David Barrie

Listen to the Panda

Architecture writer Arjen Oosterman has collected a brilliant series of essays in the current edition of Volume magazine.

'Engineering Society' is a wholesale investigation in to the vogue for popular/citizen/'service user' involvement in the making of cities.

What interests me in particular is an essay by Peer 2 Peer theorist Michel Bauwens.

Bauwens surveys the basic business models emerging around peer-production - what he defines as the ability to create value in common - and attributes the success of Linux and Wikipedia to our need for third parties - platforms for bridging or strengthening ties between people.

Now the neeks out there will know that all sorts of mechanisms and vehicles have been created in recent years to try to bind people together to the cause of social progress, ways other than command-and-control government, war or other forms of peer-group pressure.

And there's much discussion going on in the U.K. at the moment to experiment with how the Net might play a role in acting as a network agent of change in poor communities - and next year, I'm planning to give it a go in my own social media project.

But one question nags...what does a third party look like? What are its constituent parts? What does it do?

Here's one answer, scribbled on a scrap of paper by my friend Ben, after three hours of professional therapy and East 8 Hold Up cocktails at Milk and Honey:

The mix might help define the role of 'cultural broker', 'transformational designer' and/or what we have in our heads when we use the phrase 'enabling government':

2 parts - Thought Leadership
4 parts - Stakeholder Management
6 parts - Social Entrepreneurship
8 parts - Project Delivery, not Consultancy

What do you think?

Picture by Zhao Bandi, Laid Off, 1999.

Kevin McCloud and the Big Town Plan

Here are images of almost all of the design projects that form The Castleford Project: an urban renewal initiative in the forming coal-mining town in West Yorkshire.

A TV series on the design and delivery of these projects and the pleasure and pain of renewing a town will be broadcast by Channel 4 in the U.K. for four weeks from Monday, August 11 at 2100hrs. It is called Kevin McCloud and the Big Town Plan and produced by Talkback Thames. 

According to an article in today's Times newspaper

the physical results are impressive. Talkback attracted serious talent. On the steering committees are leading lights such as Roger Zogolovitch, one of Britain’s most influential, design-led developers, and Peter Rogers, brother of Richard and the founding CEO of developers Stanhope. Architects included rising stars such as DSDHA and Hudson Architects, plus international luminaries including Martha Schwartz.

Here are two views of the new pedestrian bridge, designed by McDowell & Benedetti.

The new town square, designed by Hudson Architects:

A new pedestrian subway and public space to the south side of the town centre, designed by DSDHA with lighting artist Martin Richman.

The initiative features the renewal of three open spaces in housing neighborhoods across the town as public spaces and play areas.

Here is the new Playforest at Cutsyke, designed by Estell Warren Landscape Architecture and Allen Tod Architecture:

The new playground at The Green Ferry Fryston/Airedale, designed by Parklife:

A new public space at New Fryston on the site of former mining cottages by American landscape designer Martha Schwartz:

In addition to these physical transformations, the Project enabled the creation of a forward plan for the town's riverfront by architect Sarah Wigglesworth.

And a new master plan for a housing district known as Wilson Street, adjacent to the town centre by architects Allen Tod.

The design team was supported by Roger Zogolovitch, AZ Urban Studio and design writer Lee Mallett.

The public space strategy of the initiative was advised by Gehl Partners, Copenhagen.

Project Management: MACE. Cost Management: Gleeds.

The grandest design of all

The project I have been slaving away on for six years has started to come out from under wraps.

Its centerpiece is Renato Benedetti's stunning new S-shaped sweep of a bridge.

You'll find more on the bridge element of the renewal program known as The Castleford Project here:

Channel 4 Television

Dezeen Magazine

World Architecturenews.com

Building Design

A series of four one-hour TV programs that follow the design and delivery of these and other projects will be broadcast on Channel 4 TV in the U.K. from Monday, August 11. The series is presented by Kevin McCloud of Grand Designs.

For those not based in the U.K. or who are sunbathing/don't have a telly/in Tuscany reading their primers on philosophers Deleuze and Guattari, the series should be available online from on Channel 4 'Catch Up' - and I'll post the link as and when I know it.

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.

 

Peripheral porn (in Hartlepool)

Israeli sociologist Erik Cohen once defined tourism as involving movement from the cultural centre to the periphery.

In the North Sea port town of Hartlepool, England, park up on the edge of town, pass under a railway bridge, head towards the sea and you fall across this:

It's called Steetley Refractories.

The site of a factory that once extracted magnesia from the sea and reacted it with dolomite deposits in giant tubs, tanks and kilns.

This is what the site looked like in the 1960s.

And this is it today, a floor show of vast blue lagoons that push for attention as land art.

The BBC reports that there are plans to turn the site in to luxury flats.

But for the moment, it remains a classic English example of what Matthew Coolidge, founder and director of  The Center for Land Use Interpretation calls the contemporary landscape as museum.

