Deep in forest & to keep us out the rain we try the oldest stone & timber shelter

a town of stones cut from the top of earth’s epidermis, 50-70km deep & ~1.35 × 10¹⁹ m³ of stone if we use 100m3 for internal & external walls on a 120m2 family home that’d be 11m family homes per person for all 8bn people on the planet & a drop in house prices

& hand applied “scratch” lime render normally used as a heavy textured under coat before the final but also left as a rustic self-finish

Remnants of buttressed walls cut & remodelled for domestic trading doors & domestic windows

Ancient castle walls long subsumed into homes, occasionally revealed as useful front gates

Mostly crudely cut 500mm deep stone blocks mortar stacked Cheap, cool in Sumer & warm in winter Posh it up with a render finish. Keeps the moisture out too in rainy climates

The Albanian Adriatic-Ionian coastal tour continues thru’ Vlor. About to open an international airport, its bed. (re)discovered by locals & foreign tourists alike. Infrastructure & private investment has lifted it from a bit Southend-on-sea via Miami & straight to Rio, perhaps

Onto a tour of a stalled project, that offers a reprieve to a mixed mature coastal woodland. Horrifically the architect planned to tarmac the lot with “luxury” suburban housing. Imagination needed for a conundrum allowing rural land owners to develop x1.0-2.0 their site footprint

& areas still untouched by concrete. Barely accessible, they attract mostly north European hikers camping under umbrella pines above limestone caves & clear blue waters

With a solid traffic jam ahead of us we find a car park whose operator fist bumps us & points out his hero. Then work our way thru’ the bustling promenade & loungers for a boat tour of a coastline beginning to show signs of the annual 14.5m tourists that visit a country of 2.5m

From a distance Dhermi fishing village appears to be that. Crisscrossing foam wakes of jet skis & yachts belie the sleepy expectation. New hotels come into focus, then the regimental blocks of sun loungers & straw or fabric umbrellas that identify each & Bali or Med beach-bars

After a night of musical performances on three of the public terraces, a morning swim in an infinity pool built onto another & before we head to Dhermi’s coastal twin, we look back at the 1,000yr old stone village built into the sheltering 250m yr old stone geology

Exploring its lanes & steps traversing level changes equivalent of a 15 storey bldg laid onto the hillside, Lorenc & project architect Alex Cotterill discuss the one proposed new build element, a dining room with lift access to at least 1/3 of those levels

10yrs later the Instagram world was in full swing, making famous ZoeHora, a part of old Dhermi’s mountain village that is now both family homes & 35 bed hotel scattered across the once abandoned houses. Bringing in 2,000 visitors a day where there had been none

15yrs ago structural engineer Lorenc Gjikuria returned to his home mountain village overlooking the Albanian Ionian coastline & bought 20 of the abandoned homes in its highest parts. Reassembling stone walls, roofs & relearning lessons such as planting trees on the windward side

https://t.co/0BdtL5jHcP Why would they do that to Fleetwood Mac’s Chain?

Sketch for Christ’s College Cambridge new library

✊🏼 https://t.co/b9N4wp6dB2

9 social housing apartments in Mallorca Recessed balconies with adjustable shade, lots of natural materials, access to natural light and ventilation By Estruch Martorell, Estudio E. Torres Pujol + Ripon Tizon

Working on embodied carbon comparisons for steel, rc, all stone & stone-timber hybrid structural frames After presenting field of numbers, thought the graphic put it more succinctly “material passporting” especially of biomass materials enabling accounting of sequestered CO2