Thursday, March 21, 2013

Last week of spring term

20 Mar 2013: The equinox day started with heavy fluffy snow falling and it was the day of our final tutorial before the vacation. Unfortunately, I completely forgot to take a photo during the day!
   We started with a lecture by Richard Waterhouse and Savita Poojari of ActivePlan. They have visual information database modelling software that allows for managed maintenance of facades in tall buildings. They already have a contract for 3 tall buildings in London, including Tower 42. This was a useful lesson in the importance of making the facade durable, and of designing it to be accessible using cleaning cradles. Incidentally, Savita who has worked on this is one of the first cohort of Sustainable Tall Buildings graduates from our course.
 We then had a Lecture from John Macdonald of Ecoworks, a Nottingham based organisation promoting the local growing of edible fruit and nuts. He is also working with Splant. See their YouTube video at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHAj-zAbI3Q.
See also http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaCnnWBnRuE.
Although he doesn't know skyscrapers specifically, he understands Vertical Farming, and is excellent at discussing the organisation of species to achieve greatest productivity. Ecoworks/Splant is involved in developing one of about 4 storeys in Nottingham that may be the first in the UK. Best of luck to John with that! John stayed till 2pm helping 4 of the groups who had chosen to include either vertical farming or rooftop farming. We also had Matt Humphreys (from last semester's Singapore project) explaining his vertical farming project for Tanjong Pagar.
The rest of the day was spent on Tutorials with DNC and Phil, trying to help the students make crucial decisions before the long March-April break. 

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