Yesterday evening, I went to the first meeting of the All Party Parliamentary Group for Excellence in the Built Environment. We are involved in the group through our membership of the Construction Industry Council. The purpose of APPGs is, on the one hand, to bring together parliamentarians with a shared interest and, on other, representatives of outside interests who can help shape their thinking, answer their questions and, if relevant, influence emerging legislation and regulation.
The Chair of the new group is Tony Baldry, MP for Banbury, who was formerly a junior Environment minister with responsibility for construction. Also present last night were Oliver Colvile, MP for Plymouth Sutton and Devonport, Baron Knight of Weymouth, who as Jim Knight MP was responsible for Building Schools for the Future. The theme of yesterday’s session was building schools and there were presentations from Mark Castle, Managing Director of Mace Plus, and Sunand Prasad, Past President of the RIBA. Part of the discussion that followed focused on problems in local authority procurement and how it excludes small firms. The meeting also covered the importance of having designers involved at key early stages in a project if some of the pitfalls of large-scale procurement are to be avoided.
Earlier in the day we had the first of our Technical Committee workshops. We had an excellent day with a group of members looking at the current state of the profession and deciding on the most important areas of guidance that are required. The group considered future developments for the Knowledge Base and the Knowledge Forum on Talking Landscape. The workshop is being repeated next Monday 1 November in Newcastle, and a couple of places are still available. You can register here: Technical Workshop.
My iPhone app recommendation this week is called ‘Fractals’ by PomApps.com. I have wanted to recommend it for a few weeks, and am pointing you towards it now because Benoit Mandelbrot, who coined the term fractal in 1975, died on 14 October. Fractals are amazing mathematical patterns produced by non-linear equations. They are found everywhere in nature, in the patterns of leaves or of frost, for example, and often in coastlines or in clouds. One of Mandelbrot’s own favourite examples was a head of broccoli – no matter how many times you cut it you find the same pattern repeating itself at smaller and smaller scales.
‘Fractals’ costs £1.79, but I have certainly had good entertainment value out of it. If you won’t stretch to £1.79 you might want to try ‘Genuine Fractals’ by Alexander Mychio, which is only 59p. This has a lot more images – 525, to be exact – but appears to be just a static gallery of mandala-like images. The beauty of ‘Fractals’ is that you can watch the app recalculate and re-plot the fractal patterns over and over, no matter how many times you zoom in –which is kind of the point with fractals, otherwise they’re just pretty designs.
For a live animation of a fractal series called Phoenix, click this link: Phoenix. For some static examples click here: Gallery.
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