Blog

Supporting wildlife, connecting communities

51 architecture’s swift, bat and town-twinning column transforms the public entrance to the Woking Borough Council into an open-air classroom, somewhere for children to learn about the extraordinary lives of these tiny creatures.

Greening the city

Working on an enormous 300m long retaining wall to the rail lands of the Stratford International Quarter, adjacent to Queen Elizabeth Park with the fabulous landscape architects Gustafson Porter Bowman.

Autumn

Autumn is here with its wonderful light and along with it the pumpkins and Halloween posters started to fill up the city. This means one thing for us: bats!

5 apps to explore nature

We've heard it too many times, mobile phones and tablets are creating addiction in their users. But they are, as you know, also wonderful tools. We've set to discover some apps that would make screen time something that would help us reconnect with nature and that would teach us a thing or two.

A swift watch, with banging & fledging

We were very privileged to see a fledgling leave the nest for the first time whilst swift watching with Edward and Mandy Meyer of Swift Conservation on Marta Strand's terrace in last week. We had been invited to see behaviour called 'banging' - gangs of swifts race past the nest, briefly pausing at the nest hole, sometimes clinging briefly to the bricks before moving on.

Let's talk about bats, and why we need them

(photo: www.shorpy.com)

Not everyone is aware that bats love eating insects, and over the course of history they have proved to be an effective way of controlling mosquito populations. We take a look at why we need bats and the benefits of looking after them.

Materials for a Sustainable Future

Here at Habi-Sabi we're passionate about the environment. We aim at living a sustainable life producing as little waste as possible and to make life better for the species that share the planet with us. Partly because of this and partly because we're a bunch of architectural geeks, we get excited about materials for construction that change the ways we've been working and challenge us to think of better practices to build. And is with one particular material that blew our mind that Habi-Sabi started to take form as something more than a nice idea and became a business. 

Building homes for nature

We Love Swifts

Over the following weeks we will be sharing swift pictures and facts over Twitter, Instagram and Facebook under the hashtags #swiftfacts and #saveourswifts. Please join us by sharing your swift stories, facts and images or videos. We look forward to seeing them and spreading the word on how wonderful swifts are for many more to enjoy and be aware of them this summer.  Help us spread the word about swifts and their needs so we can continue to enjoy their visits for many more summers to come.

Tips on placing your Little Bird Boxes

"This weekend we will install our Little Bird Box on a three hundred year old cherry tree in a small village deep into the mountains of Niigata. They still have 1.5 meters of snow so it will be interesting. With this project in mind we put together a checklist for installing your Habi-Sabi boxes." Carolina Vallejo. from Tokyo

Image credit: yuki5287 from Fukuoka city, Japan, CC BY 2.0