Free Lunch: Continuing Professional Development (CPD) seminars are embedded within architectural practice as a ‘vital’ means (if you don’t, your RIBA membership is suspended…) to sustaining a professional educational ‘top-up’. Remaining relevant. CPD seminars are pitched to the architect-as-specifier by manufacturers who use the lunch hour to inform and ultimately sell their product in return for offering their captive audience CPD points. Thus ongoing RIBA membership. But more importantly sales via specification. CPD points are not, yet, redeemable in the local supermarket but are, significantly, manifest also with an accompanying free lunch. In this way CPD presentations at lunch times are a WHAT_tv dinner: eat and be entertained. We have held ‘sushi CPDs’ for some years now: enjoy here.

Free Plan: the plan libré refers, and let’s use populist Wiki to save the debate, to the “ability to have a floor plan with non-load bearing walls and floors by creating a structural system that holds the weight of the building by ways of an interior skeleton of load bearing columns. The building system carries only its columns, or skeleton, and each corresponding ceiling. Free plan allows for the ability to create buildings without being limited by the placement of walls for structural support, and enables an architect to have the freedom to design the outside and inside façade without compromise.”

Result: Le Corbusier might have said “a free lunch is not as good as a free plan”. The intern/national office is still playing this thought out but is currently toying between an hour of a free£6 sushi vs losing 60 minutes of freedom .

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