London is so rich with photographic opportunities that some times it can get overwhelming. You can either end up taking an endless series of postcard style photos or you can try and look to find new views and new ways to frame over exposed icons and places.
I love the juxtapositions you can come across in cities, and I also love the random and chance.
What I love about the city, is that as you wonder round it and explore it, you never know what you will come across. London in particular is a very fertile city that way. Central London is in a way considered the “front window” or “display” of the UK, and a lot of care has been put into its public space and buildings.
The subject might seem morbid, but hey, life can get pretty morbid from time to time. And there is poetry to be found in sadness and loss.
I was on a walk with a friend of mine when we stumbled across this children’s cemetery. We were up on the edges of Enfield in London were there are many parks and old manor houses and golf courses to be found. As we just aimlessly explored, with no map – not even google maps! – and no destination in mind we discovered Lavender Hills cemetery. A large cemetery arranged in areas along some rolling hills and surrounded by trees.
Yesterday I posted about my visit to Stratford Olympic park, and shared some photos. Â If you saw that post, you might recall the giant Run mirror sculpture. It was quite a fun sculpture, and you must know by now how I can never resist reflections. Â So for today’s photo friday, no words, just some more photos I took of the giant RUN while exploring its angles and possibilities.
Despite being in London during the 2012 Olympics, I never went to see any of the events. And despite hearing a lot about the olympic park in Stratford and the planes for it, I had never got round to visiting it. A couple of weeks ago, during Green Sky Thinking week, MACE, the company in charge of making the olympic park, held a treasure hunt there one evening as a fun way to tell us about it. It was actually quite fun.
Family obligations and issues have been eating up a lot of my time and energy lately meaning that I missed about a week of posts. I’ll try and juggle both again and hope I manage.
This week amongst other things I went for two days to Clerkenwell Design Week. It was interesting, but hardly groundbreaking. Having gone to all sorts of design festivals over the last three years I’ve found that I’ve more or less seen most of it already. Design in furniture, lighting and architectural components is not like fashion. It doesn’t change every season. Trends actually last a number of years. And anyway Clerkenwell is hardly the most pioneering of areas. It’s a trendy area full of companies and practices that like to think they are on the cutting edge, but are actually quite mainstream. The place is full of hipsters on bicycles and yuppies on motorbikes. It is a nice area though, full of beautiful buildings and streets and all sorts of hidden nooks and gardens and underground spaces.
So far I have mainly posted about architecture I like the look of. Today I was to talk about architecture who’s philosophy I like.
BedZED
Architect: ZedFactory
Location: Hackbridge, London, UK
Completed: 2002
My architecture briefs are usually about published buildings that have caught my eye. Today I’m going to switch it up a bit and do a little shameless promotion and talk a bit about a project I worked on last year.
Architecture for Humanity is a charity that works mainly with volunteers. Last year I came across a call for volunteers to help them with a project for Clerkenwell Design Week. CDW was offering AfH four spots to set up four huts. These huts were to be installation pieces that could be used as advertisement for the charity.
This is another from my series of summer city sketches. I was in the area of the Tate Modern, and despite the Tate Modern being a gorgeous building, I was feeling quite contrary. So I sad on the pavement in the sun and decided to draw this random contemporary block instead. I never bothered to learn the exact details of it, but a couple of months late, quite by chance I sent of a job application to the practice that designed and built it!
pandora pavlides 