‘root-fin’ GSHP pipe plan

sketch of how the pipes might connect with the houses – via a timber ‘fin’ that would protrude from the sides of the outermost unit through the stacked wall, and down into the ground – then gripped into the ground by the little forests of coppiced willow

don’t panic. working things through again

list : jobs to do before the end of easter break…. (6 days)

finish 2 models – massing model (not really started, but have materials) and finish detail model – needs concentration, patience and time

finish putting together report with material gathered/written so far – order, and sort text and pull out relevant images

up to date drawings of my houses!! – detailed microstation drawings with plans and sections of the units and how they sit together – log the different options of configuration and circulation – have sketches, but need to clarify and develop – print pages for IDS presentation

keep up to date with diary – and decide on printable format

finish updating to new format last few old pages, and make sure i am up to date explaining in portfolio all that i have done recently

seems clear enough – but so much to do. and the real problem i am having is working out what to do first, as they all seem equally as important.

i think today i will spend the morning working on the massing model, and this afternoon do a stint in microstation drawing things up – at least work out the unit configuration options (and make a page of it) so i am ready to draw more detailed workings of houses next

there – that wasn’t too painful…. ?

mark lynas lecture at RIBA

‘international dialogues : Architecture and Climate Change’ at the RIBA

An interesting lecture, and a good mixed audience – Mark is very engaging, funny and a passionate speaker. his book ‘6 degrees’ sounds well researched and thorough, but the film that has been made from it by National Geographic (aimed at a north american audience) is cheesy and irritating.

he urges us to help make a difference to the decisions that will be made by the government in 21 months time – an international agreement that will decide the fate of our planet – sealing promises on energy and global carbon emissions until 2050….. apparently our last hope to keep global warming to only a 2 degrees increase in temperature – which will cause devastation enough.

not really sure how we are supposed to make a difference to these huge decisions though….

angled unit fronts, stacking and circulation workings

angled fronts allow for views to be unrestricted and no bedrooms to be overlooked. the living/kitchen space and the entrance/work space are angled in towards each other to create a protected, sheltered balcony space giving some of the characteristics of a courtyard.

the houses are configured of stacked units and entered from alternating sides down the hill – they are stepped and the units flow through the house starting with the least private room – the entrance/workspace, into the living/kitchen, and finaly through to the more private bathroom and bedrooms at the far end.

ramps could be used to lead through the entrance/work space and directly into the living/kitchen, but still experiencing the connection with the work space.

geek skills update:

well.

i have been to several workshops that were arranged at the AA this year, mainly Microstation ‘Generative Components’, and i have tried hard to find a way of making use of them in my project as i did a bit last year in my prototyping project. i understand the programme reasonably well, and have quite a good idea of what it is capable of and usefull for – which i am happy about, but i guess i just don’t have the desire to use it for my project just for the sake of it.

The thing is, that i have learnt Microstation this year, and am feeling pretty comfortable with it – which i think is achievement enough for the moment – i am actually ENJOYING using Microstation (after a little nagging, and some useful training sessions from jonas) – i still get a bit stuck and frustrated with it sometimes, but generally it is proving very useful and good to get another programme under my belt.

we were also shown ‘Ansys’ as a tool for simulation testing gravity pressure, air flows and earthquake movement, and i think that it could be something i would use in the future without too much difficulty – provided it was important enough to my project so that i had the drive and determination to persevere with it!

i still seem quite comfortable with ‘Rhino’, which i used extensively last year, especially in the early development part of my design.

i have been through a couple of points this year where i have had a bit of a block about drawing on the computer and got quite anxious about it – but i think i may have found a way to combine my hand-drawing skills with extracted microstation drawings, by printing out – sketching over on trace and then scanning in and merging the two images…. we will see.

‘Chinese greed menaces another natural treasure’

- a rather long-winded, but sadly true article i found about my site in leaping tiger gorge, (although i am just a couple of villages along in ‘monkey cries’ ) and the wider state of Chinese development. it was written in 1997, 11 years ago, and thankfully the hiking track is still in place, and i didn’t spot the golf course, but the road bustles busily and dustily by further below nearer the riverside, taking coach loads of camera-laden tourists to the leaping rock which used to be accessed only by a dramatic scramble down and a painful climb back up, and the villagers are not so excited about spotting a traveler anymore – unless they are staying in one of the now 5 guesthouses in the valley, and Qiatou the nearest town is full of pushy taxi drivers waiting to connect people with the airport and other towns…. but it is undeniably an amazing display of nature.

