Will Tatton Talking about design www.willtatton.co.nz

At the recent conference of architectural designers, along with technical learning about things such as large laminated plywood posts and beams, there were inspiring talks on how art, design, and architecture work together.

In July I had passed through Sydney and seen the opera house bathed in weird and wonderful projected light images.

Giant searchlights were installed miles away, low on the water, and projected moving patterns of colour onto the sail-like faces of the building. It felt like I was very close to the skin of a giant cheetah or some amorphous amoebic cell.

With images moving slowly and morphing, upon the giant building was surreal and compelling. It was like the building was gently rearranging its form or muscles like a living organism. Transformed from fixed to moving, and from white into seething colour made me question: what is this building? It is not what I thought it was all this time. And so the questions of, what a building is and what it can be developed further into? entered my thinking. Art had done its wonderful task of creating and questioning.

This stimulation of thinking wasn't without care and effort. This was expensive and part of a very large festival of light. The thing is, it was energising and worth doing because of the result. Design can add to our life ahead in rewarding ways which are as yet unknown to us. We have the choice to be open to ideas of art and combine them with our practical needs.

I revisited our Te Ngaio Road house shown in the last blog and found a new richness after Sydney due to the new possibilities of combining white house walls with exterior lighting. I'll develop this further now as I see opportunities for delighting us all, and also for interior projection also.

The lake house design discussed earlier is developing nicely with the floor plan agreed and first elevations emailed to Switzerland. ‘Meeting' on Skype video has proven a very good tool. I'll be exploring the Skype ‘show my screen' function next to point out details while talking.

We're just finishing building a boathouse on the Tauranga harbour front which I designed for the owner to arrive by sea and be taken up into the house by a cradle on rails. From the mezzanine living space above, the boat will be seen (parked on its sloping rails) through the two-way fireplace and through fish tank ‘windows'.

I'll show pictures of this soon. Tomorrow I'm off to Christchurch as I want to initiate an Architectural Designers NZ design education programme, so we're spending a day on that down there. Also I'll look at the earthquake aftermath, and see if I can help with any needed design.