Cartone

This paper explores the use of mixed media in contemporary spatial and architectural practice. It is an introduction to a set of preparatory works for wall paintings, completed between 2017-20. The 12 panels are inspired by the tradition of ‘cartone’, or cartoons in the visual arts, that were preliminary studies for painted space. They are made using natural coloured pigments, paper collage and material textures. As such they appear as arrangements of fields of colour, and their surfaces tend to have a complex depth. The project is grounded on the understanding of architecture as a representational discipline. It draws on notions of spatial perception that are first articulated by Merleau Ponty (1962), enmeshed sensorial experience, and participatory experience in visual phenomena - the work is intended to take forward the dialogue between architecture and the humanities. Colour and its materiality have also long been the subject of philosophical and theoretical debate and by exploring colour and space through hybrid drawing, we may inquire if colour is mind-independent: are colours simply qualities of objects/spaces or can colour be understood relationally, integral to spatial and material experience? Situating the work in the context of the historical development of pictorial space in painting and architecture, this study then asks how mixed media visual practice can contribute to the development of forms of critical spatial practice. For instance, in an age of resource depletion, an exploration of the potential of low-impact pigmented surfaces has an ecological imperative

An increasing role for solvent emissions and implications for future measurements of volatile organic compounds : Solvent emissions of VOCs

Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) are a broad class of air pollutants which act as precursors to tropospheric ozone and secondary organic aerosols. Total UK emissions of anthropogenic VOCs peaked in 1990 at 2,840 kt yr -1 and then declined to approximately 810 kt yr -1 in 2017 with large reductions in road transport and fugitive fuel emissions. The atmospheric concentrations of many non-methane hydrocarbons (NMHC) in the UK have been observed to fall over this period in broadly similar proportions. The relative contribution to emissions from solvents and industrial processes is estimated to have increased from approximately 35% in 1990 to approximately 63% in 2017. In 1992, UK national monitoring quantified 19 of the 20 most abundant individual anthropogenic VOCs emitted (all were NMHCs), but by 2017 monitoring captured only 13 of the top 20 emitted VOCs. Ethanol is now estimated to be the most important VOC emitted by mass (in 2017 approx. 136 kt yr -1 and approx. 16.8% of total emissions) followed by n-butane (52.4 kt yr -1) and methanol (33.2 kt yr -1). Alcohols have grown in significance representing approximately 10% of emissions in 1990 rising to approximately 30% in 2017. The increased role of solvent emissions should now be reflected in European monitoring strategies to verify total VOC emission reduction obligations in the National Emissions Ceiling Directive. Adding ethanol, methanol, formaldehyde, acetone, 2-butanone and 2-propanol to the existing NMHC measurements would provide full coverage of the 20 most significant VOCs emitted on an annual mass basis. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue 'Air quality, past present and future'

Un Coup De Dés

The collages illustrated here made by hand from original copies of the French newspaper La Grande Illustré (1904) They form a visual novel inspired by Stéphane Mallarmé’s Un Coup de Dés, that dates 1897. Like the poem, the collages presented here are heterogeneous and their protagonists are ‘found’, both in terms of their scale and detail, in the dramatized newspaper of the period. The engravings are a snapshot of the terrible uncertainties, reported disasters and social unrest that coloured Parisian life at the time. The re-invented figures, scenes and architectural settings are offered as spatial analogues to the poetic passages, exploring the non-perspectival space of the text, its content and poetic imagery as much as it’s solipsism and incoherence. There is no overarching narrative intended, but all narratives that are available to the reader, all possible connections and dislocations