And a way better piece of cinema than either Mongol or Prom Night.

For directions, go here.

God Save the Queen

In London, we have a very large but very local architectural problem:

In last weekend's Guardian, Madeleine Bunting basked in the early Summer sun and asked a simple question: why can't Londoners use Buckingham Palace - especially its gardens?

While Green Park is used by up to a million people a month in the summer, right next door a park of near-comparable size remains largely empty; pristine lawns behind 10ft brick walls, bristling with barbed wire and metal spikes....

Buckingham Palace Gardens is the largest private green space in central London. (It's all the area to the left of the picture above...)

Its forty acres of fine garden, lakes, two thousand animal species and flamingos were once common ground when the Palace was plain old Buckingham House in the early eighteenth century.

Today, surrounded by walls, wire, speakers and surveillance cameras, it is in the words of architect Sir Terry Farrell, an essay in

bad neighborliness...Either the monarchy is paternal and they share in a paternal way and we enjoy it; or they are behind walls, and it is us and them.

Several years ago, Terry and me made a documentary film arguing that it was time to turn the forecourt of the Palace in to a 'world square' and puncture its architectural front:

And replace the walls that surround the Palace grounds with railings and allow public access:

Architect and writer Charles Jencks fell in to our ranks, seeing the building as like a Hollywood stage set, 

a very uptight facade that says nothing. The message is all to do with control...It is as if being a monarch was a real pain. And dangerous!...Being a monarch cannot always be a burden. It should be a celebration.

But royalist Lord St John of Fawsley lumped us in with an alternative aristocracy and gave us a terrifying glimpse of an ancient ax:

Along come these architects and intellectuals and others who really do not understand what people are like, with these mad crazy schemes. Well, away with them! In another age they would have been sent to the Tower!

I wasn't sent to the Tower.

And the idea hasn't developed.

The message:

We may be adapting physical and metaphorical landscapes throughout the world, de-commissoning and re-commissioning 'place' - but there are limits.

Politicians and designers may be busy re-defining the role of service providers and promoting inclusion - but there are limits.

And the monarchy is serving the nation in many ways other than exclusivity - but it has its limits.

Fact is that our idea of monarchy remains captive to the idea of magic and awe of the private landed upper class.

The Windsors find it difficult to link leadership, value and play.

And assets such as the Palace and its gardens are classified as a 'home' - i.e. a private, not a public asset. 

I told you that it was a local problem.

Suffice it to say: God Save the Queen!

Unravelling the spaghetti

This is an image of the Spaghetti Junction interchange in the West Midlands, England.

In 1990, several architectural designers came up with some alternative design ideas for the area over and under the Junction: an infrastructural megastructure that's magnificent to see from above and travel through but that cuts up communities living either side.

Robert Adam, the classicist English architect, decided to accentuate the interchange as a gateway to the city:

American internationalists Swanke Hayden Connell  decided to condense the structure by building on top and around it with offices and housing: 

Annoyingly I don't have an image of the scheme by Melanie Sainsbury, a former partner in crime of Nigel Coates and the Narrative Architecture Today group.

But Melanie imagined a fabulous, Hamburg-style nightclub beneath the interchange piers:

And alongside recent RIBA Gold Medal winner Edward Cullinan, Finnish landscape architects Pirkko Higson chose to use the scale of spaces beneath the interchange

and imagine a jungle:

Five architects, five revisions of a public space: oh God! another architectural ideas initiative!

Yes. But there's a small but important dimension to this project.

Over at BLDGBLOG, there's speculation on the relationship between architecture and the media.

How are architectural ideas communicating through...various media? Does the medium itself inform the message, as it were – and in what specific way? How are architecture and architectural ideas repackaged for discussion in these various forms?

The project on Spaghetti Junction contributes to the discussion because it was commissioned by the British Broadcasting Corporation and was broadcast as a special edition of an innovative arts TV series called The Late Show.

The person who came up with the project idea - er, me! - wanted to speculate upon the different pictures of the world in architectural designers' heads, suppressed by tight top-buttons done up and the virulent anti-architectural spirit of the times, triggered by Prince Charles' outburst against the National Gallery extension by Venturi Scott-Brown. 

Nothing much has happened to the space since this outburst of creative visioning, perhaps confirming in the abstract architect Bernard Tschumi's thought that

No spatial organization ever changes the socio-economic structure of a reactionary society.

But one principal stands tall.

Architecture need not be communicated by the media simply through reportage.

It can be communicated by the media acknowledging that it has a role as a protagonist in the public realm and that it can make its presence known as commissioner and cultural speculator.

In some places or situations, civic organization is dead and buried.

In others, it is fractured in to bowling associations, amenity groups and people obsessed with the world on their doorstep.

In others still, local government has given up the job of curating the physical quality of public life.

