zerochampion

New blogger in town

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I'd love to say that my aforementioned inspirational and rabble-rousing presentation on blogging earlier this week has inspired a colleague to try his hand at one. But I'd be lying. Dan Stewart, an architectural reporter at Building, started a blog called Drawn State earlier this month, but emailed me this morning to get himself about a bit more. He's already rhymed Ritchie and bitchy, discussed the Olympics and flagged up a potentially troublesome job for the big architectural firm HOK. Welcome aboard Dan.

Blog navel gazing

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I've had an interesting day or so indulging in some navel-gazing. I was talking through my blogging experiences yesterday to a room full of somewhat sceptical print hacks. My presentation was about how starting a blog can lead to bigger things (using examples of celebrities, authors, TV stars etc who gained fame firstly through their blogs) and is in some ways a great introduction to communicating much differently online as a journalist. So blogging lets you begin to break out of the shackles of serving ready prepared content to your audience, as a traditional print journalist, and begin having more of a conversation with them.

Groundhog Day - The End?

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I love the film Groundhog Day. The combination of Bill Murray's priceless hangdog face with a great plot conceit make it one of the more enjoyable hours and half on a screen. The story of a man stuck in the same day attempting to achieve the near impossible clearly also makes the romantic comedy excellent analogy-fodder. So it is for the struggle this decade for anyone - politician, industry leader, environmentalist - to get any grip on our leaking and creaking stock of existing buildings. There have been the equivalent of 18 Groundog Days for the existing stock so far this century in the form of Government reviews, inquiries, reports and white papers etc. What price the Existing Stock Groundhog Day spell being broken?

Open House

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I'm a big fan of the Open House event, the weekend in September (20-21 this year) where you can poke around major landmarks in our capital for free. There was a good sprinkling of green projects on display last year as well as a Sponge Eco-tour run by the group of sustainable professionals which will be repeated this time. The programme also highlights a couple of new elements:

Green drinks

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I finally made it to a green drinks bash last night, encouraged out of my sustainable social shyness by Mel. I returned home the proud owner of a Totnes pound, the currency used in one of the leading Transition Towns - the current exchange rate is 95p. There were about 60 of us, from beardies to suits, campaigners to capitalists holed up in the basement of a (very cheap) Soho pub. Barring the aforementioned Mel I met two fellow green hacks, a contingent from the climate camp, a CSR expert at URS, a pair of design and branding bods, an assistant buyer at Topshop, a lady from a world music record label and a Finnish man called Albert who we unfortunately were unable to understand very well - I think he was talking about wind turbines. The chat? Sustainability in a downturn, fuel cells, General Electric, Big Brother, Georgia (the country), are website more or less sustainable than print? eel-skin bags, summer music festivals and celebrity stylist Gok Wan Read. I think I'm going to give the Tower Hamlets one a stab in the autumn - I'm told it's more intimate but I've got the bug now.

Is BREEAM good good?

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Quick thought struck me, probably not that original, during a shortlisting session for the upcoming Building Sustainability Awards that will be handed out later this year. Is BREEAM good rating really that good? The one I saw was rated 48%. To my simple brain that equates to a pass in an academic exam so would be a C. Would you then call that average? To introduce another analogy it's similar to when London Underground proudly declares that its tube lines are experiencing 'good' levels of service, when it really means normal. It may be a minor point but I wonder whether such a language shift would change attitudes and demands amongst the industry for better performance and delivery.

Rubbish - our national disgrace

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Bill Bryson stepped forward last night and delivered a home truth about the UK that is uncomfortable but accurate - our public areas are strewn with rubbish and we've come to accept it as the norm. The author's Panorama report Notes on a Dirty Island was not all that startling in highlighting what a mess we are collectively in, but that's probably the point. Walking my local streets of Tower Hamlets is not a pleasant experience - there's the discarded fag butts, bottles etc that scatter across the pavements, then there are the impromptu 'rubbish collection areas' that pedestrians decide are bins - unused or empty land, fenced construction areas etc.

Is our Pursuit of the Millennium pointless?

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I managed to get through A Green New Deal report released by the new economics foundation over the weekend, in between Olympics viewing and a niece's first birthday party. It's a utopian vision that draws on historical precedent to call for some pretty revolutionary activity to tackle climate change. And there's the usual urgent deadlines - we have 100 months to carry out such a plan before it's too late and the Government has a year to start to implement the proposals, many of which are by necessity pretty profound. Forced demerger of large banking and finance groups anyone? An orderly downsizing of the financial sector and reducing interest rates to a lower value? No wonder it has already inspired snorts of derision from libertaian thinkers, including Tim Wortsall.

BREEAM - bashing and beyond

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More rotten vegetables have been thrown at the BREEAM rating this week. First off in a reader's rant on the BSJ website Keith Calder from Meinhart has a pop at the measurement tool as part of a wider point on the misuse of the word sustainable. And in today's Property Week the debate about how much the rating is concerned with carbon and energy is again raised. The latter article quotes Faber Maunsell director Ant Wilson: "There are a lot of developments that do remarkably well because they are in city centres on a brownfield site, but the energy consumption is atrocious."

McCloud fluffs his lines

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Should we be rethinking the inclusion of Kevin McCloud's in the Top 10 green gurus list? BD's splash on the Grand Designs frontman today leaves a rather bad taste in the mouth. While you can't deny his passion and communication skills in front of camera when it comes to housing design his attempts to transfer this into practice have so far proved less successful. McCloud's company, Happiness Architecture Beauty (Hab) has fallen out with architect Wright & Wright, delaying a planned scheme for Swindon.