dendrite studios

So Bali has come and gone with some hailing it a break-through and others a huge disappointment. UCT scientist Prof Harald Winkler describes the progress made there as tectonic – slow but large. I hope he is right, but cannot help to agree with John Doerr at the 2007 TED conference when, after mentioning some [...]

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The ‘Building well’ seminar series concluded on Tuesday 16 October with a session entitled, Getting Practical. It was indeed a fitting way to end, as this series opened up all participants’ eyes as to the urgency of designing more sustainable (session 1 & 2) and the possibilities of how to do so (session 3 & [...]

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What do I need to support me in order to become a more sustainable built environment professional? This is the question that opened the fourth session of Dendrite’s ‘Building well’ seminar series. All participants partnered up with one other person and got 3 minutes to share their ideas while the other person listened before the [...]

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So climate change is a reality, water scarcity in the Western Cape a big risk, urbanisation an accelerating international trend and Cape Town still sit with pronounced economic inequality. Now what?
According to Sym van der Ryn, “the environmental crisis is a design crisis. It is a consequence of how things are made, buildings are constructed, [...]

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Things really kicked into gear on Thursday night (4/10/2007) at the second session of the seminar series. The title of the session was ‘Overview of the Implications of Urbanisation and Other Ecological System Pressures’. A bold title, but the exceptional triumvirate of speakers, covered this topic brilliantly and left participants with much to digest.
First was [...]

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Tuesday night (2/01/2007) saw the kick-off of our ‘How do we build well in a fundamentally changing climate’ seminar series. The title of the first session was ‘An overview of climate change and its implications’. We were fortunate to have two speakers who are both experts on this issue in the persons of Peter Willis [...]

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At a dinner on Saturday I was sitting with a group of highly educated, young professionals and somewhere during the course of the evening the issue of climate change got mentioned. I was stunned to hear that several of the guests were rather oblivious to the issue and were very sceptical as to the scientific [...]

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