Blog

For 20 years, Grace Dlabik has been seeking an accessible rental property suitable to live with her son Elijah, who has cerebral palsy. Elijah is quadriplegic, and uses an electric wheelchair that’s too wide and heavy to move through most Australian homes. 

‘Wheelchair accessible rental homes are very hard to come by, and we’ve lived in compromised conditions for Elijah’s entire life that have not at all been adequate for his needs,’ says Grace, who is a creative director, artist, and director of creative agency

In March of 1966, Paul Rand finished his Ford logo presentation book. It was a proposal to Ford Motor Company for a new house mark. I’ve always found it intriguing to read the words Rand used in his logo presentations. The story, the confidence, the rationale, the salesmanship. The presentation has been transcribed here for reference.

When faced with buying in an unaffordable and overinflated housing market, architect William Samuels and his partner Hannah D’Arcy were forced to consider alternative paths to home ownership. ‘To address this, we looked at how to detach the house value from the land value,’ says William.

The answer: leased land. William and Hannah struck up a long-term agreement with a landowner in Nelson, located in New Zealand’s South Island, to rent the land required to host their future home. 

Built on a NZD$150,000 (about AUD$140,000) budget, William and Hannah’s resulting home, The Studio House, tackles the issues of housing affordability as well as sustainable design, the liveability of smaller spaces, and adaptable architecture.

It’s been a feat of engineering in itself to bring the trees into the podium area of 21 Moorfields in The City of London. This zone is in the public realm but to get the plants in required craning them from the street up over 5 storeys and back down into the beds. We have yet to construct the planters for further planting but already just a three trees shows what a difference even a small amount of green makes in an urban environment. We say small, but these trees were each over 6m tall and weighed well over two tonnes each. Hats off to the team who planted them.

The building here will be home to new Deutsche Bank HQ in the City of London and is designed by Wilkinson Eyre Architects. The entire scheme includes new public realm, raised walkways, bridges, and a new City Garden. Additionally there are six levels of private roof terraces which we have already planted. The building is huge with a footprint of approximately 100m x 60m and just to make things a bit more difficult it sits directly above the new Crossrail station. A genuine feat of engineering and an exciting  project for Andy Sturgeon Design to work on.

Back in January, we learned via analyst Jeff Pu that Apple has plans to debut an Apple Watch Ultra with a larger/MicroLED display in 2024 – and even Bloomberg’s very own Mark Gurman confirmed those plans!

Turns out plans change, and larger MicroLED displays on Apple Watch are being pushed back a year or more. Let’s talk about it.

Following its move from the 2022 RHS Chelsea Flower Show, the Mind in Furness garden was officially opened last week. Bulbs are blooming and everything is beginning to establish at the new garden that has been adapted to suit its new location and visitors. The garden has been redesigned so that the curved walls have been re-imagined as hedges, the whole space is fully accessible and there are areas where people can get their hands dirty doing some gardening themselves.

This garden was always designed to highlight the benefits of being in nature for wellbeing and mental health. It is great to see the garden at a permanent location where many people may benefit from visiting it. What was once an abandoned space in the middle of the town, now offers a green lung to the people who live there.