From Architect Matthew Barnett Howland website:
Cork House embodies a strong whole life approach to sustainability, from resource through to end-of-life. Expanded cork is a pure bio-material made with waste from cork forestry. The bark of the cork oak is harvested by hand every nine years without harming the tree or disturbing the forest.
This gentle agro-industry sustains the Mediterranean cork oak landscapes, providing a rich biodiverse habitat that is widely recognised. This compelling ecological origin of expanded cork is mirrored at the opposite end of the building’s lifecycle. The construction system is dry-jointed, so that all 1,268 blocks of cork can be reclaimed at end-of-building-life for re-use, recycling, or returning to the biosphere.
Completed in 2019, Cork House was designed by Matthew Barnett Howland with Dido Milne and Oliver Wilton.
Cork House is a brand new and radically simple form of plant-based construction. Monolithic walls and corbelled roofs are made almost entirely from solid load-bearing cork. This highly innovative self-build construction kit is designed for disassembly, is carbon-negative at completion and has exceptionally low whole life carbon.
To read more: https://www.matthewbarnetthowland.com/
From Helen of Troy’s abduction to the deception of the Trojan Horse and the fall of the city, tread the line between myth and reality in this phenomenal new exhibition.
The story of the ancient city of Troy, and of the great war that was fought over it, has been told for some 3,000 years. Spread by travelling storytellers, it was cast into powerful words by the Greek poet Homer as early as the eighth to seventh century BC – and into powerful images by ancient Greek and Roman artists. Just as it enraptured audiences in the past, it still speaks to us today and it’s easy to see why. It’s a story that has it all – love and loss, courage and passion, violence and vengeance, triumph and tragedy – on a truly epic scale.
In 1965, James Baldwin, by then internationally famous, faced off against William F. Buckley Jr., one of the leading voices of American conservatism, in a debate hosted by the Cambridge Union in England. The debate proposition before the house was: “The American dream is at the expense of the American Negro.”
First published in 1897, Country Life is itself a late-Victorian institution. What could be more appropriate, therefore, than to celebrate this anniversary with a collector’s issue of articles and photographs from the magazine’s archives?
The van is new from the ground up, sitting on a new modular platform and featuring a 60kWh lithium ion powertrain said to endow it with a “power-to-weight efficiency that fully maximises the range of the vehicle”. It can fast charge to 80% in 30 minutes. 

David Gandy wears many hats. He wears his
“I suppose I started off with a fairly literal view of the world,” he says. “But, quite early on, it became clear to me that there was much more going on than simply the picture I was seeing; that the natural world had an agenda of its own; that it was going to live out life, regardless of how we viewed it and how we used it; and, indeed, regardless of the fancy metaphors that we used.”



