Tate Britain

The Turner Prize A Retrospective 1984-2006.

This is a good way to look at the winners of the turner prize through the years. Its a good way to see how art has changed and developed through over the 22 years.
The use of technology plays a part in some of the more modern art but yet there is still a retro look to some of the art.

No pictures were allowed to be taken around this gallery so it has to be seen to be appreciated.

One of the wierdest pieces was by Damien Hirst, called Mother and Child Divided originally done in 1993.
Its a very odd piece but I wouldn't expect anything else from Damien Hirst.
I won't say anything about it, I would encourage you to see it or at the very least click the link (here) to see some images.

Natural History Museum

The Natural History Museum is the home to the Shell Wildlife Photographer of the year gallery.

This gallery is definately worth looking at! The images that the photographers have on show were amazing. Some of the images just seem impossible to be able to capture on camera.

No photographs were allowed to be taken in the gallery and to be honest they wouldn't have done justice to the images on show. They are being shown as prints with a lit background so that every colour shows up as crisp as possible.

To view the winners and runners up for 2007 click here.

This is one my favourite pictures from the gallery. It was taken by Andrew Walmsley and is titled the Amber Thrush.
The image is from National History Museum and can be seen if you click here.

Out the front of the Natural History Museum is the Wildlife Garden.

The Natural History Museum call the Wildlife Garden an urban oasis, i'm not sure about this. This could be partly my fault for visiting it in autumn, but the garden seemed very manufactured, and it was hard to get away from the noisey road and building repairs that were happening nearby.

The garden does seem to doing well for something so small, with more then 300 native species, over 50 bird species have been seen, numerous amounts of moths and butterflies and regular visits from foxes, bats and squirrels.

This all seems ncie and looks good in the brochure but the experience of the garden is very dissapointing.

The Serpentine

The Serpentine Gallery Pavilion designed by Olafur Eliasson and Kjetil Thorsen.
This was a nice piece of architecture, the space was attractive and the lighting is hard to describe.

There's a lot of natural light but the lighting that is set up is very bright as well. The lighting has its own design as well, its almost like a big disco ball (but without the rotating cheesyness of a disco ball).


It was also home to wildlife as well as all the people that were there to visit it!

The Future Laboratories

This lecture was given by Future Laboratories.

Future Laboratories is a trend forecasting company. They try and predict new trends in society by using three factors;
1. Interrogation
2. Observation
3. Intuition
A combination of three help to give an insight as to how the trends are likely to change.

One of the main themes in the lecture is that design is changing to focus more on the experience of an event, rather then a physical object. Looking at the life/work balance, and thinking do we live to work or work to live?
The lecture was very interesting lecture and it will be interesting to see how these predictions evolve over the next couple of years.

Practice Research Part I

One of my focus week activities is researching practises in asia, that I plan to apply to for a year out job after my BA (hons) degree.

The website above is IFLA, they are the International Federation of Landscape Architects. This is a good starting point as they list all the landscape bodies for each country around the world.

The web page above is the Hong Kong Institution of Landscape Architects. After looking through their members list I short-listed some practices that I plan to make contact with about job opportunities next year. Some of the websites can be seen below.



The companies that I have chosen are;
Jerde
Belt Collins
Hassell
Urbis
These are just focusing on Hong Kong, I plan to find some more in Malaysia and possible China.