BY SIMON WINCHESTER | YUNNAN, CHINA — this is the story of an impending tragedy. Only a small tragedy, it is true, when set against other great sadnesses of the world, but a melancholy event nonetheless — and particularly so since it is one that, were it not for the fact of human greed, might well be avoided. It concerns a pretty little Chinese village called Walnut Grove, and a stupendous piece of Miocene creation and Carboniferous geology called the Tiger Leaping Gorge.

Both village and gorge lie in Yunnan Province, deep in China’s western mountains. This is land unlike anywhere else in the world: soaring snow-capped ranges, immense and unimaginably wild rivers, valleys crammed with the flowers — rhododendrons, camellias — that captivated the great Victorian collectors and that now grace formal gardens and herbaceous borders around the world. It is a country of steep cliffs and hidden Shangri-Las, and of secret temples that hum with monkish mantras and the eldritch creak of prayer-wheels. Until quite lately it was a land little-known to all but the most intrepid explorers. Today — and in this lies the roots of the new sadness — it is being opened to that most democratically empowered example of modern man, the international tourist. So where once there was wilderness, there is now an airport; where once a peaceful meadow grazed by yaks, now there are plans for a course for playing that most land-hungry of pursuits: golf.

I first went to Tiger Leaping Gorge three years ago. It is said to be the deepest river-gorge on the surface of the planet, an almost unimaginably deep declivity formed where the Jinsha-Jiang, the River of Golden Sand, has forced its way between two 18,000-foot peaks, the Dragon Snow Mountain and the Jade Snow Mountain. Miocene uplifting forced them up, the river cut them down. The combination of 5 million years’ worth of thrusting and slicing has produced something stupendous indeed.

The walk through the gorge takes someone who is reasonably fit two days. The only drawback is the route. You have to take an old miners’ track, a path that is so steep and precipitous and dangerous that you wonder how even goats, let alone miners, were ever brave enough to pass along it.

I can’t ever forget the first time I did it. A couple of miles from the village of Qiatou, where one starts, the path began to narrow — first to a yard, then to a foot, then to almost nothing. And at the same time the cliffs closed in — 5,000 feet of vertical blackness above my head, 1,000 of vertical terror below me and the foaming river roaring menacingly at the bottom. A single misstep — or a rock dislodged from above — and I would be dashed off the path, headlong into the maelstrom. Six people had been killed the week before I went. Their bodies had been found 20 miles downstream, smashed beyond recognition.

But though the path is thrillingly dangerous — “airy” is how one mountaineers’ guide described it, laconically — the rewards of being there are incalculable. And none more so than the moment of arrival at the midway point, the village of Walnut Grove. You round a bend, hugging the safety of the cliffside, daring not to look down — and then suddenly ahead, so very welcoming because it is, at long last, something safely horizontal, is a mile of shining rice paddies and vivid green fields. Above these fields, were their appearance not reward enough, is a huddle of tiny Chinese houses, all grace and upswept tiled eaves, and with blue smoke curling from a score of chimneys.

The villagers are always happy to see outsiders. They cluck and fuss over anyone who has dared make the journey. You eat and drink deep and well, you sleep peacefully to the steady roar of the river below, and if you are lucky, you wake to crystal-clear skies, sheer cloud-swirling cliffs and one of the greatest spectacles on the face of the earth.

