11 July 2012

Centre 404 awaits hot summer


The green Oak pergola is complete and the vine ready to grow across to produce the first year of Chateau Caledonia wine (name yet to be confirmed)!

And last month we had the pleasure of showing designer and photographer Amandine Alessandra around the building - have a look at some of her work in progress photos of Centre 404 on our website.



9 July 2012

AECB conference 2012



Detailed and wide ranging workshops featured at the annual AECB conference this year, as well as the best opportunity to meet up with the most knowledgable green people around. Having been involved in organising it, I still managed to enjoy it enormously - the only problem was wanting to go to workshops that were happening at the same time!

On the wide ranging, I heard Blanche Cameron from Resit talking about unusual partnerships for change, she had some great examples of action where one would least expect it - and Chris Baines also talked about working on the Elephant scheme to retain a huge mature tree canopy as a starting point for redevelopment while Neil May talked about an 'uncertainty principle' approach to retrofit.

On the detail, some great discussion of ventilation from Mark Siddall and WARM Associates, retrofit and dealing with moisture by Andy Simmons among others. It will all be on the website soon, so do go and have a look at those you missed.

Have a look at the AJ's Footptint blog on this year's conference.

The Passivhaus masterclass on saturday with Wolfgang Feist was also a great success.
Thanks to Nick for the picture!
Fran