Something profound happened this morning. Last night I was exhausted after teaching and talking all day. I slept deeply. Vivid dreaming. Tending a garden, which was in the front yard of my Dad’s house. I had violets planted in rows. And I was talking to Victor – my colleague and mentor – who was sitting at a table in the middle of the yard trying to work. I was thinking about a radical new building design I had heard of, trying to understand a how it worked – sorting the images out in my head while watering the flowers. What I remember about the building is that it had huge rain catchers, which fed into an underground chamber used to make and store ice cream and draw air to cool the space above. I was asking Victor questions and finally I stopped and said – I think I know how it should look. I walked over to the desk and grabbed some trace and a pen and sketched it out. Victor smiled and we laughed about how you could build a ramp through the underground chamber and sled through the mounds of ice cream. He left and looked over my drawings, impressed with the way it came together and sat down to add some craftsman-style details to the beams beneath the eaves.

As I woke up my head was flooded with images that moved out of the land of ice cream sledding and started to form into more concrete elements that tie together so many of the ideas I have had over the last year or so. I grabbed my sketch book and in my chicken scratch started to describe beautiful scoops that reach out from the building to catch water and create shade and outdoor space beneath their wings. Manipulating a daylight scheme with shading devices and light shelves to also catch and move water. Water storage that forms thermal columns or directed through a series of planters for biological water treatment. Cooling towers moving air over an underground reservoir to provide natural displacement ventilation. A cascade of opportunities to integrate ecological processes into building form. A second ecological skin wrapped around an old building giving it new life.

I can’t wait to get back home and set up a proper studio space. Dedicate some time to pulling imagery – a day at the library printing and making copies, going through my own photography. Need some better trace for the chimeric assembly of ideas. Get some better tools to use with my clay. And before long I know I will need the right challenge to focus my investigations and keep them well fed. Time to start looking for a design competition.