We love Fischer!

This morning Hilton, Nabil and Hannah talked to the whole class on their sources of inspiration in architecture. Among other things – such as beaches along the side of the Seine – Hannah showed some of Aldo van Eyck’s playgrounds which we should really look at in connection with our project. At 2pm we had a terribly inefficient session with Rat in the CAD lab demonstrating how to upload blogs. Before we upload any, though, she is going to provide us with a list of keywords according to which we classify our blogs so that they can be searched that way.

We left the session early to go with Hannah to see Kerry at Fischer, a client of hers whose building on the Troyeville side of Ellis Park she has just refurbished, in the hopes of getting a donation of fixing materials and some advice – Fischer makes bolts and fixings, including things such as chemical mortars. We sat in the boardroom and described our needs for fixing the balustrade, swings, abacus etc and Kerry miraculously pointed to the right fixing products for the job. He showed us express anchors for fixing the balustrading and specified that we needed two, spaced at least 130mm apart. He proposed a brilliant solution for the abacus which involved drilling two holes into the brickwork – one deeper than the other – so that the round bar could be slid in to place and then chemical mortared. Hannah also joined in, designing off the top of her head a bracket for the swings that used the same tectonic language as the c-sections of the balustrade. When Kerry left the room, Hannah said to us that all we needed to do was to ask him for a donation now! – but in fact he’d intimated as much earlier in the proceedings, when she’d been elsewhere. When he returned, she in fact popped the question and he agreed! We were overwhelmed by his generosity which included not only donating all our fixing equipment, but promising to try to source other material such as steel and cabling from his contacts at Mac Steel and Rope Reconstruction, and making up the bracket for the swings. Kerry also said he might be able to put us in touch with someone at Sika who could advise us on repairing the spawling concrete as he’d just done some similar work on part of his building. After admiring Hannah’s work on the building and a bit of a wait for Kerry to give us swanky Fischer brochures, we left, exhilarated. Now we need to finalise all the quantities of material and get back to him as soon as possible.