This year the RIBA Journal is bringing you even more exciting and informative features concentrating on Design in the making, a wealth of practical knowledge sharing on design. Eleanor Young offers a flavour
When we asked you last year what you most valued from the RIBA Journal – both here on ribaj.com and in the print magazine – we saw the profession’s growth mindset writ large. Architects want to learn, you want to know more. As well as seeing more great buildings and reading about people and practices, the survey showed you want to know how those people draw, how they put things together, how they design and specify. And you wanted to better understand sustainability, the big picture and how to make sustainable buildings.
The continuing popularity of Michael Pawlyn’s guide to regenerative design and the piece on using the Plan of Work by Dale Sinclair, show that you don’t just cast your vote for this sort of useful information to be included, you are actively seeking it out (see the most popular 2021 stories here).
We’ve come a long way from having to borrow a friend’s Jackie magazine to learn how to apply that bright blue eye shadow we spent our pocket money on. Nowadays we can see how to do that and watch how to change a bike brake pad on YouTube, or google the best way to unclog a drain. But the best insights always come with a spark of excitement: a way of doing a regular task so much better, the answer to a question that was only half formed in your mind, a connection from someone you admire that opens a new understanding.
‘How did Tonkin Liu squeeze that stair into its Watertower House?’
This year we want to bring that to the fore in our wide coverage of architecture. We are calling it Design in the making. You will see the new elements primarily here on ribaj.com – more useful, practical articles that are exciting to read, unveiling things you can learn from people you look up to and from talents you have not yet discovered. Many of you will have seen Tonkin Liu’s Water Tower House on Grand Designs’ TV coverage of the RIBA’s House of the Year, but will have wondered how that CLT stair was put together, and squeezed into that space. And how did Tonkin Liu go about convincing building inspectors, and was the £40,000 on sprinklers for the stair?
We are also tapping into the expertise of other design consultants, getting under the lid of the advice that can make collaborations so fruitful. We are bringing you more competitions and opportunities that can be so easy to miss in the midst of delivering projects with our Opportunities Hub. And we are asking you for more contributions on what you have learnt from projects and processes. It is not about dreary lectures in dull rooms (thank you LinkedIn Learning) or rushing through ticking off CPD points at the last minute while eating lunch at your desk. We want to entertain you. It is about making better design. It is Design in the making.
Stay, take a look around ribaj.com. There’s lots to learn.
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Read more about making buildings: Water Tower stair, more about the collaborators of leading architects' in Contact book. See the RIBA Journal's Opportunities Hub.
Image above: Redscape model by McCloy+ Muchemwa. Credit: Photograph by Sophie Percival