David Barrie

Stickier media

Just now, broadcasters in the U.K. are angsting over the role and meaning of public service broadcasting.

The personalisation of media, growth of the Internet and disappearance of traditional ideas of public realm have thrown the meaning of the public value of the media in to crisis.

What's great is that new platforms promise to end monopolies on narrative and its traditional form. 

So should old media players just pack their bags and go home?

No.

In the real world, there is a crying need for 'connectors' to bridge between people, government and life.

The return on investment required by the public and private sectors in the built environment place ever more importance on the social, not just physical infrastructure of place.

And companies increasingly recognize that there is competitive advantage to be had in sustainability, not just in the resource flows of material culture but also social and human capital.

What's exciting is that broadcasters now understand that new media platforms are just that - platforms and not pipes through which information can flow.

What's clear is that the public still identify and want some form of support to enable them to manage real and personal economies.

The challenge for broadcasters is whether they can meet their pledge to use new media to support public service - and define what that service is.

For if it's to mean more than acting as a nodal point for information and social networks, it needs to engage with the dreaded 'm' word...moral purpose.

In my mind, there's no dread in this.

And there's a willing audience out there. 

Why?

Because people innately understand through their everyday experience that communication matters.

The challenge is to embrace this understanding, take on the 'm' word and be inspired by the words of John W. Gardner, the former U.S. Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare under Lyndon Johnson and founder of Common Cause:

Communication in a healthy society must be more than a flow of messages; it must be a means of conflict resolution, a means of cutting through the rigidities that divide and paralyze a community.

Image of TV courtesy of  Niemster. Cross Story Platform Telling by Russell Davies. Video shared by yannoucs.   

Architectural salvation

Coming soon to a screen near you will be the first genuine exposé of the pleasure and pain of designing public space.

In 2002, Channel 4 Television in the U.K. decided it wanted to corporately socially invest in the renewal of the former coalmining town of Castleford, Yorkshire, England. 

In parallel, it commissioned the production of a wholly independent series of TV shows to track the process, presented by Kevin McCloud of Grand Designs.

With vast amounts of innovative public involvement and commitment, nine projects have now been completed - with two in second phases led by community groups.

And an initial grant of £100k ($195k) from Channel 4 has become a capital and revenue works programme valued at over £11m ($22m) and led by over 11 public agencies.

I once spent a lot of time with a senior officer in the British army who served in the Falklands.

In the heat of The Battle for Goose Green, with his commander dying of wounds, a bullet came the way of this second-in-command. In his pocket was a book. He claimed it saved his life. It was by the 20th century desert mystic Carlo Carretto.

Now for all those involved in urban renewal or wanting to bring a town or city forward for transformational change - and deliver it - you'd do worse than strap a book to *your* chest, but by another desert mystic, of sorts: co-author of a famous homily to Las Vegas, Nevada, architect Denise Scott Brown.

In her book The Public Realm (1985, now out of print), Scott Brown wrote:

Where civic design succeeds it is usually because it is sponsored by a civic organization that operates as watch-dog, implementer, funder, maintainer, and supporter of the project and because this group has convinced the city that its project is in the interest of the whole community.

If you want to support a town, public agencies or communities renew the world in which they live, you'd do well to have this wisdom strapped to *your* chest.

Images courtesy of McDowell & Benedetti, Sarah Wigglesworth Architects and Tim O'Connor.

Beer mat architecture

In yesterday's London Times newspaper, The Cratehouse in Castleford, Yorkshire was named one of the top ten works of public art in the U.K.

Created by German artists Wolfgang Winter and Berthold Hörbelt, it's made out of hundreds of bottle crates perched on a shipping container.

 

In their book on Fleeting Architecture and Hideouts, Robert Klanten and Lukas Feiress saw The Cratehouse as part of a general trend for modular building and another brick - or is it crate? - in the wall of architects

losing their traditional sovereign right to the formal design of buildings/spaces...the overthrow of established etiquette in our built surroundings...

What's great about The Cratehouse is that it's a mad mix of the beautiful and the useful.

So experimental film-maker Katie Clark has made this:

And for two years, the object has been used for poetry readings, school workshops, meetings of the Rotary Club, even as a Santa's Grotto and halloween hideout.   

A brilliant combination of walk-through sculpture - described by the artists as a space of light - and usable object.

In late 2008, The Cratehouse will move from Castleford, Yorkshire to Kielder Forest, Northumberland and  join a number of installations there that include a Skyspace by James Turrell. 

The artwork was commissioned by Arts Council England, Yorkshire, curated by Yorkshire Sculpture Park and managed by City of Wakefield Metropolitan District Council. Its fabrication was supported by Northern Containers, Hessle Fork Trucks Ltd. and HDS Associates.