I got an impromptu tour of Foster + Partners‘ NYC office today, from an architect friend who works there. It’s up by Central Park, in a corner of the Hearst Tower magazine empire — which Foster designed, hence the connection. It’s a bit shiny and imperialistic for my taste, but it does have incredible views.

Models of the enormous projects the practice works on were laid out everywhere, some of them complete city blocks made of moveable pieces of wood and furnished with little trees and cars, some of them large (and expensive) pieces from a 3D printer.

The scale and level of investment are huge; after all, their work includes apartment buildings with US$10 million condos in them. Jai told me the practice hires a “balloon man” who takes panoramic images from the proposed building site at the height of every unbuilt floor, to show clients what they can expect to see from their windows. They had some of these shoots displayed around his office and you could see why — if there was any city that could sell a building purely on views, it’s New York.

Then, we took a trip to the Good Housekeeping labs. Launched in 1885, the magazine is one of America’s oldest, and product testing and comparison is one of the pillars of its remit. Each lab was behind a glass wall; a room of hairdryers, a room of hoovers containing a treadmill-like contraption with a piece of continuously moving orange carpet, a testing kitchen with dozens of different brand ovens, and a row of women all eating new flavours of ice-cream and filling in forms about it. It made me think a little of Willy Wonka’s factory; perhaps because it all smelled like freshly baked chocolate biscuits.

The original Good Housekeeping dining room has also been recreated here. We’re talking a 19th-century provincial dining room with its own china dinner service. With a fake window suggesting the sun is shining outside. High up in the centre of a massive Norman Foster office building, 20-something floors above central Manhattan. Surreal is an understatement.

Jim Garrison, Principal, Garrison Architects, DUMBO

Jim Garrison teaches at the Pratt Institute as well as running Garrison Architects, which is breaking ground on New York’s first zero-energy building when we speak. He tells a story about one of his colleagues, who recently set a class project on post-Zombie War housing (after the Max Brooks novel World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War). “There are all these post-apocalyptic dreams out there now,” he says at one point. Living in this city, and being an architect, it would be impossible not to wonder: what next?

“The culture of New York evolves quickly,” he says. “But the creative culture of Manhattan has more or less exhausted itself.” He puts it down to simple economics. When the artists fled to Brooklyn, his practice wasn’t far behind. “There’s a certain vibe to its character – it’s a hotbed of ideas and risk taking, which all worked to bring us over.”

The recession means, he says, there are virtually no houses being built now. Garrison’s other projects are mostly in the public sector, and include a plaza in the oldest commercial centre of the Bronx, “where all the grids collide,” combining sustainability, transport, urban design and construction.

A progressive new transport commissioner, the city’s ongoing attempt to create more green space, and the chance to make a difference has given Garrison a lot of optimism about the future. He eventually plans to produce buildings that not only support their own heating and cooling, but produce enough energy to pay for their construction over their lifetime. “The issues that affect us affect everyone – they just affect us, perhaps, more strongly. Every project these days has too little money, too little time, and disrupts too many neighbours. And there are multiple interested groups with something to say about it. That makes it a very complex stew.”

www.garrisonarchitects.com

Images © Emily Andrews

The magazine is on newstands Monday the 6th February. BOOM.

She loved pop-up books as a child, worked at a greetings card company after graduating from Central St Martins, and rather than a sketchpad, she uses Post-It notes, which she moves around to build up the finished product.

She also works on personal book projects that play on our relationship with everyday paper. For example, The Imp of the Perverse requires its readers to tear and fold pages to reveal sections of the text — everything you were always told not to do to a book. Her most recent, For Matters of Life and Death, is a well-designed series of cashier’s dockets and entry tickets for surreal situations.

Friel works from the Papered Parlour in Clapham, an artspace inhabited by a group of like-minded artists and designers. (I recently interviewed her for a Swedish design industry title). Find her online at www.helenfriel.com

I do spend a lot of time comparing Auckland’s transport network unfavourably with those of other cities, though. The first story on the introduction of all-electric cars to our fair isles was in Element’s launch issue, here, and the next, on Auckland’s transport congestion, here.

I don’t wish to sound smug, but I can’t remember the last time I was in a traffic jam. Oh wait — actually, I am OK with sounding smug on that one small point, as I’m usually the person waiting 20 minutes for one of Auckland’s ghost buses, or experiencing a damp near-death by SUV at the Ponsonby Road pedestrian crossing because when it rains in Auckland, the road rules are replaced with THE LAW OF THE JUNGLE.

So I am basically The Young Ones‘ Neil, in a lady suit. Just an umbrella and that large chip on my shoulder to keep me motivated.

Having recently decided I need to absorb more ambient information, and lacking colleagues, free Tube papers, sandwich boards and water-cooler conversation to keep me informed, I tuned in to National Radio. One of the first things I half-listened to while I pottered about was a story about a pioneering female journalist (exact name now lost to brain fog) working in war-torn or developing countries. There was a moment where I stopped, looked over at the radio and thought, “That’s what I’d really like to do”.

On its own, that wouldn’t have been the most amazing revelation, had an email not suddenly arrived the following day from Family Planning International, via a friend who works at the Aids Foundation (well, I guess they have condoms in common). The FPI were looking for a journalist to join a research tour to the Solomon Islands, studying women’s development, rights and sexual and reproductive health. I fired off an email, expecting little. Less than ten minutes later, a response arrived from the FPI director, wanting more information. Turns out, they were actually quite excited about getting a freelance journalist to come along, because it means more outlets for the stories I generate. Three weeks on, I’ve just got shots for hepatitis A, typhoid, influenza, measles and yellow fever. My Facebook status update reads: “One dead arm closer to the Solomon Islands.” I also spell hepatitis wrong, which is embarrassing.

Here’s what I knew about the Solomon Islands three weeks ago: they are an archipelago in the Pacific.That’s pretty much it.

A note on Facebook asking for information garnered the following responses:

Phillip: “Lots of gingers, strange kind of pidgin English is spoken, church may last all day.”

Rose: “They have awesome warlords.”

Claris: “I heard they have Friday night fights where they set spiders against small mice.”

Christine: “What do you want to know about apart from spiders? And if I were you, I’d be more worried about the shower toads.”

I also got slightly more useful offers from a doctor who did a three-month elective there, and a fellow journalist who has family there and written a number of stories about the islands — one of which included interviewing said warlords while doing fieldwork with the army.

Here’s what I know today. There are over 1,000 islands in the archipelago. (I am never going to get tired of saying that word.) Inheritance is matrilineal, from mother to daughter. The islands were never colonised, as such, and so don’t suffer from the colonial hangover of other Pacific nations like Vanuatu and New Caledonia. There are two dominant local cultures, the Melanesians and the Malaitans, who are Polynesian. Life is very, very simple. As the journalist told it, people outside the capital, Honiara, live in leaf huts, and wash in streams or under a communal tap. There’s plenty of seafood and the land is very fertile — which is lucky, as the population is very poor.

Tension between the majority Melanesians, and the Polynesians, who hail from some of the outlying islands but are represented in high numbers in Honiara as well, led to a civil war in 1999, which only calmed down when the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI) arrived. This included police and troops from Australia, New Zealand and other Pacific countries, and is still the Solomons’ primary security force.

I also know that there’s a “tank graveyard” somewhere full of scrapped American military equipment from the Second World War, and that if you swim out of a particular bay at low tide, you can stand on the nose of a sunken Japanese fighter plane. That would be awesome.

I still don’t know what shower toads are, though.