sites look slick but have disadvantages. As Flash files cannot be read by text-searching robots none of the content within the site is searchable by Google.
The three fully formed websites all followed variations of splitting the website into “home”, “about us”, “projects” and “contact sections”. The sites are predominantly text and image-based: one used slideshows but generally the images were static. My brief survey seemed to indicate that when it comes to web technologies the profession is not characterised by the phrases “ground-breaking” or “early adopters” .
None of the websites in my rough survey appeared to use an online content management system, which is the sort of built-in feature that is growing in architects’ own websites and begins to nudge at the edges of the ideas behind the concept of web 2.0.
web2tweet
Twitter is one of the newest and potentially most ephemeral of these technologies.
Su Butcher’s league table of architects’ Twitter sites at
www.justpractising.com/architects-twitter-league is a good starting point.
Andy Marshall also maintains a descriptive list which throws up some examples of potentially useful feeds including http://twitter.com/RIBAEducation
But, you may ask, why would I want to tweet? Twitter is a bit like holding court in an office meeting or over a pint except that the people listening are doing so because they have chosen to. At 140 characters, you may struggle to hold their interest, but you won’t bore them. Whether you get a new client out of it I somehow doubt, but at least you will know you are not alone.
Modern Day Hunting Trophies
The popularity of hunting motifs, even in the most urban of interiors, is surprisingly enduring. Blood sports might make for an inflammatory dinner-party topic, but designs inspired by traditional country pursuits are often uncontroversial and unadventurous classics: pheasants printed on muted plaid upholstery fabric, pale blue huntsmen pursuing foxes across white wallpaper. In the hands of masters such as Mulberry or Ralph Lauren, these evoke a cosy, baronial hunting-lodge feel, the interiors equivalent of cashmere socks. While the old guard has comfort covered, young designers have been producing refreshing twists on the theme, including witty reworkings of the traditional hunter’s trophy such as mirrors in the shape of stag’s heads and antlered cuckoo clocks.
FEATHERED There’s a covey of homewares featuring partridge, as well as pheasant, duck and pigeon, this season. Mulberry offers a range of game-bird fabrics, from Flying Ducks linen (£79 per metre) to the 100% wool Pheasant Check (£89 per metre; 020 7352 3173, www.mulberryhome.com).
Helen Minns handprints pheasants onto textured, unbleached linen light shades and cushions (cushions 50cm x 50cm, £60; 07838 120812, helenminns.com). From the designers Juliet Thornback and Delia Peel come linen tea towels printed with a brace of grey pigeon (50cm x 70cm, £12.50; 020 7242 7478, www.thornbackandpeel.co.uk).
The best of the birdie wallpapers is Alken Wildfowlers, from Lewis & Wood. Printed with country gents stalking through marshes in search of their feathered quarry, this is one of the Cotswold-based firm’s bestsellers (made to order, £51 per 10-metre roll; 01453 878517, www.lewisandwood.co.uk).
Back from next month, by popular demand, is Timorous Beasties’ pheasant print. The Beasties are known for their quirky, offbeat patterns, but these conservative fowl proved an unexpected favourite with their fans. Orders piled up while the birds were unavailable, so now they’re coming back in a palette of greys, creams, ochres and blues (£123 per 10-metre roll; 0141 959 3331, www.timorousbeasties.com).
FURRED Foxes are another autumn favourite. Marie Rodgers and Maria Livings, of Lush Designs, offer a lamp shade featuring a stylised graphic of a sly crimson fox (35cm x 26cm, £60; 020 8694 1664, www.lushlampshades.co.uk). Kersten Boulogner’s 1970s folkloric design of red foxes against a background of leaves and berries is available on tablecloths, trays, tea towels, chopping boards and pot stands (£10.50 for a pot stand, 21cm diameter; 01989 740380, www.newhousetextiles.co.uk).
Emily Bond provides a fresh, contemporary take on the thrill of the chase with her country-pursuit-themed fabrics and papers. She knows a thing or two about texture, having worked for the cashmere firm Brora before launching her own label in 2007. Her trademark fox-hunting scenes come in brown print on an opentextured, oatmeal-coloured Irish linen, or in pale blue on a crisp white cotton (cotton £21 per metre, linen £27 per metre; 0117 376 3067, www.emilybond.co.uk).
ANTLERED The image of the noble stag is popular this season. Yukari Sweeney offers Forest of Dean, a digitally printed stag wallpaper featuring pairs of the majestic beasts (£98 per 10-metre roll; 07734 728153, www.yukarisweeneydesign.com). Wesley-Barrell has recently added a stag-motif cushion to its range of woven tapestries (45cm x 45cm, £60; 01993 893100, www.wesley-barrell.co.uk), and there’s a deliciously gothic edge to Ecocentric’s newly launched wallpaper, Deer Damask, patterned with stag skulls (£63 per 10-metre roll; 020 7739 3888, www.ecocentric.co.uk).
