Well....went to London and came back...still lots of work to do. Going to the RIBA lib again this weekend to abuse my free membership. mannnn....I am so tired! 6 more weeks of this poo to go!

I cant wait for this Friday to arrive! Ever since I got back from Ed I have been working my little butt (oook BIG butt) off for the two hand-ins on Friday, together with studio work. I am sooo looking forward to just get out of this studio and just chill in the evenings! ( don't worry...I will take the beast....that's my laptop... and work during the day!)

For the Easter weekend I enjoyed a trip up to Edinburgh with Raphael. The weather was not bad, we even got some sunshine on the Friday! I managed to meet up with Lucy and Alex on the Friday before they went home for Easter. Lucy very kindly made me this AMAZING MAP which I reckon is the ultimate architecture guide to Edinburgh! We followed the map round, went down small back streets and found some beautiful spaces and buildings.



Dance Base studio on Grassmarket. The extension designed by Malcolm Fraser architects that was nominated for the Stirling prize few years ago. This is the main studio with the glass roof, the guy who was showing us around said that the studio acts like a green house in the summer, but the limit in budget means they had to do without the blinds that were designed to combat the problem! You can see the sun is bleaching the wooden panels slowly but surely, they are gonna have to spend that money replacing the panels soon....which is ironic!



Yes...the much debated 400 million pound Scottish Parliament building by Enric Miralles. There just seems to be too many ideas crammed into this one building! Here is the pam I took from the back of the building, as you can see it looks like lots of buildings that are not really related...rather than one that's coherent together. The building photographs well if you take shots of individual elements, rather than the whole thing. We were lucky to have got there on a non-business day, as we were given guided tours round the inside of the building!



There are 2 timers above the main MP entrances into this room, one timer tells you the GMT and the other is used to time the MPs. They are allocated a certain amount of time to speak, if they go over the time their mic is switched off! A bit like the Oscars ceremony...though there are no big bands here , just the clock to hurry them up.




Amazing installation by Nathan Coley, now in the Dean Gallery!

All in all my trip was very exciting and I kinda feel sorry for Raph as I was dragging him round the city, examining all the architecture. It comes with doing the course...I now find it hard to have a non - architectural holiday!