Since I haven't shown anything in a while, here's a little bit of recent work. It was a one week long site survey undertaken as a group of three. Sandra, Dianne and I had to present a snapshot of an area of Manchester as we understood it, and hopefully draw some conclusions which would inform the coming project - accommodation and working space for thirty artists.
Although the requirements were for three A1 sheets, we chose to work predominantly in sketchbooks. Although possibly the worst medium for explaining ideas to critics, and for reproducing the work in our portfolios (or on the Internet!), it allowed us to work simultaneously on the finished product, and gave us a set of portable tools for the rest of the project. I like to explore new ways that we can collaborate.
We did eventually compromise and produce some A1s too. These were dominated by a traced map which contextualised the ideas in the sketchbooks and facilitated a decent discussion of the local area during the crit. In case you're wondering, the creeping creatures are Dianne's pets, and they're pointing out some views of key local features. They attracted a fair amount of attention :D.


Here's a couple of links I've been checking lately:
Angelina Gualdoni - the work of an excellent painter who I hadn't encountered before (from mestcs)
No Garlic Please - much as I disagree with the name, this is an excellent source of freshness (from We Make Money Not Art)
Rift Trooper HQ - good to see a mention of the She One/Kid Acne show taking place at the Myymala 2 (*shop 2*) gallery in Helsinki where I spent plenty of time - big up yerself man like Hayes.
Additionally:
3D badmeaninggoodness
cassettes, via Arkitip, via Turntablelab


In other news, we've finalised a date and place for our Christmas Ball. 6th December for all you scousers. There's plenty more organisation to come, but all is under control.

Last week myself and three other University of Liverpool students were joined by a pair of students from JMU for the Archaos meeting in Oxford Brookes. It's a gathering of architecture school reps from around the country, and the theme this time was the future of architectural education. Not only did we meet some magnificent students, but we managed to hack out some recommendations to important organisations about how architecture might be taught in the future. As a school we'll definitely continue to participate - the organisers managed to make it a pretty crucial part of the calendar.
A point which had me thinking was the value for students of working at 1:1. I've always pined for a bit more of this in our course, and everything that has happened has been self-motivated. Contrast this with courses where almost all of your credit one semester will come from the design and construction of an actual piece of architecture, with mechanisms in place for obtaining planning permission and so on. I began to wonder whether this was actually too ridiculous to put so much emphasis on, since the structure would never be too ambitious with the average student's lack of craftmanship and manual clout. I hope to be proved wrong!

Cheers for now//D