Heal’s stocks an extravagantly antlered cuckoo clock by Diamantini & Domeniconi — imagine something commissioned for Tim Burton’s Black Forest hunting lodge (45cm x 90cm, £215; 0870 024 0780, www.heals.co.uk). Ralph Lauren, to complement some lovely velvet-backed pheasant feather-motif cushions — out this autumn — has unveiled a macabre range of candlesticks made from “shed antlers found on the English countryside”, with silver-plated bases (from £1,000; 020 7535 4600, www.ralphlaurenhome.com).
A cheery, kitschy take on the stag is provided by the French design trio iBride. Their oval laminate trays, made to double as wall-hung art, feature deer with flowers behind their ears, Hawaii-style (42 cm x 26 cm, was £43, now £30; 020 7734 9970, www.lifestylebazaar.com).
TROPHIES Several designers have clocked the decorative and sculptural possibilities of stuffed, skinned hunting trophies, creating their own versions. Polly Westergaard offers a deer’s head trophy mirror as a chic alternative to the traditional stag’s head (94cm x 54cm, £100; 07793 032470, www.westergaarddesigns.co.uk).
Jon Male’s rug, English Hide, is a cutout carpet in the shape of a tiger skin, which can be made from 100% pure New Zealand wool or from recycled carpet (250cm x 170cm, from £1,050; 0161 832 1442, www.studiojonmale.com).
The concept of displaying the heads of game animals is a familiar one, but Donya Coward gives the old idea an unsettling tweak with Veggie Taxidermy. She makes wall-mounted animal heads in various media; she knits and crochets, uses reclaimed materials and adorns her work with jewellery. The faces are all pet dogs — choose between french bulldog, greyhound, highland terrier, pug and english bull terrier (from £1,150; 020 7727 3553,
www.donyacoward.co.uk/portraits.html).
Solar Forest
Designer neville mars has developed an electric vehicle charging station that takes
the form of an evergreen glade of solar trees. The photovoltaic grove serves a dual function,
acting as a go to source for clean renewable energy while providing a shady spot for cars
to park as they charge.
Flowers That Smell As Good As They Look
Over the past few weeks of warm weather, many of us will have enjoyed an all-too-rare chance to sit out in the garden in the evening. As you pour a glass of wine and relax after a day’s work, the candles flickering in the warm breeze, what could be more redolent of summer’s pleasures than the sweet smell of honeysuckle, jasmine and roses in the air?
 A garden without perfume seems to be missing something. Watch people as they pass a beautiful flower: they will naturally lean their noses towards whatever is in bloom, in the hope of finding a fragrance, and feel disappointed if they are denied this. A rose without scent seems half the flower compared to one that smells of cloves and musk.
People have been creating scented gardens since medieval times, when a perfumed bower offered a welcome escape from the whiffs of unwashed bodies and clothes. Lavender and other herbs would be cut to strew on floors, too. At Lytes Cary Manor, a Tudor house near Somerton, Somerset, home of the 16th-century herbalist Henry Lyte, the traditional lavender garden has just been revamped to take it into the next 500 years. There are now 250 blue Lavandula x intermedia ‘Grosso’ in beds edged with box and flanked by yew hedging, with myrtle in the corners (both with particular aromas), looking as attractive as it smells.
While most of us associate scent with traditional gardens such as Lytes Cary, rather than streamlined contemporary design, Laurie Chetwood and Patrick Collins showed why that needn’t always be the case with their gold-medal-winning Perfume Garden at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show in May. “I wanted what I call the ‘tingle factor’,” Chetwood says. “Something that ignited the subtle senses. I also wanted it to be a sanctuary of some sort. Scent creates both these things.”
The garden was composed of sleek beds of aromatic plants — roses, lilies, pinks, ferns and herbs — contained by cedar panels, and was interspersed with tall clipped thuja trees. In the centre, a steel perfumery created perfume for the show’s visitors. “Making scent modern is all about plant associations,” Collins explains. “For example, we put the burgundy rose ‘Tuscany Superb’ among herbs such as sage and purple fennel.”
Marc Fulljames, a landscape gardener and designer, tries to include scent as much as possible in his designs. “In my work, I’ve seen endless gardens, but most lacked something, and I realised it was smell,” he says. “I remember my grandmother’s cottage garden in the 1960s. It was a wonderful pool of scent, but it’s rare to find such a place nowadays, perhaps because many modern plants are bred for colour, flower power and health.”
