The Lost Cuckoo this weekend

Thibaut Devulder

2hd and Marcus Rowlands would like to invite you, your family and friends to come and take part in The Lost Cuckoo, an exciting outdoor public art installation.

For the last four months we have been working with families from three schools inthe Bilborough area of Nottingham. Together we have designed a cardboard construction module that can be assembled to build unusual structures and forms. The families will be on hand to share ideas and help with your creations.

This event is part of the International Children’s Theatre and Dance Festival happening at the Lakeside Arts Centre, Nottingham, on Saturday 4th and Sunday 5th June from11am to 5pm.

You can download this printable poster to spread the word. We are looking forward to seeing you there!

This project is being supported by the Lakeside Arts Centre, the Arts Council England, Faspak, Staples and Nottingham Education Improvement Partnership.

Mass observation

Thibaut Devulder

Our friend Colin Haynes, who worked with us on the Sneinton Trail project, has just introduced me to the Mass Observation movement.

Initiated in 1937 by anthropologist Tom Harrisson, poet Charles Madge and film-maker Humphrey Jennings, this project aimed to record the daly life of Britain through diaries or open-ended questionnaires filled in by hundreds of untrained volunteers. Recording everything, from everyday conversations to wall graffiti and jokes heard in public occasions, they created strangely detailed and offbeat snapshots of British society.

Oscar-winning director Kevin Macdonald visits the Mass Observation Archive to talk about the inspiration behind Life In A Day. With thanks to the Mass Observation Archive for allowing us to shoot this clip at the archive and for their generous assistance www.massobs.org.uk ife In A Day is a historic global experiment to create the world's largest user-generated feature film: a documentary, shot in a single day, by you.

We love to share

Thibaut Devulder

At 2hD we work in close collaboration but generally a couple of thousand kilometres apart. While the gap between us can come and go, the work needs to flow on a seamless basis. We mash together a number of technologies to achieve this, but one tool has really helped us to crack our file sharing issues: SugarSync.

It is a cloud based backup that allows a fairly fine-grained control over which files get synced to where. We think it is, well... sweet.

If you would care to check it out, we can both benefit from free storage — 500 mb each if you sign up for a free (5 Gb) account, and 10 Gb each if you decide to move up to a paid account. Just follow this referral link. Sweet syncing!

2hD's Alina travels to Romania and Hungary as a trade mission delegate

Thibaut Devulder

Alina has been instrumental in the setting up of a Trade Mission to Romania and Hungary by the Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire Chamber of Commerce and the Enterprise Europe Network. Building on our industry and academic contacts in Timisoara, Romania, the mission will also visit Szeged in Hungary to explore new business opportunities in these two emerging markets. 

We packed Alina off with a small stack of our first printed 2hD "brochure" — a simple fold-out A4 flyer that says something about our approach and expertise. The main aim being to look too nice to throw in the bin, provide some intrigue and direct people here to the website. We hope it works...

Sandbox manual

Thibaut Devulder

As part of our submission for the Structures on the Edge competition, we created a fun model sandbox to illustrate the participative construction process for our Stranded installation. We invited the public to interact with the model and to play on a miniature dune, equipped with our scale prototypes of the facetted concrete sculpture and some toy tools.

Of course, we couldn't resist creating a little manual for the sandbox!

2hD in RIBA journal

Thibaut Devulder

A great article on East Midlands regional architecture practice has appeared in the Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects. It features 2hD's Alina Hughes talking about her dual roles in practice and education, and the importance for the region of retaining talented graduates.

The Lost Cuckoo takes flight

Thibaut Devulder

We have started work with artist Marcus Rowlands on the Lost Cuckoo project. Working with families from 3 schools in the Bilborough area of Nottingham, we will collaborate on the design of a bespoke cardboard module or system. This will be used by the families and visitors at the International Children’s Theatre and Dance Festival in the live creation of an interactive community sculpture.

In our first set of workshops we asked families to build with standard cardboard boxes and colourful tapes. They produced an amazing array of sculptures and spaces, pushing the boxes to do the unexpected and giving us plenty of inspiration to start the design of our special module.

Further workshops will run over the months until the Festival, on June 4th and 5th at the Lakeside Arts Centre.

