Orbis Naturalis

COMPETITION SUBMISSION After a manic week, we finally realised our garden design for the Chaumont competition which we submitted last Friday. See below the drawing package! Finger's crossed we get selected and get the opportunity to build the garden in real life. TITLE: 'The Primordial Garden' CONCEPT GENERAL ARRANGEMENT PLANTING PLAN SECTION SKETCH VISUALISATIONS EXPENSES

Garden Competition: Concept Outline THEME: 'Resilience' TITLE: 'Nature's Building Blocks'  CONCEPT: How the plant cell has led to the evolution of plants and how they adapted to survive and thrive throughout the ages. Featured below are some of the key ideas from my sketchbook:

Concrete This week the focus was on concrete, one of the most widely used construction materials. Again, I explored Cheltenham for five different examples.  CONCRETE EXTRACT: Concrete is a manufactured stone and is made with water, aggregate, and cement in different proportions and often with chemical admixtures. Concrete is usually a mixture of 10-15% cement; 15-20% water; about 60-75% aggregates, such as gravel, sand and limestone filler; about 5 percent entrained air; and less than 0.1% chemical admixtures. It is often said concrete has a relatively short history, as a building material; however, forms of cement and concrete were used by ancient Egyptian and early Chinese builders, and certainly the Romans used concrete construction in the dome of the Pantheon.

Photovoltaics This week I had to prepare a pecha kucha presentation on Photovoltaics, so I've featured some slides and a brief overview.    Photovoltaics, also known as solar panels, are the most reliable methods for producing renewable energy in the world. Photovoltaic systems (PV systems) transform solar energy into electricity.  The sun is a limitless source of energy and is the key to all life on Earth, luckily our planet lies within the Goldilocks zone where we are neither too close nor too far away for the sun's rays.  . Every second, the sun fuses over 600 million tons of hydrogen into helium which is equivalent to 384.6 septillion watts of energy per second. Or comparatively, the sun releases more energy in one hour than the Earth’s population uses in an entire year.  The first practical photovoltaic cell wasn’t developed until 1954, meaning solar energy wasn’t viable until at least the 1960s. The American oil crisis in the 1970s sparked a change in the ...

Stone Textures Identification  This week's task sought to identify various stone textures around Cheltenham. I struggled with this more than the brickwork bonds because they're less obvious and more ambiguous. There is an enormous variety of stone finishes that completely transform the final appearance. Using this extract to help me (see image below), I found five examples.