April 2025

Hope you’ve had a good Easter break and raring to get back to work, school or college!

We may have made a slow start to 2025 here at SofA but we have been working behind the scenes to bring some great events to you over the rest of the year.

First up, on 30th April, we have a very special BUILDING VISIT planned.  This will be an architect-led tour of a fascinating project nearing completion in Douglas.  Due to restricted numbers on the tour, this will be for SofA MEMBERS ONLY.

If you’re eligible to join SofA, please make sure that you’ve filled in your form for 2025 before the tickets become available later this week!

The next event in our calendar is a SofA FILM CLUB night, brought to you in conjunction with Erin Arts Centre in Port Erin. We are really excited to present recent Oscar nominee/ winner ’THE BRUTALIST’ on Friday 13th June. This is open to everybody and it would be great to see you there.  We’ll be in the chippy on the way and the pub afterwards if you’d like to join us! Tickets will be available for this shortly via the Erin Arts Centre website - we will share a link via our socials and our next newsletter.

Another event that will be of interest to the construction professionals on our mailing list is a CPD demonstration being brought to you by Protection Paints and Thermoguard in Balthane. This live smoke and flame demonstration, presenting their range of intumescent paints, is literally HOT and not to be missed.  This will take place on Wednesday 18th June; if you’re interested in booking a place, please just email me back.

Over the summer, we will be hosting another Childrens’ SofA ARCHITECTURE ADVENTURE.  We’re working on another exciting collaboration for this project and will reveal details nearer the time.

In August we have been invited to take part in the annual ISLE OF MAN ART FESTIVAL, brought to you by the Isle of Man Creative Network.  We have some really exciting plans for this!  This will be open for everyone to attend but there will be a great opportunity for SofA members to get really involved.

In September we’re planning a PECHA KUCHA evening.  This would be the third in our sporadic series and we are hoping that some of our Architect members will be presenting their work, interspersed with a few other surprise guest speakers.  It would be great to see as many as possible in the audience to witness the thrills and spills of this exciting 20 slides x 20 seconds presentation format.

October brings the BIG DRAW festival.  It has been a few years since we participated in this but we are aiming to host one or two events as part of this worldwide festival of drawing.

In between these core events, we will be planning a few socials and some more CPD to help the Architects hit the magic 35 hours!

We will also be sharing CPD from other local sources and we’ll keep you up to date with what the RIBA Academy are delivering.

We will follow this up with a members’ mail out with details of the BUILDING VISIT and some upcoming CPD events.

If you’ve any questions at all, please do contact me or Mona and we’ll do whatever we can to help.

Enjoy the sunshine and have a great week!