Prince Charles’s Speech at Our Annual Conference

Our President gave the keynote address at our Annual Conference earlier this month. Full text is here. My favorite quotes below:

I also want to say that I think sometimes people think that the only reason I set up the Foundation and bother about all these issues is that I have an absolute obsession about classical architecture, which drives me insane because it’s very easy to accuse somebody of that. In fact at the end of the day I think the architecture matters. If you go to somewhere like Poundbury, I defy anybody who goes round to be able to tell me where the people with lower incomes are living. The secret being that you should be able to design a place, a mixed use place whereby the architecture doesn’t necessarily mean that you are confined to an affordable housing area.

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The whole thing mimicked what a traditional town actually is. It struck me then that in a strange way we operate like bees making a hive and ants making a nest or whatever. The universal pattern is within us. I think that if you look at the way we’ve developed our approach over the last hundred years, we have gone against that intuitive process. So when my Foundation goes around with all these Enquiry by Designs we do actually find that if you provide people with an alternative prospect, actually they are voting with their feet for something that reminds them of what intuitively they feel to make comfortable in a living environment and before you realise it they have actually created a more traditional type of community. People I feel also want to see a sense of identity.

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I’m only doing this, not for my health, I can assure you, but actually because I would like to see greater resilience put into the system for the future and as I say to turn around this gigantic mad experiment into realigning ourselves with Nature in a way where we work in harmony with her and our own inner pattern because the two are intimately linked.

Issuu – Amazing Website to View PDFs

I came across Issuu today on the Urban Sketchers website. It is a website that provides free PDF digital publishing. The interface and the process are really easy and great. The best part is that they provide the code to embed, link, etc……..

Whoops. OK, I just spent an hour figuring out WordPress does NOT allow Issuu embeds. So I guess that’s not the best part.

Anyway, I uploaded this PDF of some sketches in InDesign. Clicking below will take you to it. I still think the site is great even if I cannot embed here. Having to download a PDF will soon be a thing of the past as these types of sites gain more popularity (and trust), especially because PDFs look so great on the site.

Flickr Project

I have figured out that Flickr is going to be where I will start to bank my photos. I hope to build up sets for all the cities I have visited or will visit.

Here is the link:

Belgravia, London

Week 5 – Official Start in Charlotte Road

I have been placed in the Design, Theory and Networks team at the Foundation. Seems like a great place for me to be. Part of what I will be working on will be real projects, and part of it will be research. This is exactly why I wanted to do this program. The office environment is really good. I was worried about that because I haven’t really been in a larger office environment in a few years. But I like it already.

Victoria & Albert Museum - Up the street from our place.

The small square near our place.

Week 4 – Boston

Week Three was in Boston, spending the week with my girls. Crazy week of fatherhood. Then I was back in London, but without Katie or the girls.