It has obviously been quite a while since my last post – you would think that doing something every day for almost four months would be hard to stop but not for me – I have an extraordinary capacity to quit difficult things. Lots has happened since I last wrote: School finished up, Ana and Joao got married (note: I am still waiting for photos), not  one but two of our over-40 friends found themselves surprisingly pregnant, and Jennifer and I took a fun-but-way-too-short vacation to London to attend the opening of “1:1 – Architects Build Small Spaces” at the Victoria and Albert Museum. I was fortunate enough to work alongside Andrew Freear, Danny Wicke, and Brett Jones to design the Rural Studio’s entry into the exhibit. There were nineteen “International Practices” invited to submit proposals for the exhibit, and then seven of the proposals were selected for construction in the museum. We were very honored to be invited to submit, and incredibly surprised and excited when our proposal “Woodshed” was selected for construction. The ‘Woodshed’ is intended to be a utilitarian yet noble structure constructed using forest ‘thinnings’ sourced from Wales. Thinning is a forest management practice in which small, constricted trees are removed to allow others to thrive. Costing as little as three dollars per ton, thinnings provide a plentiful, renewable, affordable – and underutilized – source of construction material. The word ‘woodshed’ is also a verb. It is an improvisation term used in jazz music meaning to improve one’s technical ability through focus, diligence and repetition – a sentiment echoed hopefully in the rigorously iterative design methods in which the the Studio engages as well as in the modular, extensible nature of the ‘Woodshed’ itself. If you click on the thumbnail above you can see a few construction photos; the movie below shows how the whole thing is put together – hopefully I will get some images up soon of the actual finished installation… The V&A stuff kept us pretty busy, but we did get to do a few other fun things while we were in London. The weather was so nice we spent as much time outdoors as possible – on our first free day we walked all over the city, stopping to visit both St. Paul’s and the Tate Modern. On our other free day we spent most of the day at Kew Gardens, which was definitely the highlight of my trip!