And all the sweeter because you had walked it — anyone with enough fortitude and energy and luck could stride out from Qiatou and make it to Walnut Grove in a day; another day spent walking out to a tiny village called Daju, and the whole of Tiger Leaping Gorge could be accomplished, a memorable two days of personal achievement. That truly was central to the pleasure: personal demons conquered, fitness rewarded, sights of unimagined beauty offered in recompense. No money, privilege or rank was needed, merely a desire to go, to stride out, to triumph and to get there.
- but now, sad to say, it is all to change. For reasons of short-term profit and long-term madness, the authorities — and this basically means the bosses of one of the local counties — are now driving a road, a paved and metaled two-lane road, along what used to be the miners’ path. When I walked along the track this past month there were gangs of Szechuanese miners dynamiting the rocks — no Yunnanese, it was said, would stoop to do the task and so ruin what they proudly felt to be a legendary and a special place. The road will be halfway along by the end of this year. It will stretch all of the 30 miles from Qiatou to Daju by the middle of next.

Already the benefits, so called, of progress have reached Walnut Grove. There is electricity. There is talk of telephones. I saw a satellite dish. And this year when I tried to sleep to the ceaseless rumble of the river, I was interrupted instead by the thump of explosions. The road was coming closer, a few yards every day, a creeping reminder of the encroachment of something that no one in the village, and no one who has ever been there, wants to see.

Soon, said one of the villagers (a kindly man whom passers-by had once named Woody), there will be no more walkers — only cars that will speed through the gorge in a matter of minutes. There will probably before long be a proper hotel in Walnut Grove — not the cozy inn that exists today — and it will no doubt take credit cards, and in its rooms will be color televisions that show CNN and Rupert Murdoch’s Star TV.

Worse is to come. Down the road a millionaire from Thailand is said to be carving a golf course and a base for ski slopes into the meadows at the foot of Jade Dragon Snow Mountain. The airport at Lijiang has just been finished, and there are flights in and out four times a week. Where five years ago there were horse-drawn buggies on the lanes, last week I saw air-conditioned buses, hauling around people from Holland and Israel, their cameras clicking like cicadas.

The Chinese government, or the Yunnan provincial government, could have stopped all this. It could have declared Tiger Leaping Gorge a national park, it could have made Walnut Grove a national treasure, it could have named Jade Dragon Snow Mountain a sacred piece of the nation’s heritage. The Americans protected the Grand Canyon and Yosemite, after all, and the British protected Dartmoor. Nations can protect themselves from the mulishness and rapacity of their peoples.

But in China different dynamics operate these days. Long-term thinking has little relevance in a state that, for all of its recent existence, has been mired in the valueless idealism and wasted energies of a succession of Five-Year Plans. And since the county bosses want their money now, or soon, and since no law and no one in authority stands in their way, so the dynamite explodes, the road goes in, the electric power goes on and the tourists and their buses grind noisily and inexorably into Shangri-La.

But we all know the truth. In a few years other sites in China, or in the East, will have caught the popular mood, tourists will have wearied of this part of the planet, will have sought out still more difficult and pretty places. The world’s traveling classes are, above all, a capricious mob, given to whims of geography that are every bit as lunatic as the whims of the clothing trade. And in their caprices, and from the wishes of a few greedy men to make money from them, so the damage — to this lovely place in Yunnan as to a score of others elsewhere — will have been done.

Much has been written already about what terrible damage is about to be wrought 1,000 miles downstream: A huge dam is being built at a place called Sandouping, which will forever ruin the wonders of the Three Gorges, a far larger and better-known wonder of the natural world. The 100 miles of stunning cliffs and rapids and overfalls will soon be flooded and silenced; where once there were rushing waters and the drama of raw nature, there will soon be a vast sewage-filled lake, dead and stagnant. Hundreds of archaeological sites will be inundated, temples drowned, whole villages forced to move. And the Chinese authorities, despite a threnody of opposition, care not one whit.

Would that the ruin of their country were confined to just these Yangtze gorges, but one only has to look at the polluted air in Beijing, the crushing of the narrow-street hutongs and their replacement by freeways, the jostling of the hawkers on the paths to the Great Wall, the crass and the crude commercialization of a place like Guilin, or where the terra-cotta armies are near Xi’an, to know that the Chinese government of today cares precious little about the beauties of the treasure over which it presides.

The pleasure that one took particularly in Tiger Leaping Gorge, by virtue of its peace, its isolation and its beauty will now soon have gone forever. By tarmac and pollution and crowding, it will have been utterly and comprehensively ruined. The village of Walnut Grove will, in a way, have lost its soul. Somewhere special will have become merely commonplace, and worse.

