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Windows

  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...
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World Food Day

  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...
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Re-learning watercolour

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...
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Forgotten skills

  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...
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Perspective on Wits

  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...
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Things my father taught me

  I can remember so many things my dad taught me, from how to hold a pencil, to fixing a petrol lawnmower, and even how to listen to classical music. The most dramatic of these "lessons" was when I was in my early teens and I had hit a cricket ball through one of the large windows (I was absolutely hopeless at cricket and most other ball games, so this was an accident waiting to happen!) My dad insisted that I should replace the glass, so he set up a deckchair outside and proceeded to instruct me. The first step was to remove all the broken glass. My dad was excellent at thinking beyond the task at hand, and suggested I use some old painting drop-cloths on both the inside of the room and the flowerbed directly outside to catch the glass splinters and chips of paint and putty. This is definitely a job for leather gloves - the tiny splinters of glass can pierce through even quite thick gardening gloves. This gave me an early appreciation for why construction workers prefer to w...
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Blind spots

 Sometimes when looking through the photos of listings of homes for sale, I am struck by features that look out-of-place - whether because they give a shabby appearance to an otherwise great room, or because they look dated. If these are bedrooms or living rooms, these features can often be quite economical and cost-effective to remedy, whether for your own comfort or if you are planning to put your home on sale. In these rooms, the culprits are often damaged, faded or dated wall finishes - if painted, a new coat of paint in a tinted white would be my recommendation. While it is quite dramatic and trendy to use bold colours as an accent wall or even for a whole room, these can become limiting on any future plans for the room, and can negatively affect the perceptions of a prospective buyer. A tinted white gives a bit of character and liveliness to the space, rather than pure white, which can be quite sterile and harsh.  Wallpaper can be a bit more of a challenge - if it is sti...
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