The following is a guest article by Matthew Wood.

Before We Arrived.....Peace and Tranquillity

4th June 2012, Marriott Kensington hotel, after polishing off several bottles of mediocre wine at the CivSoc ball there is a sudden realisation that in less than two days we depart for Africa. More specifically Rwanda, the location of the atrocious 1994 genocides, in order to construct a hydro electric power system that will provide lighting, mobile phone charging and low wattage appliance use to more than 150 villagers. These basic facilities we take for granted, but in an area where children...

The following is a guest article by Áine Ní Bhreasaíl

Freezing soil causes cracks to appear in buildings and lumps in roads. It’s not just the 9% expansion of water when it freezes to ice that that causes the ground to heave in this way, it is also the freezing and thawing of ice lenses, segregated bands of ice within the soil, which cause movement many times greater than 9%.The threat from ice lenses is significant. In 1966 20 people died when a building affected by soil freezing and thawing collapsed in Noril’sk in Russia. The extent of ice lens related damage to infrastructure and...

Hamish Mackenzie & Camilla Nicholson talk about how to deal with your advisors...

If you are not already, you will soon be awash with several rainforests’ worth of leaflets and booklets giving valuable advice on exactly how you can get the most out of the library’s advice sessions and the most effective way of developing your multicultural interdisciplinary environmentally friendly pasta-frying skills. So at LIVIC, we have decided that you will probably need guidance on how best to deal with this paper-based avalanche that is marching inevitably towards you. First of all, its worth saying...

Livic has it's reporters everywhere, this month one reported from the Joint ICE and RIBA Annual Lecture.

Sustainability: It's probably one of the most used "buzz" phrases right now, along with emissions trading, carbon offsetting, green, global warming, ozone depletion, ecological; you get the picture. The press and the consumer have woken up and realised that destruction of the earth and its resources is not quite so hot any more, unless you count global warming. So it's fitting that this year's Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) and the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE)...