UK - Day 11

Slept backward with my feet at the headboard, so my head was right at the window and I could sleep with the breeze on my face and wake up to sunlight and the view of the courtyard below. This is a nice way to wake up!
We take a train to Oxford today, where the taxis are all painted up and they have parking lots for bicycles!
We have a long walk to our first appointment, and I can't help but snap pictures along the way:
Our destination: Sue Roaf's famous Ecohouse in a typical little neighborhood. From the front, it looks like any ol' house:
But, from the backyard, you can see it's been designed with a 'green' priority:
The property is deep enough that she can control obstacles that might block her southern exposure to the sun. No neighbor is close enough on that side to plant a tree or build anything that would take away her solar gain. The walls of the house are thick and heavily insulated, the windows are triple-pane, and the conservatory serves as a buffer so that the interior of the house itself stays at an almost constant temperature - varying only by 2 or 3 degrees throughout the day. When it does get cold outside, she has a little 'cackle oven' that radiates heat that flows right up the stairs to the 2 stories above as well as throughout the main space on the first level.
After the Ecohouse, we have lunch at a local pub with Rajat Gupta and Fionn Stevenson. The company is intriguing and the food is fabulous. This is where I fall right in love with Brie/Cranberry paninis.
Up next, a tour of the North Wall Arts Centre - an award-winning building that houses a private school of drama. Although it is a private school, they opted to open the theater and art gallery to the public to engage the community. It is actually an adaptive reuse project and incorporates an original Victorian school as well as a medeival wall, hence the name North Wall. That wall is now the exterior wall of the building, seen here:
The original Victorian school was built in 1873 and had a church with it as well. In 1888, they added a swimming pool that operated for the next 100 years. With the rules that come with remodeling a historic building, they were not allowed to take out the structure of the swimming pool. So, with some creative design, they turned it into the theater!
Once we're done admiring the arts centre, we have more walking and tours ahead but our tour guide is nowhere to be found. So, we sit around outside the North Wall and wait for awhile. An adorable little girl and her mother go walking by on the sidewalk where I'm sitting and the little girl is carrying a little white daisy. I just smile at her and she grins and tries to hand the flower to me. Knowing she'll take better care of it, I don't want to take it and tell her to put it in her hair instead. Her mother gives me a dirty look, but that little girl just grins from ear to ear and tucks it in her hair and keeps looking over her shoulder with that cute little smile as her mother tugs her off down the street. After all the walking and waiting today, that makes my day! There is a private elementary school letting out across the street and we watch in complete bewilderment while taxi after taxi stops in to pick up one child and take him/her away. What a strange way to go home from school every day...
Finally, our tour guide rides up on her bicycle and we get ready for another long walk, following her as she pushes her bicycle along. Next on the agenda is Oxford University, but we are early for our tour, so we duck inside the museum across the street to kill a little time.
One step inside, and I wish my nephews were with me! They'd love this!

I really like the environment created by the structure of the buildings and the bone structure of the prehistoric animals. The scale of it all is stunning. All around the perimeter of the main room are statues of famous scholars/inventors/etc. that tell their stories without even having to read their names. Any guesses who this might be? (hint: he's puzzling about an apple at his feet)
Then, as we cut across the grass toward our long-awaited tour of Oxford University, we see that something else has done the same thing!
Oxford University:
Each Oxford location has its own chapel...and this one is awe-inspiring.
The dining hall where the students still come to eat dinner each day, dressed in their robes:
The tile floor is wearing down and some portions have cracked and need replacing. With the bureaucracy that must be passed through in order to approve any work done on these incredible historic buildings and the time it takes to find and order tile that matches the original exactly, they have had to come up with a temporary solution. They have rugs made to look just like the tile and lay it over the cracked areas until a permanent solution can be done. In the daylight, the rugs are easy to see, but our tour guide says under different lighting at dinner time they blend right in.
They have one rather new building on campus - the Sloan Robinson building (2002) - that definitely stands apart from the others. The warden was very proud of the unconventional way they decided to use the brick, even though they were unable to mimic the brickwork on the original buildings. She was also proud of their efforts to make this building sustainable.
They have ground source heating and cooling and roll-down doors that come down on the inside of the large windows to hold in the heat overnight. They planned in open flexible spaces and use an evacuation system for their toilets (like in airplanes) rather than the water-consuming flush.
As much as she went on about their design considerations in this building, I couldn't help but be most impressed by the view outside the windows!
After Oxford U, we are free to explore the town or catch a train back. Most of us want to see more of this place - it is so packed with historic buildings - but we are tired of traveling in our "herd", so we break into smaller groups. Holly, Amy, Keith, Paul, Jesse and I wander some of the main streets taking pictures before looking for dinner. Outside one of the shops, this sign just goes to show what a hot topic climate change has become:
My group finds dinner at a little sandwich shop. They have display cases full of fabulous looking paninis, pasties, and such, AND a little ice cream cart too! Jesse and I are suckers for ice cream anytime and often make our meal choices by whether or not we can sneak in a sweet treat too. I have a cheese and onion pasty and a scoop of mango sorbet - sooooo yummy. And, the lad behind the counter has the best smile of the trip so far, so of course that makes my day again!
It is raining as the train pulls out from Oxford, headed to Paddington station (pictured above), and as we speed through the countryside, we are treated to a rainbow and the kind of lighting that makes the clouds and barley fields glow that warm yellow...not a good time of night to try taking pictures through a window of a moving train so the description will have to suffice.

