Montpelier Community Nursery

Montpelier Community Nursery is a small building in Kentish Town, London designed for Camden Community Nurseries. The project has wide reach as a model for participatory design processes in dense urban neighbourhoods. It responds to a number of research questions: How can the design of a small public building serve as an instrument of community building and urban regeneration? What responsible environmental strategies can be incorporated into the design of a nursery? How can natural play be promoted in the design of a nursery? How can the sustainability of a nursery be assured? How can the autobiography of the building be recorded? Boulanger was involved in all stages of the project, generating community awareness, bringing together different parties to participate in its design, fundraising, designing, supervising the building’s construction and recording and disseminating the process. The new building was designed around a flexible space opening onto a wooded outdoor area. Daylight is brought into the building through strip windows located within the roof with a north-south orientation, spanning the floor plan diagonally. Deep overhangs allow passive solar heat gain during times of the year as needed, but block out high summer sun. The superstructure is made of a pre-fabricated solid timber panel system, which facilitated an efficient building sequence. The project was recorded and disseminated through film, photographic documentation and exhibition, a children-focused workshop and a collaborative project of site visits with local primary school children. The building has been widely lauded, receiving a 2013 RIBA London Regional Award, a 2013 RIBA National Award and the 2013 Steven Lawrence Prize, which rewards the best example of a project with a construction budget of less than £1 million. This output will also be returned by Yeoryia Manolopoulou for University College London

Design for Learning: Camden Schools, Architecture in the Age of Austerity

This group of small specialised school projects in Camden, London demonstrate the possibilities for significant and enriching architectural work in high quality school buildings in a time of extreme austerity in current school building in the United Kingdom. Centred on the Eleanor Palmer state Primary School’s new science laboratory building (the first of its kind in the country), Anthony Boulanger and AY Architects demonstrate the possibilities for significant architectural improvement of school facilities and pupil and staff experience despite very low budgets, no significant or obvious sites, and in response to changing and emerging needs and requirements for school provision. Individually and collectively these interventions have generated a group of high-quality and innovative buildings and improvements out of very little financing. The four projects provide valuable teaching/learning, communal dining and office space, are strongly connected to their sites, briefs, landscapes and urban fabric, and are in marked contrast with projects from the age of major school building programmes. The solutions are innovative, well-crafted and environmentally-minded, realised with very tight budgets and working with challenging constraints on difficult sites. Taken as a whole, the projects critique standardised approaches to educational buildings and far exceed expectations of minimum requirements set by the government’s programme of ‘baseline designs and strategies for schools’. Though modest in scale, they mark a new phase in the history of school building in the UK, contrasting restrictive sector-wide responses and typologies with specialised solutions that do more with less; prioritise spatial quality and environmental design principles; use timber construction for the stand-alone buildings, marking a shift in the educational construction sector in the UK. They also offer new typologies of provision such as the country’s first science building for primary school children

House of Flags, Parliament Square, London

The House of Flags was a temporary freestanding structure erected on Parliament Square for the 2012 Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games. It was one of the Mayor of London’s ‘Wonder Series’ of installations to celebrate the capital’s design talent by showcasing cutting edge architectural projects throughout London. It was made of plywood panels containing cut out symbols, each printed with the flag of a nation participating in the games. Together the flag panels created a large timber jigsaw, a matrix of symbols, shimmering colours, shadows and perforations, inviting the public to experience an image of the cosmopolitan world as well as an image of multi-ethnic London. The structure was designed to be demounted and installed elsewhere. The installation responded to the following research questions: How can the unifying spirit of the Olympic and Paralympic Games and the cosmopolitanism of London be reflected in a temporary installation? How can the design objectives of an interlocking, stacked structure be reconciled with the protocols of heraldry? How can a temporary installation be prefabricated for hand assembly, demounting and reassembly? Once the initial decision to design an interlocking, stacked structure had been made, the architects worked closely with manufacturers and printers to research the production of the CNC cut printed plywood panels. Panels were designed to be lighter towards the top of the structure to facilitate hand assembly. The architects worked closely with the Flag Institute, the world’s leading research and documentation centre for flag information, to determine how flag designs and relationships could correspond with their strict protocols. The structure was a highly visible installation and popular photographic backdrop throughout the Olympic and Paralympic games and was widely disseminated in the media as a symbol of the games. This output will also be returned by Yeoryia Manolopoulou for University College London

Optimizing ISOCAM data processing using spatial redundancy

We present new data processing techniques that allow to correct the main instrumental effects that degrade the images obtained by ISOCAM, the camera on board the Infrared Space Observatory (ISO). Our techniques take advantage of the fact that a position on the sky has been observed by several pixels at different times. We use this information (1) to correct the long term variation of the detector response, (2) to correct memory effects after glitches and point sources, and (3) to refine the deglitching process. Our new method allows the detection of faint extended emission with contrast smaller than 1% of the zodiacal background. The data reduction corrects instrumental effects to the point where the noise in the final map is dominated by the readout and the photon noises. All raster ISOCAM observations can benefit from the data processing described here. These techniques could also be applied to other raster type observations (e.g. ISOPHOT or IRAC on SIRTF).Comment: 13 pages, 10 figures, to be published in Astronomy and Astrophysics Supplement Serie

Gravitational cubic interactions for a massive mixed symmetry gauge field

In a recent paper arXiv:1107.1872 cubic gravitational interactions for a massless mixed symmetry field in AdS space have been constructed. In the current paper we extend these results to the case of massive field. We work in a Fradkin-Vasiliev approach and use frame-like gauge invariant description for massive field which works in (A)dS spaces with arbitrary values of cosmological constant including flat Minkowski space. In this, massless limit in AdS space coincides with the results of arXiv:1107.1872 while we show that it is impossible to switch on gravitational interaction for massless field in dS space.Comment: 13 page