Darwin – NoelG

OpenLearn – free courses from the Open University

“OpenLearn aims to break the barriers to education by reaching millions of learners around the world, providing free educational resources and inviting all to sample courses that our registered students take – for free!”

What more could you want, credibility and no fee :)
They have a huge range of courses covering almost every subject area I can think of. They are to be fair sometimes taken from previous versions of full price courses; yet for all that they are still really useful. A free certificate of participation appears to come with most of them too.

And the humungous tortoise? A course on evolution, so Darwin – Galapagos – giant tortoises 😊

Image: By David Adam Kess – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

Survival of the fittest: HKPA’s ideas competition for Darwin College

HKPA allsorts

Studying the drawings at HKPA’s archive last summer, I noticed this label on ‘roll 24’:

These, I discovered, are the drawings for HKPA’s in-house ideas competition for their additions to Darwin College, Cambridge (designed 1965-6, built 1967-8). It’s slightly ironic that while these have survived, the practice’s main set of drawings for the job appear to be missing (although Darwin retain a full set).

The base drawings – showing existing buildings – are dated 4 March 1965, so I suppose the competition was held a little after that date. Bill Howell mentioned an ‘office competition’ when presenting a revised scheme to the College in May. Most of the entrants had a go at the challenge of slotting a new dining hall into a narrow gap between the Hermitage (left on the photo below) and Newnam Terrace (right), ensuring privacy and security for those in the garden while maintaining visual connections…

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