The Good Builder - Researching John Laing

Airfield construction at Thurleigh - Keeping contact with the control centre © Historic England 2018 Having completed the PhD introductions session I have been concentrating on completing my paper for the Construction History Society meeting in April ( Sixth Annual Conference of the Construction History Society ) - deadline is 14th January. In addition I have been looking to see what other organisations might be able to help me and so am now a "Friend of RIBA" and a student member of the International Council on Archives. John Laing very kindly put a piece in the latest Retirees Newsletter about the work that I am undertaking and I have had an immediate response with someone very kindly offering me their notebook from Berkeley to take a look at. This was better than I could have hoped for and with luck is the start of more material and anecdotes. January will start with a tutorial and attending a whole lecture series for which the reading list is huge (but usefull

So 2 months into the degree it is time to talk about my research ideas to a wider audience. On 4th Dec the School will be running a session titled PhD Introductions. The purpose of the event is to introduce the students' previous work and research interests, to discuss their current research ideas, developments and experiments and to generate a lively discussion about research in architecture. I get to do a 10 minute presentation followed by comments/questions/discussion. It has been a useful exercise so far - thinking about how to condense a somewhat sprawling thought process into a short piece and to make sure that it is accessible in the sense of providing enough of the background and context to allow the audience to make some sense of everything.