The beginning..

So it is finally time for me to enter the blogosphere.. My name is Stephen Blowers, this year I'm getting married (in June), hoping to finally build a house (which I've been designing and re-designing for three years), and I have in the last five weeks left my job of 10 years as an Associate Director at Dyer (architects) London, along with a colleague, to set up our own practice Design-Cubed (http://www.design-cubed.co.uk/). So this year should be a breeze!

As an architect the majority of my experience has been at the front end design stages of projects developing fairly large scale complex buildings with clients, users, and various interest groups. Unlike many others I almost fell into architecture by accident having started my University education as an electronic engineer (that lasted about ten weeks). I took my first degree in architecture in Liverpool, UK and then spent about 5 years doing various jobs: teaching maths at an international school in Switzerland, starting up (and closing) a company which developed electronic car security devices, truck driving, to name a few before returning to the world of architecture where I've been ever since..

I have a great interest in software. Unlike traditional architects I never really felt comfortable drawing. In order to be able to design I had to find a medium in which I was comfortable and could express myself with. In the early days that medium was balsa wood and cardboard but I never really had the patience to build great models that way and besides once a model was built I was reluctant and a bit lazy to make changes to reflect changes or develop a design. I therefore learned in the early years of design software to use computers to sketch out my ideas - something which my tutors and fellow professionals at the time told me you couldn't really do. I found that I could never really get what I wanted out of one programme but could produce great things if you worked between a series of different ones and used them differently to how they were really designed to be used.. Today I produce the majority of my work using Revit, 3ds Max, Photoshop (still probably my favourite piece of software), After Effects, Premier and InDesign, oh and sometimes Sketch-up too ..

So this is my first entry and I'm not yet quite sure what the focus of this blog will be. I'm sure I will write some entries about how I use Revit and some thoughts of how I go about using for a concept design focus rather than a pure documentation tool. I think this will also be about starting a new practice and seeing how it develops (believing that it will) and some updates on house building (if I can finally get all those ducks in a row). Most of all I hope I manage to keep at it - consistently writing has never been a strong point of mine!

Until the next post here's an image that demonstrates the sort of work that I do. It was a competition proposal I worked on at Dyer about 18 months ago for a Leisure Centre (swimming pools, leisure pool, fitness suites etc) on the north east coast of England. The building was designed over about four days in Revit, then rendered in 3ds max and for this image composited in Photoshop..