The question is whether the media can and is willing to fill the void and become an activist promoter of civic value and support the common sense prescription of architect Denise Scott-Brown when she wrote:

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

Yes, the media is entertainment. And yes, it's devoted to making money. It would be deadly if it were otherwise.

But if architecture is defined by the actions it witnesses as much as the enclosure of its walls, ditto the media.

Somewhere between the two there is common purpose.

So the job has got to be to get media corporations to not just commission superstarchitect head offices but become activists and sponsors of design and social innovation.

And for architects to not take such a snobbish, PR-orientated attitude towards the media, acknowledge a mutual role as shapers of the public realm, not hide in the basements of their buildings...and PLAY!

Pictures of Spaghetti Junction courtesy of Tim Ellis.

Slaves to the cult of de-clutter

This is an eagle-eyed view of a new square in the town of Castleford, England:

And this is what it was like five years ago:

An earlier age of crud:

Has given way to something brighter, more elegant and de-cluttered:

But my favorite image of the project is this one:

 

Why?

Because it makes me think about clutter - or more to the point, tidiness.

I was involved in the early stages of design development of the new main square in Castleford.

The selection and management of the design was devolved to a steering group made up of representatives of the local community - and by and large, people got what they wanted. 

The town is proud of the design. I am proud of the design. And there is little doubt that it has contributed to the $400m plus new investment that is now flowing in to the town.

But what gets me thinking is that for many years, the model for successful urban life has been the noise, disorderliness and messy mix of people and traffic of SoHo, New York.

Alongside, creativity has escaped linearity and order: be it ironic, awkward Britart, whimsy, casual Goldfrapp, the popularity of feature-length social documentary film-making, the chaos of social networking and exotic packaging of securitised debt.

And yet we're choosing to scrape the surface of our towns and cities and turn it in to clean, clear and crisp pavement.

In its wake has come outdoor food courts, not street markets and a sweep of control orders that segregate access to the streets.

An irony is that all of this has been done in the name of winning back public space.

Another is the derision that once greeted minimalist, conceptual art in '70s and '80s.

Why is the new public realm so out of sync with the grind, mess, whim and float of popular culture - and of our lives?

And how and why did the cult of de-clutter take hold?

Here's a quick list of some of the things that might have got us here:

• The cult of Copenhagen, Danish urban design guru Jan Gehl and the pedestrianisation of the city
• The stream of sparse, ambient Sigur Ros running through the veins of the design profession
• The massive, hidden influence of chic interiors by John Pawson
• The apolitical lure of an empty stage
• The rise of de-clutter and home cleaning TV shows
• Our un-ending anticipation - and expectation - that something big's about to happen

The problem is that quite often in these places, nothing big does happen.

It's as if city developers skipped the chapter in Jan Gehl, William Whyte or Jane Jacobs that said that "designed" public spaces will be empty of people most of the time if a user population doesn't live near by.

Is it time for the script to move on?

Time for urban designers and their clients to take all of that brilliant new energy and enthusiasm for public space, look at the popularity of artists like Peter Doig and realise something simple?

That what we like and what often works is not just tidy stuff but experiences and images that are colorful, casual and awkward?

Fields of gold

This is an image of the celebrated Not a Cornfield art and land project in Los Angeles:

 

And this is an image of the existing landscape of a housing estate in the town of Middlesbrough, North East England that was involved in an urban farming initiative I ran last year:

Yesterday, the price of wheat skyrocketed as Kazakhstan, one of the world's largest exporters of grain, said it would impose export tariffs to curb sales of wheat. The reason: to contain domestic inflation of nearly 20%.

Dear city mayors, planners and architects,

How about reviewing those renewal strategies based on physical, social and cultural build and write a Five Year Crop Plan?

Be inspired by the spatial planning of Not a Cornfield:

Or the first vision of architects Andre Viljoen and Katrin Bohn for the town of Middlesbrough as a productive urban landscape, in a project enabled by Dott07/Designs of the Time, One North East and The Design Council, England:

Viljoen and Bohn's plan connected tissues of land that might be cultivated, from existing parkland, open green spaces and allotment sites across town to places that local people chose to grow food  as part of the initiative and would like to see urban agriculture happening in the future (red dots above/green dots below):

Not a Cornfield is described as a sculpture. Viljoen's plan for Middlesbrough: an edible town.

It remains to be seen whether spikes in commodity prices, peak oil, the dearth of productive arable land and the changing metabolism of compact cities will make all of this financially viable.

But you've got to admit that the vision of an urban design for cities as an unfenced Glastonbury Festival or embargoed Havana is compelling - even if Fidel Castro has stepped down and you don't like hippies.

Urban farming images courtesy of Dott07 Urban Farming. The project was enabled by Dott07/Designs of the Time Ltd., One North East and The Design Council. All rights reserved. Urban Farming Project Site map, copyright of Middlesbrough Council.