Context 161 - September 2019

C O N T E X T 1 6 1 : S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 9 3 Matthew Orme of the University of Kent was awarded the Gus Astley Fund’s ‘Trustee selection’ for special commendation in 2018 for his project ‘Patere: a secular ritual Kentish patent office and archive’. The judges described it as ‘a cross between an architectural submission and a magical realist essay.’ Orme explains: ‘The major design project is located in Dunkirk, Kent, on the site of a disused second world war chain home (one of the ring of coastal early-warning radar stations built to detect aircraft). The proposal for a patent office and inventors’ workshop becomes a piece of parasitic architecture which, like a patent, becomes a test of originality as it imposes itself on three chain home ruins. ‘The project explores how the advancing and slowing of material weathering can manipulate the seeming relativity of time. The spatial use of the ruin within the proposed building is fundamental to the building’s overall use, and the new use of the ruin is driven by the patent process and metaphorically shows when an idea needs to be protected.’ allowing open discussion about place, the history of Nottingham, and how we shape it as a city in the present and future. At the vanguard of this is the use for engagement and participation with Nottingham’s Design Quality Framework, with developers, citizens and built environment professionals. The Design Quality Framework (nottinghamdqf.org.uk ) is a suite of guides about how design quality is improved in the city, including a housing design guide, street design guide and shopfront design guide. IHBC Gus Astley Awards 2018 Ingval Maxwell writes: It was a great honour for me to be invited by the IHBC to be the judge of the 2018 Gus Astley Student Awards scheme. Having previously fulfilled the role of external examiner in a number of the UK’s postgraduate conservation courses, the invitation offered me a unique opportunity to obtain a collective overview of student activity across the broad spectrum of what is being delivered in conservation education. With 37 submissions, student entries were received from colleges and universities in Oxford, London, Birmingham,York, Cambridge, Lancashire, Huddersfield, Strathclyde, Chelmsford, Bath and Cardiff. This significant response presented a remarkable overview of what was being achieved across the country by the various courses. At the same time, the range of addressed topics created a substantial and influential body of developing knowledge, understanding and appreciation of the diversity of conservation interests in the work I had to review. The multiplicity of topics was all the more remarkable in covering a truly comprehensive range of conservation matters. Submissions spanned planning, vernacular, energy efficiency, environmental performance, management, sustainability, tourism, legislation, building information modeling, adaptive reuse, and authenticity issues. An outstandingly wide range of case studies and insightful appreciations of traditional building materials were also submitted. Being invited to review the submissions with the ‘liberty to develop [my] own marking/grading system’ added to the challenges of assessing each in a fair and equitable manner. I inevitably learned much from the exercise but, in the interest of even-handedness, my approach had to be balanced through a consideration of content, value, presentation, awareness raising and course relevance. As might be expected, this was a not an easy task and rightly tested me in a