Isolation - Blog

April 2020

In these unusual and uncertain times of the Coronavirus pandemic our event schedule is suspended.

We have asked our members to reflect on the the current situation and you will find below a series of short written pieces by some of our members.

If you would like to contribute please contact Club Administrator, Rowena Ellims.

Isolation Portraits

Isolation | The Architecture Club

Thursday 2 Jul 2020

Our collective  lockdown  experience is perhaps, and hopefully, something we won’t experience again. In some ways it felt like being a participant in a social experiment, but at another level it gave ...

Where have all the flowers gone

Isolation | Roddy Langmuir

Saturday 23 May 2020

Our year-out students ran a drawing exercise on a Friday evening – to imagine your idealised home-working environment. In lockdown, as the classic painting; ‘St Jerome in his Study’ appears to propose...

‘Passeggiata’: a paradigm for the times in which we now live

Isolation | Terry Trickett

Tuesday 19 May 2020

We are now caught up in a complex metabolic whirlpool where systems of free-living equilibrium have collapsed to a radically disordered state. Viruses like Covid-19 are not free-living entities; they ...

Isolation

Isolation | Sir John Tusa

Friday 15 May 2020

I am not of course isolated; I live with my wife. I am though isolated from most of the people and activities that filled my life before lockdown. It was only as I read the other blogs that I realised...

ISO* lation

Isolation | Lynne Bryant

Thursday 7 May 2020

In Digital Photography ISO measures the sensitivity of the image sensor. The same principles apply as in film photography – the lower the number the less sensitive your camera is to light and the fine...

Belonging

Isolation | Jo Bacon

Tuesday 5 May 2020

Some years ago, I sat next to a Scot, whose introduction to conversation was “So where do you belong?” This kind man, who had only once in his life left the Moidart on the west coast of Scotland, was ...

We will meet again!

Isolation | Margarita Boulaki

Monday 4 May 2020

There have been long discussions over the years, and even more in the days before the lockdown about our profession being collaborative and based on everyday interaction and how it is close to impossi...

Nice to be lost

Isolation | Celeste Bolte

Friday 1 May 2020

Today I got lost, which to my delight, was a very pleasant experience. I wasn’t properly lost in a busy foreign market or a remote, rugged landscape; I was lost in Abney Park Cemetery in Stoke Newing...

Life changes after lockdown

Isolation | Sarah Featherstone

Monday 27 Apr 2020

“The biggest problem in the world is isolation and disconnectedness - socially and physically.”

Canaries in the Coal Mine

Isolation | Terry Trickett

Wednesday 22 Apr 2020

I’ll tell my story of isolation in pictures or, to be more specific, Plague Cartoons as I call them. But my time has been spent, also, in delving into Shoshana Zuboff’s massive volume on ‘The Age of ...

A temporary platform

Isolation | Hugo Dalton

Wednesday 22 Apr 2020

It is only a short walk away but my studio lies silent. Despite the proximity it is a forbidden territory: I am in isolation as my neighbour in the flat below has suspected Covid-19. Artists are as ...

The View from the Heath

Isolation | Michael Lowndes

Friday 17 Apr 2020

These strange and worrying days are not without some consolation. My self-isolation exercise is a daily dog walk that takes me across the hills and fields and through the woods and vales of Hampstead ...

Dwelling at home

Isolation | Luke Tozer

Thursday 16 Apr 2020

My home has changed. The physical structure is the same, but the way I’m living in it is different. There are four of us here now, all the time. I’m sharing the space with my wife and two boys (12 a...

Work, women, pots and isolation

Isolation | Caroline Cole

Tuesday 14 Apr 2020

At the moment, I remain quite comfortable with enforced isolation. The bottom has fallen out of my day job and, as there is little I can do about it, I am spending time instead tidying the business, ...

‘Clavis lux est’ - The key is Light

Isolation | Chris Dyson

Thursday 9 Apr 2020

We all sit alone on the ship sometimes at home sometimes in the studio at the moment always alone… strange times for a collaborative profession! My wife Sarah and I believe we have had the virus and w...

...Of Poets Philosophy and the Passing of Time

Isolation | Jonathan Ball

Tuesday 7 Apr 2020

...it was during my AA 1960’s years that the Liverpool poet Brian Patten published an anthology under the title ‘Notes To The Hurrying Man’...it is worth a dip into the title poem at this moment in ou...

Isolation

Isolation | Nicholas Thompson

Tuesday 7 Apr 2020

Isolation poses more than the word initially suggests when “what If” grows in importance and uncertainty. We heard month ago whilst in India that our bookings in Kerala were being cancelled, initial...

No person is an island

Isolation | Peter Stewart

Monday 6 Apr 2020

Living with my family in an inner London flat during the days of COVID-19 lockdown, I’ve wondered from time to time whether we would rather be elsewhere. The ‘culture’ slot of our strange new daily t...

Touching the Void : Art and Architecture in the Time of Pandemic

Isolation | Keith Williams

Monday 6 Apr 2020

Albert Camus’ 1947 dystopian novel La Peste (The Plague) depicts post-World War II Oran, hollowed out by medieval bubonic plague. I read it many years ago in the original language when my French was r...

Silent City

Isolation | Grant Smith

Friday 3 Apr 2020

Since a day before the lockdown I have been cycling into the City taking photographs of our changed environment every few days. I lock my bike near Liverpool Street and walk, keeping the regulatory 2m...

Isolation

Isolation | Ben Derbyshire

Friday 3 Apr 2020

I’m a self-isolating asthmatic, working from my pre-fabricated study in the garden and remote from colleagues, friends and family, apart from my wife. My commute is all of 20m and otherwise I find a m...

The Lonely Crowd

Isolation | Mike Stiff

Monday 23 Mar 2020

During a discussion at Vision London (2018), organised by Architecture Today, the debate centred around the issue of alienation and isolation in the metropolis. I think it could be argued that whilst ...