Thursday, June 12, 2008

Photothon 8: model (wind) farm

In my last post I mentioned that I seemed to be a bit fixated on nineteenth century engineering, so today I ran to the future. RES is an engineering firm concerned with wind farms and other green technologies. Its headquarters are Beaufort Court, in what was the Ovaltine model poultry farm.

Model farms were farms designed by architects rather than built in the vernacular style. You can see how splendid these chicken houses were from these photos on the Beaufort Court website. The aim was to be an example and it is hard to imagine anything further from the huts in which we intensively rear chickens now. Similarly RES have wanted to make their offices an example of environmental engineering. The aim is that all of its energy needs are met from on-site renewable installations and the offices have won a number of awards. The architects have a nice aerial shot of the complex here.



Today was fairly windy so I expected the turbine to be turning round at a good speed. I was a bit puzzled when I saw it was still. As I got closer I could see it was undergoing maintenance. My you need a good head for heights to do this

No comments: