BUSY

It's been an eventful week.

Last weekend was spent primarily paper writing for a final paper for one of our short segment courses: Environmental Assessment for Buildings.
I also visited Dave's house in Brockley--- we took a walk through an awesome park in his neighborhood (up on a hill with great views), hung out at the big house where he lives (and watched Notting Hill), then went out to dinner to a great little pub in his neighborhood, and then went to a party at his new friends' house in near Canada Water and the docks.

Tuesday we went to the Brunel Museum for class which is in Rotherhide. The museum is at the entrance to the first tunnel to go under the Thames which was designed by Brunel for moving goods. The museum building contained the steam engines for pumping the Thames Tunnel. It was pretty cool to go down into the shaft where the tunnel began but our professor wanted us to focus on how the building was saved from demolition and how the museum gained momentum and has worked as an adaptive reuse scheme.
In the evening we went to a great Lecture at the RIBA. It was about creating change and international development through architecture. There were two interesting speakers. One of them was Ashu Sharma of SEEDs, which is a organization that works to build disaster resilient structures in India. He talked a lot about localism in design.


Wednesday we went on an all day trip out to Ipswich and surrounding areas. The trip was organized for our Structures and Materials course taught by Brian Morton. He arranged a great day and had a little bus take the 14 of us around everywhere. We visited Cressing Temple and saw the oldest timber framed barns in the world (and of course how they worked structurally). Then went to an adaptive reuse project-- housing in Mannigtree at a maltings (which is where they used to make beer.) We visited an actual home and saw how they double level maltings space had been split up into units. We also visited a couple churches. One was mostly in ruin but one side of the ruin, one aisle had been turned back into a church. Brian's firm had also worked on the structure there. My mom would have loved it.
Brian treated us to a great lunch at the Anchor in his home town, Walberswick. We had fish and chips and local beer.





















home in old maltings building! _______ At Cressing Temple learning about wood structures


Thursday we had the second of three sessions at the Victoria and Albert Museum on the history of British interiors. We focused on 1500-1750. Next week its 1750-1900's. The sessions are based in the British Gallery and a specialist on the exhibition takes us around.
That evening we went to see "The Woman in Black" a supposedly scary play that was showing in Covent Garden in the Fortune Theater.NYU gave us tickets to go. It was pretty campy but fun to see some live theater and be in that area at night.

Friday I went out to Peckham early to meet with Benny and go over some drawing stuff. I came back to my neck of the woods for a fancy tea at the Kingsgate Hotel--- which NYU paid for, and then made it down to Westminster for Evensong. Which was beautiful and also FREE.

This Saturday morning I went to a meeting of the "Sketchmob" at Southwark. Sketchmob is a group of architects and other professionals who like to draw in their spare time. Today they were drawing near Borough Market and Southwark to encourage others to draw. Dave met me there. We drew for a while and then had hot soup at the market and headed over to the Tate Modern.

Then I went to church with Kathleen and had a quiet night. (Well we watched No Country for Old Men... Don't know if you can call that quiet)

Today was definitely quiet! All I did was go to the gym and then I met my friends at the pub for roast (Sunday traditional meal at the pub).

Matt Barrows comes to town this week... hopefully we'll meet up!!