As should be pretty obvious to any regular reader of this site, I’m pretty keen on the use of design patterns to ensure the goodness-of-fit between building plans and specifications and the requirements of the eventual end-users of a building. Patterns help inspire, guide and polish building design at all levels.

So, when I stumbled across the architypes site my interest was piqued.

architypes.net is a library of architectural design issues, solutions and ideas.

At the heart of architypes.net are two simple but powerful ideas:

Patterns: The principles and ideas are organized into “patterns”. Each pattern describes a solution for a specific problem or design goal. [...]
Open Collaboration: architypes.net is a continuously evolving peer-reviewed project that you are invited to participate in.

In use I find the site and its patterns to be informative & inspirational, but perhaps a little light-weight. For example, the intriguing ‘Places of Quiet Refuge‘ pattern consists merely of the text:

The Japanese are often admired for their techniques used in creating private and quiet spaces. They are masters of separating the public spaces from the private spaces, and their techniques are rather simple.

…and a photo of an interesting mezzanine. Thanks, I’d like more… but it does start you thinking.

Worth a visit if you’re seeking inspiration. I’m off to develop some of my own meaty patterns…

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One of the (admittedly very dull) things that I spend quite a lot of time thinking about and experimenting with is the presentation of information. One of the newish developments that is overused on the web, but can be very effective is the word cloud. A word cloud is made up of the key words found with the domain of a certain topic or article with the size of each word in relation to the others determined by the frequency of use of that word.

The site wordle provides a great on-line word cloud generator. I used it to generate a word cloud from my article on Passive Solar Design:

(Click on the image to get a larger version)

Please take a look at the image then read the article on Passive Solar Design

Although some of the colouring of words could be better and certain words such as direct & indirect loose their relationship, I think that the word cloud conveys much of the content of the article - what do you think?

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I’d love the forum to become a useful resource for asking questions and getting answers related to ‘healthy house’, sustainable, ecological & environmentally aware building. There are other places out there to ask questions but they can at times be daunting, unwelcoming sorts of places. I want to keep things friendly and inclusive here.

To encourage questions and answers I’ll be running a competition over the Summer. There are a number of categories:

• Most interesting topic. Awarded to the most interesting or thought provoking new topic posted on the forum.
• Most interesting reply. Awarded to the most informative, thought provoking or well researched reply made within a topic on the forum.
• Editors choice. Awarded to forum member that whose over contribution (in the editors opinion) has been the most interesting, thought provoking, funny, well researched or informative.

Prizes are a £20 Amazon E-mail Gift Certificate for each of the three categories.

Please register and get posting…

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Now we have pipes (and lots of them as well). In addition to lots of electricity cables, we now have complex pipe-work that will form the basis of the even more complex heating and hot-water system that we’ll be installing. This also means that first-fix electrics and plumbing is now complete… (worthy of a small [...]

I’ve long considered adding a forum to this site mainly to allow questions to be asked in a general manner rather than tied to a specific post. So, after fiddling about with it for a while, here is the new…
mybarnconversion.com Discussion Forum
My Barn Conversion Forum is the place for discussion of sustainable, ecological & [...]