This project is being supported by the Lakeside Arts Centre, the Arts Council England, Faspak and Nottingham Education Improvement Partnership.

Quieting the lizard brain

Thibaut Devulder

Seth Godin exhorting us to "thrash at the beginning" of projects so that we can ship on time and on budget.

"What you do for a living is not be creative, what you do is ship," says bestselling author Seth Godin, arguing that we must quiet our fearful "lizard brains" to avoid sabotaging projects just before we finally finish them.

LaM Pavilion: some technical information

Thibaut Devulder

As we get many enquiries about the inflatable event space we recently designed for the Lille Metropole Museum of Modern Art (LaM), here's a little technical summary.

Dimensions

  • Usable internal area: 360 m2
  • Overall footprint: 400 m2
  • Max dimensions: 40 m (length), 15 m (width), 19 m (overall width), 8 m (height)

Anchors

  • Ground anchors: 500 mm deep Terra-bolt screws (or equivalent traction anchors, metal or plastic), every 2 meters of perimeter 
  • Ballast (alternative): 500kg every 2 meters of perimeter

Inflation system

  • 15 centrifugal fans (12 active plus 3 backups), 1.5 kW power each, equipped with noise silencers.
  • All fan units wired to pressure-sensitive alarm system

Materials

  • Main surface: Ripstop Nylon, white translucent
  • Air beams: PVC coated polyester, white

Feel free to contact us if you need more information...

A photographic dialogue

Thibaut Devulder

To keep our photographic juices flowing, Tom and I started a photographic dialogue more than a year ago. The rule of the dialogue was simple: one at a time, we regularly post images on Flickr, responding to each other's image in some way — form, light, colour, theme, etc. Only two constraints: 1. photos must be chronological and 2. we don't discuss our photos — we just respond with another photo and never explain the response...

Thirteen months later, the photographic dialogue is taking some interesting turns...

We wanted to display this dialogue on our website, but our Content Management System (TextPattern) did not allow this straight out-of-the-box. No problem: we resorted to our proven mashing approach to web design...

Both Tom and I were already using Flickr to share our photos, so it made sense to use this existing service to manage the images and display them on our website in a dialogue format. We did this by creating a private group on Flickr to which we posted our photos, and automatically pulled these images to our website with a few lines of code, using the powerful Flickr API and the PHPFlickr library.

Alina's presidency

Thibaut Devulder

2hD's Alina is president of the Nottingham and Derby Society of Architects (NDSA), and she has been busy! With a revitalised membership and restructured board, the Society now meets twice a month to take forward its plans. A work shadowing scheme has been set up to place architecture students into local practices as part of their studies, a trade mission has been set up to Nottingham's twin city of Timisoara in Romania, and a new web site and lecture series are in the pipeline. 

On the social calendar, the annual NDSA quiz will take place on 6th Dec, and a Facebook group takes care of the networking. 

2hD at Lincoln Architecture Society

Tom Hughes

The Lincoln Architecture Society invited 2hD along to give a talk as part of their evening lecture series. I was genuinely impressed by the professionalism of the students who run the society — an excellent welcome pack in my email a few days before the event giving all the info I needed to get to there and a warm welcome and introduction.

Here are a few of the slides from my talk, which covered the Sky Vault project, the barn conversion in the Dordogne, our work on the NTU architecture course, Mission Control (our hairy micro-office), our Structures on the Edge shortlisted competition entry and the inflatable event space.

Their lecture series looks great — it brings kudos the the Lincoln School of Architecture and is definitely worth checking out if you are in the East Midlands. Take a look at their website.

Adventure Play Centre

Tom Hughes

It's nice to get a recommendation and to support local projects!

This play centre is in need of extra space for an office and creche, and wants to make use of sunken no-man's land corner of their site. However they have no resources for the project until they get funding, and to get that they have to run the idea past the local planners and other stakeholders.

Sometimes in situations like this we can help to break the deadlock by putting a little bit of work in 'up front'. A local contact who we worked with on the Sneinton Trail project put us in touch with the play centre, we went to take a look, and turned out these simple drawings. It's a start.

On one level this is just a feel-good thing to do, but it isn't purely altruistic: it means that there might be a real project sometime in the future (one which would improve our community), we build up a huggable reputation, we might get another recommendation out of it, and we can write and illustrate some self promotional material like this.