The Green Room is an outdoor sculpture area on the corner of Wellington Street and Northern Street.

Cover in green astroturf, it will include huge living room furniture such as a television, table, sofa and a lamp, and won’t help but capture the public’s imagination and become a talking point. Rick de Blaby, chief executive of MEPC, has said “Our vision is to create the definitive new urban quarter for Leeds of the highest quality. We especially want to create a fantastic public domain so it will be a great place to live and work and enjoy all of the associated amenities that we will be bringing forward.”

Abstract from MEPC Website

Circle represents the UDP for Leeds city centre.

Some images of the tallest building in Leeds, following a rooftop visit and talk by the Leeds Civic Architect John Thorpe.

Accommodation : Primarily public at ground floor (mixed-use), vertically offices & residential.

Developer: KW Linfoot

Architects: Aedas

The Peak Districts Moorland Centre in Edale by Bower Mattin has sedum roofs over two wings of the information centre and shop, whilst a glass bottomed waterfall brings you into the reception space with light and water above. Worth a visit for a pint in the local Old Nags Head

A waterfall forms the central roof visible and audible from the inside

Sedum roof eaves detail at The Moorland Centre in Edale

The new centre makes a bridge between the outstanding clinical expertise of Moorfields Eye Hospital and the research prowess of the adjacent Institute of Ophthalmology to provide a world class children’s eye treatment facility. The arrangement of outpatients clinics, a day surgery unit, research facilities and short stay patient/parent hostel all within a very tight site has made the vertical connections between floors all important. On each floor light wells zig-zag up the building against the backdrop of a huge wall mural. Throughout, the design combines medical functionality with a rich, welcoming and easily navigable patient environment. The arresting exterior has a glass façade with a flowing pattern of aluminium solar control louvre blades - inspired by the idea of a wheeling flock of birds.

World Architecture News.Com

The School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape at Newcastle University would like to invite you to an afternoon of two talks by distinguished Australian architect Paul Pholeros.

Paul is Adjunct Professor at the University of Sydney. He directs his own architectural firm with projects across Australia and recently China. Paul’s work is essentially concerned with creating places for people which engage profoundly with their environment and landscape.

Projects range from residential to community and ecotourism developments, foregrounding sociocultural, environmental and technological sustainability.

In the first of his two talks, Paul will show a recently completed tourism project in South East China.

Together with doctor Paul Torzillo and anthropologist Stephen Rainow, Paul established HealtHabitat in the mid 80s. HealtHabitat aims to improve the health of Indigenous Australians. Over the years, it has made substantial achievements in this area by working with remote Indigenous communities, housing associations, state and federal government agencies. It has been instrumental in influencing national government policy on Indigenous housing, culminating in the National Framework for the Design Construction and Maintenance of Indigenous Housing and the National Indigenous Housing Guide here. Among many others, HealtHabitat is currently managing a significant national project - Fixing Houses for Better Health - see here. In the second of his talks, Paul will discuss the history and the work of HealhHabitat.

There are likely to be many parallels and shared experiences between Paul and pracitioners working across diverse sectors in the UK - from landscape, planning and architecture to local and national government sectors concerned with health and housing policy. We hope that Paul’s talks will prompt broader discussions about such issues for mutual benefit.

Paul will speak between 3 and 6pm on Tuesday 3 July in Room 220, Level 1, Research Beehive, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne [location]. Chris P has a flyer for the talks and a summary of the work of HealtHabitat.

I do hope you can make time to join us. The event is open to all but you must RSVP to Anne.Fry@ncl.ac.uk by June 22 to reserve a place.

I heard about this on Newsnight last night and thought it was a good idea. I am buying an acre for my wifes birthday, won’t she be thrilled.If you are likeminded it could be a good way to offset your carbon footprint.  

Visit www.coolearth.org  and www.timesonline.co.uk

“Cool Earth puts the rainforest countries into the driving seat. The world desperately needs their help and they now have every right to expect the world to start paying for the destruction it has wrought to the entire planet’s wellbeing.”

Bennetts Associates is relying on designed-in sustainability, rather than renewables, for its refurbishment of Ashburton Court in Winchester. During the refurbishment the top floor of the buildings will be cut back, pedestrian bridges removed, and new one-storey buildings built at the centre of the block along a new internal street to house a reception area, a restaurant and café, an auditorium and meeting rooms. Analysis of the building’s concrete frame, slabs and foundations using Envest, the BRE’s Whole Lifecycle Environmental Impact Analysis software, showed that they comprise about half of the building’s embodied energy.

Winchester has not adopted a mandatory 10%, but rather a suggestion of renewables. After extensive analysis, Bennetts was able to demonstrate that the real issue was overall energy consumption, not the percentage of on-site generation.

Architects Journal. 26 Apr (Pg. 38-40)

Designing out risk in public spaces is in danger of going too far, argues the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment, with a rash of bland and standardised spaces being the inevitable result. The agency that has done so much to restore the importance of quality space alongside quality buildings, now wants designers and their clients to start challenging the risk-averse culture that is becoming entrenched.

In its latest report, Living with risk: promoting better public space, CABE suggests that compensation culture fears may have been overstated; while fear of litigation clearly lies behind the risk-free design response, the reality is that the level of personal injury claims in the UK has been falling. And CABE has attracted some unexpected allies to its new campaign, including the Health and Safety Executive and Zurich Municipal, the largest insurer of local authorities.

Basing its conclusions on case studies and a survey of key organisations, the report suggests there is significant agreement among the key organisations involved that the situation needs to change and that too much professional effort is being devoted to designing out risk, to over-design and to ad hoc design interventions.

The way forward, of course, is for a sensible and proportionate approach to design based on normal behaviour, rather than freak accidents. The report offers a number of principles that can be applied, including the early involvement of all of the main user groups in any risk assessment process.

CABE is preparing a briefing on humanising streets that will look at the balance that can be achieved in shared and civic spaces.

The CABE report even dares to suggest that risk can be celebrated, as long as there is a clear design vision to manage it and any opportunities for positive risk taking are clearly communicated – hope CABE has got its relevant cover in place.

Living with risk: promoting better public space is available as a briefing or in full if you follow this link.

[RIBA PRACTICE BULLETIN - No. 400   - Ref: 32]