Upfront

how to overcome Autosave glitches, or get more accurate with Accudraw, should log on to www.eatyourcad.com – there’s a mine of information delivered with a deft humour. Check out IT consultant Nigel Davies’ Soapbox page, where his CAD musings go distinctly off piste.

For those wanting reminders of carefree days at architecture school, surf the Cooper Union’s website. The cutting edge design school ran a competition in 2003 for the redesign of its East Village Campus, and Thom Mayne of LA practice Morphosis won with a studio surrounding a vertiginous 120ft high atrium space, ‘the piazza’, only protected from the elements by a perforated metal facade. It’s going up now and you can see images on www.cooper.edu/cubuilds/vision.html.

I recently came across design website Architectradure.com and its page extolling the merits of Ulm’s School of Design at http://architectradure.blogspot.com/2005/10/ulm-school-of-design.html. A couple of clicks later and we’re at blog page http://architectradure.blogspot.com revealing developments in ferrofluid and solenoid technology. As architects, we’re used to this kind of ‘ticker tape’ information rendered in light, but it’s good to see things done with oil and rubber, suggesting that touchy feely technologies might yet educate our other senses...