And that really is a tragedy. The more so because we are able to see it while it is in the making, and to hear it happening, dynamite-blast by dynamite-blast. Yet we are powerless to do anything to stop it. It is not our country, all say: We on the outside must restrain our eagerness to interfere. Yet unless small crimes like this are stopped from happening, one reality is clear: that China, which possesses such world-class wonders within its vast frontiers, risks in the future becoming an unlovely place indeed. And for always. That is a concern that the whole world must surely share — which is why it is right, surely, for the outside world to wonder at what China is currently doing to itself, all in the name of profit and greed.
June 10, 1997

chat with carsten on technical issues and mice

good talk with carsten about my IDS report. lots of points to consider, but nothing that cannot be dealt with – just need to remember to cover it all!

where do i start… need to decide on a theoretical geological situation and resolve a plan that deals with it, this will include knowing about contracts that cover you for possible subsidence issues (MPL), and considers in the design the possibility of the individual timber piles settling differently to one another – movement joints and vent spaces between units etc.

explain that why i think it is ok to use the UK building regs over the Chinese ones – maybe look into the differences if time.

fire risk – intsumescent varnish on the solid timber shells of the building will be fine if i use the water based non-chemical version that i found, but carsten suggests that i look at the burn time of solid timber, as i may be possible to make the walls a bit thicker, and not need any coating.

on ecological grounds he suggests that i embrace the fact that my stacked timber walls will make great nesting spaces for mice, spiders and birds, rather than planting mothballs in the stacks to discourage them as done in Austrian woodpiles.

i need to work out roughly how much area of coppiced wood is needed to long-term sustain my project – probably by asking my friendly bod at the forestry commission – or waiting until next month when i am booked onto a coppicing course in dorset for a day – also ask what dimension the wood will be at 8-10 years growth to help with the insulating qualities calculations.

carsten suggests a 100mm insulating barrier all around my building behind the stacked timber insulation, as a just-in-case barrier, also useful coverage whilst replacing the stacked wood, and i think this is probably a good idea as it will also mitigate against the possibility of bad craftsmanship – and sloppy stacking skills.

and lastly – i think – he recommends a system of rotated drying racks for the wood to air dry a little before stacking – as wet wood is not as good an insulator as dry wood due to the extra conductivity of water.

the physical format of the report is up to us, and we do not have to stick to the given 4 chapter written format – it is ok to break it into chapters that relate to our individual projects.

i forgot to ask about what is expected for the presentation in 3 weeks…

4D

how did i live without it….

ids progress and the details start to come together

i have spent the weekend going through the back entries of my blog, my 4 sketchbooks, my box of date-stamped info gathered and my portfolio pages to pull out the relevant information to start to compile my ids report. i seem to have a fair amount on cultural context, environment and sustainability, materials and engineering of structure – and have already written 6000 words of notes…. but i am missing a significant part for the ‘management practice and law’ chapter. i guess i really will need to read the building regs properly… not just part L. i need to think about fire, access/escape and health and safety, as well as looking at a copy of the RIBA project plan – or whatever it is called.

unfortunately the model has not progressed this weekend, but i have been thinking quite a bit about the internal configuration of the housing units, and the individual configurations down the hillside – variations in pattern and how to adapt to the terrain, as well as create some openings in the interlocking/stacked terrace.

the book i got on housing floor plans ‘the floor plan manual’ has been fantastic to decide on workable floor areas for the different rooms in the houses.

tutorial and IDS panic mitigation

apparently my diary is going ok.

however, the report has been an issue that has been niggling at the back of my mind for a while, but today was the first time that i actually have got to grips a bit with what the content needs to be – and it seems that there is a fair amount that i have already gathered, just not formatted – that is relevant for the report. so off i go.

my model is coming along slowly, but is proving to be a very useful exercise in working through the details, material configurations and spatial issues – also looking at the way that the buildings root into the hillside.

jonas mentioned that he will be including my project in a package of ideas for for a northern Swedish ski resort project – think i might have to use it as an excuse to visit the snow… it will however require a little extra consideration of roofing materials and drainage.