THE GENIUS OF PLACE IS LOVE

[Michael Grove]

  When the physical environment affirms our importance,

  we think more clearly and boldly.  When our bodies are

  cared for and respected, our thinking improves.

  We have found consistently that Thinking Environments

  are places that say back to people, ‘You matter.’ People

  think better when they can arrive and notice that the place

  reflects their value - to the people there and to the event. 

  [IT] WAS during the unloading of a delivery of rebar to a

  John Laing construction site in West London, that a stray

  piece of reinforcing bar fell on my dad's back, which

  inevitably resulted, I suppose as the last straw in his

  decision making process, with regard to his and mum's

  retirement to their bungalow in High Kelling, Norfolk; and

  [IT] WAS from that site that dad had retrieved the two black

  marble slabs, in the picture above, which Linnie and I have

  utilised in various ways, during our own movement from

  PLACE to PLACE. 

  Place is in[DEED] a silent form of appreciation, creating

  a physical environment that reaffirms that ‘YOU MATTER’

.

[Michael Grove]

My dad had worked for John Laing's ALL his working life, having been involved with the development of the Bailey Bridge Project before the war and even during the war was responsible for the deployment of those Bailey Bridges, having travelled first to South Africa, where he had discovered that the Zulu's were the best of all at building them, regardless of the three dimensional complexity of the ground/water that they were expected to bridge; and it was in his capacity as Foreman Steel-fixer and Bar-Bender, that he had been responsible for the building of the first section of the M1 Motorway as well as for the construction of the Copper Roof of the Commonwealth Building, amongst many other projects. Thankfully John Laing's were the first company of its type ever to offer their workers a full retirement pension scheme, and following his retirement continued to help and support my mum and dad until they both died in their nineties in Holt, Norfolk.

 

[Michael Grove]

  

BUCKY's SYNERGETICS

Synergetics is the system of holistic thinking  

which Buckminster Fuller introduced and began

to formulate. Synergetics is multi-faceted: it

involves geometric modeling, exploring in depth

the inter-relationships in the facts of experience

and the process of thinking. Synergetics endeavors

to identify and understand the methods that

NATURE actually uses in coordinating the

operation of the Universe (both physically and

metaphysically). Synergetics provides a method

and a philosophy  for problem-solving and design 

and therefore has applications in all areas of human

endeavour.