Ireland Wood Surgery has been shortlisted for this year’s RIBA Northern Network Awards. The scheme will be up against 37 other shortlisted entries, with the awards due to be presented on Friday 4th November. Fingers are firmly crossed.

Ireland Wood Surgery is a contemporary, new medical centre in Cookridge, Leeds. The scheme includes a GP practice, pharmacy and optician, providing a new focal point for health services in the area. The design uses steel frame construction to provide a spacious, double height waiting area and reception, linking into a fully flexible clinical area. All public space is provided at ground floor, where a bright colour scheme ensures clear navigation around the double corridor arrangement. This sustainable development includes built-in expansion to the first floor, and has been awarded the first BREEAM Excellent for primary care in Leeds.

The Architects’ Journal have published an interesting interview with Paul Morrell, chief construction advisor to the government, about the the inevitable rise of BIM software. For anyone slightly behind the curve, that’s Building Information Modelling software such as Revit.

You need a registered account to read the full article (available here) but in essence he’s talking about a 5 year programme to roll out compulsory use of BIM software for all public projects, starting next summer. Keep those Revit skills honed and ready…

It’s been a while since the last photos, but Ireland Wood Surgery is now fairly well progressed on site. The external rendering is now virtually complete and all the glazing is in place. Coloured Trespa panels will soon be fitted over the timber battens you can see in the bottom image, to complete the external appearance.

Work is continuing at pace on Ireland Wood Surgery; these photos were taken on Thursday. The green netting and scaffolding are doing a fine job of hiding the building at the moment but the roof and walls are approaching completion.

Yes, the column is meant to be at that angle.

The project is run by Abstract Healthcare Management for Assura Medical Centres, with Tolent Construction. Despite the tropical amounts of rain that seem to be hitting Leeds this autumn, we’re still on programme.

Work is progressing nicely on Ireland Wood Surgery in Leeds a GP surgery and pharmacy for Assura Medical Centres and Tolent Construction. This photo was taken a couple of weeks ago so things have moved on a little, but you can already see the form taking shape.

The project is due to finish on site in Spring 2011. I’ll update with more photos as work continues.

It’s that time of year again! Here are the Leeds and London office entries for the annual egg-decorating competition. And the winner? Ryan’s lovely easter bunny, which beat off a number of less traditional entries including a whiteread-esque gelatine egg mould, a robot-spider egg, a crystal-encrusted egg, a P+HS graffiti egg, a trio of spiraling silver eggs and an intricately perforated egg-shell.

For the judges this year, conceptual art was soundly beaten by good old fashioned easter charm.

It looks like the endorsement of Adrian Taylor is more than enough to convince the shoppers of Harrogate – nearly all the stocks of Treacle Stout sold out at Fodder following Adrian’s recommendation. Rumours are circulating that the Taylor seal of approval will be rolling out across other product ranges shortly.

If anyone is interested, Leeds Met University is holding its annual Arts Festival at the moment, with the architecture section opening this weekend. The exhibition is split over three sites (all in and around Leeds city centre) and includes selections of work from a whole range of creative disciplines, including graphic design, art, architecture, landscape, film making and performing arts. More information can be found on the LMU website.

1. To fix this, start off by installing Service Pack 1 – this will prevent the problem reoccurring once the drawings are sorted out. It’s on both our servers ready to install, and only takes 2 mins. Alternatively download it here.
2. Clear out the redundant scales in each drawing by entering the “-SCALELISTEDIT” command. Choose ‘Reset’ and ‘Yes’. Or
3. For batch clearing of entire affected jobs, use Autodesk’s ‘Scale List Clean-up Utility’ to reset the whole lot back to match our template. See Andy (Stokesley) or myself (Leeds) for a hand doing this.

Once everyone is upgraded with the service pack we will never have the problem again. Hopefully.

After an entertaining planning committee panel yesterday, P+HS gained planning permission for Tinshill Medical Centre. Approval of the exact design details have been deferred for the case officer to approve, but we have already been working closely with the planning team to ensure that the crispness of the design is followed through thoroughly.

The medical centre, on Old Otley Road in north Leeds, is approximately 1700m2, and includes pharmacy and GP facilities.

Ryan and I are getting ever closer to the end of our student days – all that’s standing between us and our Part II is the small matter of a thesis project. Our tutors have encouraged us to pursue ‘open learning’, by which they mean sharing our work with peers, colleagues and pretty much anyone who will look. We have therefore set up blogs where we can publish the entire development process of our design projects, and where people can comment on the work we post online.

Please have a look at the sites and then, if you’re interested in helping out, check back every week or two and comment and what you see. Any feedback will be hugely useful to us.

The sites are…

http://aireabbey.blogspot.com

http://the-urban-scout.blogspot.com

Obviously we are at a very early stage right now (design work doesn’t really start until January) but we have made a start. We hope you like them, comment on them, and continue to watch as our designs develop into the unprecedented masterpieces they’re bound to be.

Thanks!

The shortlist for the Young Architect of the Year was announced last week – websites of shortlisted practices are linked below. If you’re stuck for inspiration, have a browse. As always, it’s mostly quite impressive competition entries, card models and graphics but if you look hard you can find a few built projects between them…

http://www.mcchesney.co.uk/

http://www.hhmck.com/

http://www.serie.co.uk/

http://www.feixandmerlin.com/

http://www.theaoc.co.uk/

http://www.kraus-schoenberg.com/

Whilst we’re on the subject of student work…

The Leeds School of Architecture, Landscape and Design has invited P+HS to the guest preview the end of year exhibition, on Thurs 5th June 6pm-9pm.

The exhibition is open to the public from Fri 6th to Fri 13th between 10am-4pm (Saturday 7th June 10am-2pm).

The exhibition will be held in Hepworth Point, Leeds Metropolitan University, Claypit Lane, Leeds, LS2 8BQ.

Displays will include work from:

Architecture
Landscape Architecture
Garden Art and Design
Interior Architecture and Design
Design
Graduate Certificate Landscape Architecture
PG Dip Architecture
PG Dip/MA Landscape Architecture

It seems that garden design is actually a separate course to landscape architecture, who knew? By this point, the exhibition consists of refined selection, hand-picked by the tutors, and so should only contain the good stuff (i.e. can’t guarantee us P+HSers will have any work on display, but some or all of us might do).

Just wanted to say thanks to all the staff who sat in on my university project design review and contributed valuable feedback. Whilst there is still more work to be done, the project is basically over and passed as smoothly as I could have hoped. So thanks very much everyone, cheers for the help.