Anne-apolis

  Today I am suffering from blogger's block - the inability to come up with a theme. This is quite common, and I often have to lean on family members to come up with an idea to get me started. Some days, the topic just comes to  me, either through something I have seen during the preceding week, something I have just read, or a passing comment. Many of these ideas come out of very ordinary things, that have become habitual, such as the blog I wrote a while back on the mundane task of changing light globes . Sometimes, a passing comment will prompt an idea, such as a question at the start of an online meeting, which led me to reflect on acoustics in architecture . and how one can use these principles in one's own home. Several of my posts have followed a similar format - adapting a theoretical principle from my architectural training, and adapting this to some simple and affordable strategies in one's own environment. We are often only subconsciously aware of things and phen...

  Last year in November, I wrote a blog on doors . Today is something of a companion piece, where I look at windows - their materials, proportions and placement in a room. The position of the windows in a space has a number of consequences on the comfort and usability, and often the designer needs to weigh these up where these factors do not coincide. When I was a student, we were encouraged to include typical furniture layouts in our designs, to help us to entrench this in our thinking. For example, a window in the centre of a wall can leave space on either side for tall furniture, while one closer to the corner is more limiting. A centrally placed window often gives maximum flexibility for furniture layouts On the flip side, though, the centred window often does not allow for optimal ventilation , as the fresh air tends to form a tunnel from the window to the door, especially if the door is in the centre of the opposite wall. A centrally placed window also tends to dominate the r...

  To celebrate World Food Day (16 October), I want to share some ideas about food and living alone. I enjoy cooking, but this can become tedious when there is no external feedback, and it can be very easy to drift into repetition - Monday cottage pie, Tuesday chicken curry. At its most extreme, people living on their own can slip into complete monotony (my mom, shortly before moving into a care home, was eating the identical breakfast, lunch and dinner almost every day of the week), or one can be over-reliant on "ready meals" with a serious implication on your wallet. In my first weeks of retirement, I was concerned that I could spiral into lazy cooking habits, with negative impact on my health through lack of food diversity. My solution was to have a regular weekly template, but to introduce novelty each Saturday by choosing out a recipe from one of my many books, and sticking to it exactly.  A recipe from a book simply called "Vegetables", published by Time Life T...

Last week, I reflected on the process of reviving my skills in lettering and calligraphy . Today, I look at the other skill that I needed to hone for the graphics for my daughter's wedding: watercolour. Over the past couple of years, I have been dabbling with this medium at my mom's art club, using the cheapest paints, kids' brushes and photocopy paper - quite a challenge! I was also given a book of William Morris designs, printed on high-grade paper and with quality graphics. This was excellent for polishing some of the skills one needs for watercolour - accuracy, control of the brush and consistency in colour and tone. They are also fantastic preparation for painting one's own designs with botanical subjects, as Morris was brilliant at capturing the shapes of organic curves in his designs. William Morris design on watercolour-grade paper For the wedding, there were several decisions that needed to be made quite early on - the colour scheme and the types of paper or b...

  About a year ago, my daughter and her fiancé asked me if I would do the graphics for the place cards and seating layout for their wedding. They had already done a great job with the graphics for their engagement party, using Canva graphic design tool, but we thought it would be nice to have hand painted and hand-lettered graphics for the wedding itself. When I was a Second Year architecture student, at the end of the year we had a review of all our work prior to the oral presentations, and my lecturers had advised me to erase every piece of lettering on my drawings and re-do them. In the process, my lettering became much better, but this is a skill I have not used for many decades. Nevertheless, I pulled out a couple of lettering handbooks and a calligraphy set that my brother had passed on to me. A calligraphy handbook by Muriel Parker (1980) These were great, both to remind me of the very specific techniques, and to give us a wide selection of typefaces. The one book also had a...

  In several of my previous blogs, I have looked at aspects of Wits University, which has been my home-from-home since 1976 when I was a First Year architecture student. These have included green roofs , the Flower Hall , re-use of buildings , Universal Access , decorative details , and the doors of Hillman Building , where I still have an office. But today I want to step into the past, to explore how the main campus of Wits has evolved, in many ways mimicking the architecturally hybrid city of Johannesburg. The University evolved out of the School of Mines, based in the CBD next to the original railway station, in a stately building that still exists. In its new guise, it moved to the site of the present-day East Campus in Braamfontein, perched on a ridge which is the watershed of the Witwatersrand (water flows to the south into the Orange River and into the Atlantic Ocean, while water on the north flows eventually into the Indian Ocean). The original three buildings formed a dram...