So keen is he on powerful perfumes, he has started ScentedShrubs.com, a mail-order firm specialising in fragrant plants. As well as summer favourites, it has winter-flowering varieties such as daphne and osmanthus.
Perfumed plants can also be used as an aromatherapy experience that you don’t need to visit the therapist for. At Woodvale, Brighton’s beautiful Grade II-listed cemetery, a Sensory Garden has been created to provide comfort to the bereaved. Paths wind through slick oval beds of lavender and other herbs, which infuse the air with their soothing scent — in much the same way as you might put their oil in the bath or on your pillow to help you sleep.
It is not only flowers with smell that add to the sensory experience of a garden: leaves such as mint and lemon balm release an aroma when crushed. Tread on thyme and camomile, planted between the cracks of paving, and the air will fill with their scent. You can even create a thyme or camomile lawn, although it is best to do so somewhere that doesn’t have much traffic.
Vita Sackville-West designed two thyme lawns in different coloured varieties at Sissinghurst Castle, in Kent, to echo the Persian rugs she had seen on her travels. Sadly, there are now so many visitors to the property that you can no longer step on them.
If you feel inspired, but have only a regularly used space to spare, you could follow the lead of the gardeners at Buckingham Palace. The Queen’s lawns bear thousands of feet a year at royal garden parties — not to mention the garden tours that have started this year — so they have planted camomile among the regular grass.
A good example of a camomile lawn that thrives under moderate treading can be seen at 2 Prospect Place, in Outlane, Yorkshire, which will be open with the National Gardens Scheme today (noon-5pm; entry £2.50). A 9ft circular camomile lawn (Chamaemelum nobile ‘Treneague’) sits within a scented area that is surrounded by hedging. This is a clever trick, as the hedging helps to contain the scent; large shrubs and walls will also do the trick. Without them, the perfumes can be stolen by the breeze.
Brick walls are especially good for making use of scent, as their warmth encourages plants to release their perfumes, then captures it. You can see this in action in the half-acre sanctum at Hatfield House, in Hertfordshire, where the scented garden, planted with phlox, heliotropes, roses and pinks, was revamped last year and is surrounded by 9ft-high red-brick walls.
It’s not only human beings who appreciate perfumed plants; they are also excellent for encouraging wildlife. A butterfly’s sense of smell is estimated to be 1,000 times more powerful than our own, and it will travel many miles to visit the flowers it likes. “Each breed has plants it takes nectar from and plants it uses for egg-laying,” says Clive Farrell, founder of the new Butterfly World garden at Chiswell Green, in Hertfordshire. “If you grow the right things, your garden will flutter with your favourite butterflies.”
A safe bet is honey-scented buddleia, known as the “butterfly bush”. Butterflies are more partial to pink, lavender and white buddleias than to the trendy ‘Black Knight’ variety, Farrell says. Moths, meanwhile, go weak at the knees for the perfume and white petals of flowers such as honeysuckle and sweet rocket, which release their odours late in the day.
Don’t worry if you dislike moths — they will ignore you and plunge into the flowers. Dot the terrace with pots of nicotiana, lilies and pillars of jasmine. They will fill the air with perfume while you sip your evening drink and take a deep breath.
Streetwise
The online map company Streetwise are now offering free Google Maps linked into their planning maps. Users can view the same sites they have searched in aerial photography to assist them in selecting the right site. This is really useful where the site doesn't have a normal address and postcode such as a field.
Once a site is located on the aerial photography by clicking anywhere on the image it will display the address and the x,y map coordinates making searching even easier.
Demo: http://www.streetwise-maps.com/media/streetwise/Google_Aerial_Photos.html
Free searching. Just set up a free pay-as-you-go account and log-in www.streetwise-maps.com
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QUICK CONTENTS
Weird and Wonderful Architecture
Recently Chetwood Architects unveiled a stunning proposal for a futuristic London Bridge that sprouts a towering vertical farm in the midst of the Thames river.
More
Are Architects Ready To Tweet?
Sites such as Facebook, YouTube and Flickr share the ambition of taking the web beyond a surrogate publishing system and into the realm of an interactive medium. But how effectively are architects using their existing websites, and do the latest web 2.0 technologies have a place in architects’ communication and marketing armoury?
More
Modern Day Hunting Trophies
The popularity of hunting motifs, even in the most urban of interiors, is surprisingly enduring.
More
Solar Forest
Designer Neville Mars has developed an electric vehicle charging station that takes
the form of an evergreen glade of solar trees.
More
Flowers That Smell As Good As They Look
Over the past few weeks of warm weather, many of us will have enjoyed an all-too-rare chance to sit out in the garden in the evening.
More
Streetwise
The online map company Streetwise are now offering free Google Maps linked into their planning maps
More
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