Anne-apolis

  If you have ever needed plumbing work done on the cold or hot water feed in your bathroom or kitchen, I'm sure it brings back stressful memories. Apart from the bashing and banging, exposing these pipes generally requires demolition of parts of the walling, often taking out some of the tiling, which inevitably gets damaged in the process. Here the bath had to be removed to get at the pipes in the wall This is but the start of the troubles! Identifying the source of the problem is often not easy, even with sophisticated leak detecting equipment. Here we had to fill the bath and shower with water over several days to be sure that the leak was coming from the water feed and not from the outlets - water travels in mysterious way. In total, the detection part of the job took several weeks, with both bathrooms out of action for the duration. The next challenge for the owner was to find tiles to match those that had to be removed, an adventure that required much hunting at tile speciali...

  As the weather is getting warmer, it is a good time to look into how to make our spaces cooler and more comfortable for summer. For centuries, people in Africa, the Middle East and other hot climates have developed ingenious ways of ventilating their spaces and cooling the air that flows through their buildings. Traditional ways of building in these hot climates include building rooms around a courtyard, often with a water feature and vegetation in the courtyard to cool and refresh the air. Their streets were traditionally very narrow, so that one building would shade its neighbour, preventing heat buildup. Their buildings were crafted from clay with very thick walls and roofs to  keep the rooms cool, and they often included wind catchers that act like chimneys to draw the air through their buildings. Windcatchers on the rooftops in Iran Creative commons licensed from  https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captador_de_viento But how can we capitalise on these traditional ideas ...

  I recently was alerted to some research that is being done on our perception of temperature  when there is wood present in a room - as the amount of wood in a room increases, so our feeling of warmth increases. This and other studies have been carried out in cool climates, so it would be interesting to see whether this makes a hot room feel even hotter in a warm climate. Instinctively, I would say not - my apartment is full of wood - floors, furniture and artefacts - and my experience is that the rooms feel warm in winter, yet cool in summer. An elegant kist made in the 1980s - the bookcase in the background is simple pine with a dark stain to complement the woodgrain of the kist Moreover, wood gives a feeling of luxury and is very visually satisfying, even if the pieces are not top of the range - a very modest piece of furniture or artefact can make a room seem more complete. This may be attributed to the properties of natural wood: anything made from this material automati...

  My sister has just finished ripping up the fitted carpets in her house and restoring the wooden floors underneath. In the process, they found that some pipes had been laid under the floor and patched over, necessitating replacing some of the floor boards. This can be quite a challenge to match the wood type, especially if the building is quite old. But this led me to thinking about installing a new wooden floor into an existing home. Wooden floors are very beautiful and give a warm feeling to any room, but there are a few things that you need to know before installing them. The first thing is that there are two types of wood: hardwood such as teak, mahogany and meranti, as well as the various woods commonly used for furniture such as oak. The other wood type is classed as softwood, mostly from coniferous trees such as pine or deal, the two most prevalent being Oregon Pine and Baltic Deal. Oregon is usually slightly pink, whereas Baltic Deal is more yellow.  A Baltic Deal flo...

  Last week I mentioned that the Mapungubwe Interpretation Centre by Rich and Lerotholi Architects won the World Architectural Festival Building of the Year Award in 2009 . I was fortunate to play a role in this prestigious project as the consultant on job creation. SANParks offices from the main building For some background: the Mapungubwe National Park is part of a conservation area that stretches over three countries - South Africa, Botswana and Zimbabwe. On the South African side of the Limpopo River, the land for the park was previously used for farming. Many of the farm workers who were displaced have been employed and trained by SANParks, the new site owner, to engage in conservation and tourism jobs. Beyond this, they wanted the construction of the Centre to create more jobs that could later be transferred into the local communities. Apart from the ecological conservation aspect, this is an important archaeological site which housed a settlement that was part of the Stone A...

As a child, I remember going to the annual Rand Show, hosted by the Witwatersrand Agricultural Society, one of the highlights of which was visiting the Flower Hall - a vast space carpeted from wall to wall with flowers. In more recent times, the land on which the Rand Show was housed was taken over by Wits, the University of the Witwatersrand, thereby doubling the area of the main campus, the original lands of which are immediately to the east. The soaring roofs of the Flower Hall: photo Jennifer Fitchett Wits has retained several of the original buildings, many of which have been retained largely in their original form, such as Hall 29 (used as a basketball venue and doubling up as a large exam venue) and the Wits Club and Alumni House which used to be the wine tasting venue at the Rand Show. Other buildings have their shell retained, but remodelled interiors, and the most ambitious recycling project was the Science Stadium, which ingeniously reused the stadium seating for the large l...

  A couple of months ago I posted a blog on hanging pictures   but today I take a step back to look at the mounting and framing of artwork. You may already have some frames lying around with pictures that you no longer like that can be recycled. I inherited some photos of buildings that my grandfather designed, so I selected those that I liked best, and gave one of them a face-lift to fit in with my colour scheme. I painted the natural wood frame and replaced the discoloured cream mount with a pale grey to blend in with the black-and-white photo. You will see that I gave a thin black border to the photo to accentuate the image because the mount was quite big for the size of the image. An architectural photo in a refurbished frame and mount I took one of the other frames and recycled it for a mono-print by my sister, Elizabeth Beard, of one of her land-art pieces that she made as a student. As with the architectural photo, I painted the frame that had become quite tatty ov...