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Steered to disaster

Imagine you won five Olympic gold medals, like Sir Steve Redgrave. What you expect to get next? A knighthood? The endless adulation of the public and fellow athletes? A relaxing retirement? Well, things have worked out even better than Sir Steve could possibly have imagined, for he was treated to a place in a 20ft model oil tanker alongside Gleeds鈥� senior partner Richard Steer. The vessel was erratically paddled about by the pair on a boating lake in Southampton - and here鈥檚 the link - because Gleeds project managed the construction of a 鈥渕anned model ship handling centre鈥� at Timsbury where the miniature tanker is used. Apparently, Sir Steve and Steer were not quite subtle enough with the controls, and crashed into several pontoons. Hopefully we鈥檒l see a slightly sleeker boat used at London 2012.

Divine intervention

With reports of the Rapture apparently wide of the mark, most in the industry believed they were safe from the wrath of the Almighty. That was until a brief, yet thunderous, downpour swept over London on Thursday last week, and one ill-favoured architecture practice was struck by lightning. I鈥檓 not aware of Sheppard Robson doing anything particularly sacrilegious, but could this be a warning against its recent decision to open an office in Abu Dhabi?

Slice of Halifax, anyone?

Architect BDP鈥檚 50th birthday bash at the RIBA last week was an emotional occasion for all those involved in the practice over the years. No more so than for its former chairman, Richard Saxon, who designed the celebrated Halifax Headquarters building for the practice in 1974. He was given the opportunity to eat his own building, in the form of an enormous cake built and decorated to the exact specifications of the original. 鈥淚t鈥檚 not every day you get the chance to do this,鈥� he said, with some understatement. Cheers, BDP.

Unchartered quantity of surveyors

Before you go into business, you need to know the market. So you would presume that an organisation accrediting quantity surveyors - the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, for example - would know roughly how many QSs there were in the UK? Er, apparently not. Asked by one of my minions, the RICS said that it 鈥渄id not have those statistics鈥�. It knows how many QSs are members of the RICS, but not, it seems, how many have 鈥済one rogue鈥�, presumably hiding out in forests and caves, in order to escape its fees.

I鈥檒l do it my way

A few years ago, architectural sage, Dickon Robson, was charged by the RIBA to work out what the future held for the profession. In April he came back with his findings. Among them was the perhaps
none-too-startling revelation that architects prefer to set up their own practices, rather than club together to take on the global engineering powerhouses. The study concluded this is very counterproductive. Is the problem then, as a hack of mine suggested, that architects are egotists? The maverick Dickon was all too happy to agree.