I enjoyed our lunch-time meet up last week sooo much.  It gave me exactly what I wanted / needed:

- stimulating conversation
- a laugh
- contact with the wider world
- reassurance
- food for thought (and a nice halloumi salad for my tummy)

 I remember talking to a woman who had tried to start a similar group a few years ago and she said they quite quickly ran out of things to talk about.  That just doesn't seem to happen with CWIC.  Perhaps it is because we come from multi-disciplines. Perhaps it's because we only meet once a month and there are different people there every time.

It also surprises me how readily we talk about 'women's issues'.  In my experience these are 'risky' topics in general company and with people you don't know.  A bit like talking about politics or religion.  We heard about an engineering firm and a contractor who both run programmes to improve awareness and support around gender issues (I wonder if there are architecture firms that do this).  We talked about unconscious actions on all sides - how women nod in conversation to show they are listening and encourage the speaker, how men nod to say they've got it, now move on.  We noticed how, although we all made a point of shaking hands with men at a meeting, we hadn't shaken hands with each other (bar one).  So then we did shake hands with each other and we realised it gave us a chance for eye contact and to give our name and to hear the other person's name and I, for one, resolved to make sure I do this more often.

 

It strikes me that women are aware that they communicate differently and struggle for ways into a conversation with a group of men.  Out of work and in a balanced gender group the conversation topics can be more varied.  But, just as I have found myself talking about hairdryers and 'not having enough time to exercise' with women, so men can bond over formula 1 and whichever current sports tournament is on. There's a really interesting summary on male/female conversation styles here.

England's Natasha Hunt (scrum half) in last year's Rugby World Cup

I remember consciously deciding whether to join the pre-meeting rugby banter  once.  These were my options:

1. try and join in:" no I didn't watch France, Ireland but I did see them play Italy and I thought their line-out's were scrappy and Italy should've won"
possible outcomes - shocked silence, competitive probing questions which reveal I'm really just repeating what my Dad said, being thought 'laddish', being brought into the conversation and settling down to the meeting

2. join in with self-depreciation, "oh I don't know anything about rugby, it's not my thing" maybe risk a joke about funny shaped balls
possible outcomes - shocked silence, condescending reassurance, being brought into the conversation and settling down to the meeting

3. silent paper shuffling, writing the date in my notebook and drawing a pointless margin
possible outcome -  nobody notices,  others find you aloof, someone starts a one to one conversation, everyone settles down to the meeting.

Sadly, despite being a quite rugby fan I don't know much about women's rugby and didn't feel like challenging the majority so on that occasion I went for option 3.






 

One of my projects is a small new house in central Cambridge.  The clients are keen environmentalists and working through the design is bringing me right up to date with the latest government policies.

A click through from the BREEAM website to the DCLG - Code for Sustainable Homes takes you to Policy Paper: "2010 to 2015 government policy:energy efficiency in buildings" and
Appendix 7: code for sustainable homes, which states: This policy was withdrawn on 27th March 2015.

More recently the government also scrapped the Zero Carbon Homes policy planned for 2016 and the corresponding idea for "allowable solutions" where funds are put into off -site carbon savings.  According to the Guardian UK Green Building Council, housebuilders, energy leaders and environmentalists are all critical of the move.

As I swing from link to link trying to get my head round latest theory and up to date approaches to energy conservation it strikes me just how much work has been done with the 2016 deadline in mind. I reason that it is not wasted as it has expanded our knowledge and understanding but I really feel for the authors, researchers and house builders working to be ahead of the game.  So much careful work, so many clear explanations and tested solutions, abandoned.

Yet I am sympathetic to the government wanting to make building housing easier.   The 'housing crisis' is real but it is hard for some of us to see.  It is misleading too because it implies that it has to do with people having somewhere to live - a roof over their head.  If we aren't seeing more people on the street then they must be living somewhere so it's not so bad -is it?  I suspect it is the doctors and teachers and police, separate to the social workers, who see the housing crisis even though they are having to deal with its fallout, not the issue of housing itself.

There is a mismatch - governments want more (affordable we hope) homes built and they want the private sector to do this.  At the same time they need to meet energy targets and buildings are a major contributor to Green House Gas emissions therefore they want buildings to be more energy efficient and they want the private sector to do this too.  It seems this has proved too costly and cumbersome for the building companies.  It isn't the companies' fault because ultimately they need to make profits to keep functioning.

This starts to look like a case study from Joel Bakan's book "The Corporation" published 2003. I bought this years ago when I first got excited about the idea of corporate social responsibility.  Bakan stamps all over that idea and describes the corporation (limited company) as a pathological entity, self serving by design and with no conscience social, environmental or otherwise.

State building of energy efficient social housing.  Is it impossible?  I don't know.  Time to start looping though some political links out there and getting my head round the big picture.

Studio Hobohm - Proposed New House, Cambridge