UK - Day 10...Let the London Tour Continue

After the late night of laundry, I am pretty out of it when my alarm goes off at 6:30am. I stumble to the shower hall and am taken completely by surprise by the water pressure! After the week at CAT where "low flow" is an understatement, this seems to be a little overkill but I'm not complaining!
The agenda today is packed. First, we are meeting an architect with SANAA who worked on this year's Serpentine Pavilion. He is in town from Japan because of the grand opening yesterday, and is generous enough to meet with a handful of Idaho students to talk about the project and give us tips for our design charette at the end of the month. He warns us that the Serpentine Gallery folks can be a bit uptight, gives us ideas for temporary foundations, and emphasizes that it really is all about glamour and showing off. He is very straightforward and amusing to listen to.

Once he is gone, we rush off to catch our train to Beaufort Court - the home of RES (Renewable Energy Systems). RES's office building was once a chicken rearing shed for Ovaltine's egg farm. Ovaltine owned all the surrounding land as well and had dairy cows and barley fields to make up all of the ingredients in this one area.The education manager of RES gives a really great presentation about the history of the building and RES itself. RES started in 1982 and has since grown to 600 staff with offices around the world.
We are told that the U.S. currently has the most rapidly growing wind power market with large wind farms going in the "wastelands" of the midwest and south. The largest wind farm by RES is in King Mountain, Texas and has 214 turbines! The ed manager tells us that RES used to wait for clients to approach them about putting wind farms on their land, and now they go out and analyze land for the most ideal sites and then approach the land owner. Quite a switch in procedure!
As much as they convinced us to "heart" wind power (notice button pins here), wind power isn't all they deal with.
Beaufort Court is an experiment in itself. The education manager cautions that their work here should not be taken as blueprint, but rather as an ever-changing experiment to be learned from.

On-site, they have a wind turbine, solar thermal panels, photovoltaic panels, heat store, biomass heating, and borehole cooling. And in the presentation room, they have a model showing all of the systems and how they might work depending on the weather. You just use the toggle switches to create different combinations of wind, sun, and temp. and watch the LEDs trace energy moving around the site.
Then, you can walk outside and around the property to see all of the systems represented above, as well as other design strategies they tried.
The wind turbine is 14 years old, so a lot has changed in wind power technology since it was installed. It is only 36 meters tall, while the ones we see going up now are 80 meters tall! It is also more noisy and less efficient than the newer models, but still does a decent job of generating energy. On top of their food store building, they have an array of panels, 170 square meters total with different types to experiment. There are photovoltaic (PV) panels that collect the light from the sun and turn it into electricity. There are also solar thermal panels that use water to collect the heat of the sun. RES are also experimenting with a combination of the two with the PV panel on top of the solar thermal panel. The biggest problem with PV panels is that they can easily overheat and if they get too warm, they do not operate very well and efficiency plummets. So, the idea with the combination was that the water in the solar thermal panels would act as a cooling agent for the PV above, absorbing its extra heat. Our tour guide says the results of the experiment are quite good.
Up next, the heat store. From above, it doesn't look like much. Just a gravel square with a walk way around, and dirt around that. Our tour guide explains that they tried planting up to the walkway, but the heat radiating from the heat store fried the plants. This brought to their attention a design problem with the heat store so they can no advise their clients to have a better insulative barrier around theirs. We are told that the heat store is difficult to maintain and not very efficient, but it serves as a great teaching tool. If they were to do it over again, they would use ground source heat pumps.
Besides the solar thermal option, the use a biomass boiler to generate heat. Our tour guide takes us to a field on the edge of the property. The crop is called miscanthus giganteus, or Elephant Grass and grows quickly up to about 13 feet. It grows well in infertile soil, crowds out weeds, attracts no pests, and makes a great neighbor blocker....but that's not why they are growing it. It can also be used as biomass fuel.
Unfortunately, they ran into serious problems with it and can no longer burn it. The plant produces and acid that slowly corrodes the boiler and its ashes turn to clinker if they are not cleaned out very regularly. Needless to say, they now have a new boiler which uses pellets.
On the opposite hand of things, they cool using boreholes drilled deep into the earth. The water comes up from the borehole and is circulated in the office above with air being blown over the pipes to distribute cool air. This method is used quite a lot in famous green buildings throughout London.
Besides the obvious systems on site, they also had strategically planted and shaped trees to create a sunshade for the south side of the building. I found them to be rather odd and not so effective.
After Beaufort Court, we catch the train back to London for a walk to Grimshaw's architecture office. The Grimshaw project we are most familiar with (The Eden Project) was done quite awhile ago, and our tour guide here is not as familiar with it. However, he does a fine job of showing us their newer work including the transportation projects on display in front. They change out the display periodically to engage passers-by as it can be seen through the windows.
Here, he is showing us the model of the newest building at the Eden Project - the visitor's center.
And, then we tour the office itself. It is laid out with two large open studio areas linked by two skinny corridors and an atrium.
They do have some impressive projects, but the work environment doesn't suit me. I can cross this off the list of ideal architecture firms to work for.
We bid our farewells and then realize we are free for the rest of the day! Some of the group still has to do laundry to catch up from the Wales trip, and others are dying to use the internet. I just want to wander around the city a bit and go to bed early! Keith and I decide to take the scenic route and hit as many parks/squares/gardens as we can between Grimshaws and Passfield Hall where we are staying.

1)Queen Square Gardens: Beautiful, quiet, lots of roses, surrounded by 4-story residential buildings.
2) Russel Square: Social attraction, surrounded by busy streets, panini and cheesecake at the "Cafe in the Gardens", people-watching, cool fountain, pleasant big-city oasis.
3) Woburn Square Garden: Nice open green space surrounded by old-growth trees and silent residential buildings, no walkway, benches, or flowers in the middle - just around the outside, oddly quiet and deserted.
4) Gordon Square Garden: small, very peaceful, great buildings with character surrounding
Then to Tavistock square to use internet on a park bench for a bit, and then home! and to bed...so exhausted!