Weird Scenes from Inside the Goldmine: Futuristic Technology and Amazing Materials in Design

Engineer Tom Barker follows in the footsteps of Ted Happold and Mark Whitby, having left his early apprenticeship at Arup Associates to form his own company b-consultants. Barker and his colleagues emphasise Research and Development in working on low energy buildings for the likes of Richard Rogers Partnership and Zaha Hadid Architects, as well as pursuing their own projects, such as the 70 metre high installation at Lisbon's Expo. More recently, Barker has been appointed Professor of Design Engineering at London's Royal College of Art. In addition, he oversees a number of exchange programmes for design engineering students in China and America. Through the nine essays comprising this book, Barker sets out the thinking and design approach behind collaborative projects as far afield as China, India, New Haven, London and Hong Kong, many of which projects have been collaborations with some of the most innovative and forward-looking architecture and design practices working today. Projects of significance carried out by b-consultants / Tom Barker include the following: Singapore Masterplan with Richard Rogers Partnership - 3-D technology and masterplanning data to create spaces assessing the sense of place and massing at street level of a new urban environment; Tokyo Guggenheim with Zaha Hadid - technology, materials and facade design for a new building; Greenwich Millennium Village - with Battle MacCarthy, HTA and Ralph Erskine, advising on system building and new materials developments for 3,500 dwellings in London's east end; and BP Solar - custom integrated photvoltaic solar panels for buildings, including shading systems and autonomous controls. The book further addresses issues on futuristic technologies and how these can be employed in environmentally accountable ways in the building industry. Such technologies include: 'memory plastics', the steel and timber manufacturing of prefab building components and digital imaging as a means of projecting how humans perform in different types of built environment.

Review :
"Design starts at any point, skips, repeats itself, goes backwards, insists, ramifies in simultaneous and divergent messages, converges again, has moments of irritation, turns the page, finds its place, gets lost. A direction can be recognised in it, a route to an end, since it tends towards a climax, and with this end in view it arranges rhythmic phases, recurrence of motives. Every experience is unrepeatable. You won't know what's hit you, but go with the flow - and it will start to make sense." - Tom Barker"