It had been thirty years since I was last in Dublin, when I entered the Red Room in the Architecture School of University College Dublin to participate in critical reflection on their future direction in an era of climate change, part of a series of events under the banner of Earth Week.

It’s time to cast aside our professions endorsement of Royalty and publicly vest our values in diversity and equality.

Today I walked through the forest, reconciled with a picture of a 300 year old bed and cursed kings.

What is the role of civil society in engaging government and the construction sector over climate change? As a new Director, I wrote this blog for the magazine of the Scottish Ecological Design Association.

Earth mortars are a 5,500 year old tradition combining place-based knowledge with low-carbon materials science. Can we find our future in our material past?

Huts have an exciting role as agents of that cultural change. Huts, always strong contributors to social resilience and personal wellbeing, can be part of a broader transition to a more restless, flexible and inclusive Architectural culture in Scotland, one with a dramatically lower environmental footprint.

In celebration of the architectural culture of Scottish Gypsy Travellers, we have made a short film on their cultural heritage.

What possible worlds coexist, here on the fringe of Europe, as a continent unravels and many threads are revealed?

I was an Observer during COP26 in Glasgow and here are my observations, including some clips of key speeches on the climate crisis in the built environment.

The urgency of the Climate Crisis means we can’t wait for future solutions from an industry resistant to change. Designers need to act now to cut the carbon coming from concrete by dramatically reducing how much we use. This is where Architects and Engineers can take the lead in demonstrating ethical responsibility.

Every time the sand is different, varied patterns depending on wind, humidity, tide, rain, incline and grain size. And they appear different according to the strength of the light, its diffusivity through cloud or haar, light angle and mineral colour.

To walk through woods today was to pass through a sea of green light, shifting all around me, mesmeric. Every colour, every shade, drawing me in, drawing me on. I could have been lost had I not known these trees so well.

It’s a wonderful but rare thing to have a project where we consider the needs for more than one species as a core need. Doing so broadens our design skills, understanding the physical and sensory environments that will enable two species to thrive together.

What a great event we had on Friday at Earthbuild Europe 2021, where 448 people from 52 countries in all time zones came together to network after a long year of not being able to meet and share.