week note #1
Here’s the first of a new series of posts called ‘week notes’ – an idea created by Matt Webb and Jack Schulze at BERG to see what happens when you take the time to reflect on what you’re doing and what you’ve achieved every seven days.
We’re not sure how well this will translate in the slightly slower moving world of architecture and construction, but it’s got to be worth a try…
Week note #1
We’ve kicked off 2012 with technical challenges and event planning, with some of the office working on construction details and some of us plotting ways to develop the work ideas we’re interested in pursuing this year.
Our latest BMHT sites achieved planning approval at the end of last year, so now we’re turning our hand to a few details to help guide the construction costing as it goes out to tender this month. Katie has been getting to grips with the product that I covered in my review for BD’s Envelope magazine last year – Ibstock’s Tilebrick.
Lorna has started her second month with us after spending December getting our web site back in to shape and wrestling Highrise – our CRM system – into submission. This month will be about crafting things to share with clients such as newspapers, iPad apps, bookleteers and planning seminars on Passivhaus and Retrofit. Elsewhere in the office admin department there’s a New Year tidy underway, bringing with it a decision to finally throw out many of the old magazines we’ve hoarded for years. Thanks to a twitter conversation I’m hoping they’ll be heading to Birmingham School of Architecture rather than lost forever.
Mike is busy drawing, and site layouts for more BMHT projects are filling up pieces of tracing paper. Next week we’ll need to start working them up in BIM. The challenges of creating new streets and communities in some of the city’s infill sites means once again we have to return to first principles in places and question the house type and tenure possibilities for the neighbourhood. Liz is pulling together the final pieces of the puzzles that were presented to us in BMHT’s Phase 3, coordinating levels, manipulating landscape and arranging surfaces of buildings and gardens.
Meanwhile, I’m working on our live retrofit projects, talking to builders about costs and load-bearing structures at one end; working up our first estimate with a QS at the other and trying to make sure that the more innovative products like Porotherm and Homatherm are well understood. ‘R&D’ into the new map making tool by CASA and attempting to install a time management tool on our web server is ensuring the usual levels of geek research are maintained. Oh, and the file server is misbehaving. It’s a good job I like I.T.
This week we have been mostly listening to Radio 6, although I’m hatching a plan to introduce more dubstep and see what the results on productivity are.
Happy New Year!
