David Barrie

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.

I ran the project for three years.

In 2003, we ran an architectural competition and the new generation of British architectural stars stepped forward, including Renato Benedetti, Sarah Wigglesworth, Deborah Saunt of DSDHA, FAT and Alex de Rijke of DRMM.

Here's FAT presenting their scheme:

Five years later, here's an image of Benedetti's (almost complete) bridge:

Wigglesworth's early designs for a new pontoon on Castleford waterfront:

And Saunt's new subway underpass under construction - and for completion within the next few weeks:

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.

What's more, the process has been credited with helping leverage over £2o0m ($380m) of new commercial and residential development in the town.

The TV series and its design content will be revealed over the next few weeks - and I'll post some stuff here. Blogroll me.

But for now I wanted to make a small point.

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.

A pretty cool idea from the 1960s

According to those nice people at the BBC, regular defrosting of a fridge-freezer,

ideal positioning in the room, keeping lids on liquids and even giving it a once-over with the vacuum cleaner can minimise a fridge-freezer's CO₂ emissions.

But here's a better idea from Swinging Sixties London - an article from an edition of real estate magazine Estates Gazette [subscription required] in 1965:

With developers worrying about the land-take of sustainable development and no-one worrying about  sustainable food consumption and supply in to new housing, isn't this a totally brilliant idea?

And...err....forgive my neekiness...

(Definition of 'Neek": a cross between a Nerd and a Geek.)

Fridge graveyard image courtesy of she's a renegade.

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.

Will it make a beautiful ruin?

They're back! Nuclear power stations that is - not the Spice Girls or dropped hemlines.

Time magazine reports on the comeback of nuclear energy and plans worldwide to build a new generation of 'zero-carbon' reactors.

The U.K. Government is making the running, with a recent announcement by the Business Secretary that he hopes to have a new reactor completed by 2020.

Time once again to ask a question that teams of designers, artists and others wrangled with in 1994 in the U.K. in a project I ran called Power to Change.

Four teams of architects, landscape designers, engineers and others, including environmentalists, writers and artists were invited to brainstorm the future of the site of a decommissioning nuclear power station in Snowdonia, Wales.

The Trawsfynydd Magnox power station was opened in 1963, generated power for twenty-eight years, closed in 1993 and it was estimated that it would take 135 years to dismantle.

The question posed by the project was

What should Trawsfynydd become and how might the future of its site bring new prosperity to the community?

After a year of design brainstorming, community projects, access to the station and exploration of its surrounding landscape, a series of ideas was born, critiqued by local people and a panel of experts that included design guru Cedric Price and artist Rachel Whiteread.

Team 1 proposed celebrating, not burying the site and turning it in to a model decommissioning factory.

Led by architect Will Alsop and artist Bruce McLean, the team included writer Mel Gooding, theater director David Gothard, engineer Matthew Wells and regeneration developer Roger Zogolovitch and argued:

If the Tate Gallery can open branches in relevant artistic communities like St Ives, Cornwall, the Science Museum should have a presence in a place which will witness one of the most significant developments in twentieth century technology.

Team 2 was led by Ove Arup & Partners and proposed burying the station's turbine halls in hills of slate, vegetating it, then up-lighting the surrounding hills with narrow beams of projected light.

Team 3 was led by architect and artist James Wines of Site Environmental Design.

James proposed turning the site in to a resource and polemic on the global lack of information on waste management. 

He proposed ripping down the turbine halls, greening the surfaces of the station, instigating research in to water contamination, cleaning up the site using phyto-remdiation and creating an International Energy Communications Center to hold relevant data on the decommissioning of all the world's nuclear stations.

Team 4 was made up of architects Ushida Eisaku, Kathryn Findlay, engineer Tim Macfarlane and music composer Gavin Bryars.

Their response - the fruit of video-conference visioning between the U.K. and Japan - was 

rather than leave two large, stainless steel skips in the landscape, let's get dermatological!

The team proposed turning the site in to a media center, exploiting the skills of electrical engineers, Snowdonia as a popular film location and the value of the site as a place of technology and solitude.

And using the metaphor of right brain intuition and left brain logic

We'll cover the reactor halls in a podded, white PVC skin and enclose certain activities. By covering the outmoded technology of the station with the new technology of our centre, we'll stimulate the brain's constant replacement of dead cells and strike up a new connection with the surrounding landscape - its "body".

Fourteen years ago, climate change and the cult of zero-carbon weren't understood as the context for either the construction or de-construction of such sites.

Architectural design may also have been slightly stuck in a groove of making and remaking facades. 

But now that energy and economic cycles have created a new logic for nuclear power, a challenge remains for designers, landscape urbanists, politicians and engineers alike.

And it continues to be best expressed by Basil Spence, the original architect of the Trawsfynydd nuclear power station in a question he asked back in 1963:

Emotional design

According to The Times newspaper's Year of Ideas

Next year is the year that emotional design moves mainstream.

Now that it's 2008, let's explore that emotion further. 

Lucia Van der Post cites writer Ilse Crawford as a harbinger of change. In her latest book on interior design Crawford

pointed out that, very often, the language surrounding the home reeked "simply of the balance sheet", when what people craved was much more the notion of home as "a safe place, a loving place and a creative place. A place where we can explore our inner life."

Van der Post goes on:

Looking  back, it seems amazing that the cold logic of "form follows function" and the almost universal aversion to anything decorative reigned so supremely for so long.

And on:

Today, more and more designers acknowledge that their job is not just to produce efficient products but also to provide things that give much deeper, emotional pleasure.

Rather than pious simplicity, this is a vision that's decadent as well as spiritual.

'Emotional design' sounds like sitting in a room reading the complete works of guru Sri Aurobindo while occasionally glancing at walls decorated with paintings by Gustav Klimt.

Spin through other pages of The Times and Sunday Times magazines and the idea of gilt-edged naturalism writes itself large:

- A recipe by chef Gordon Ramsay for Pineapple Ravioli with iced Mango and Mint

- An inside view of Trudie Styler's new range of organic jams, created at her

Jacobean manor house set in 198 acres of farmland, grounds and walled gardens, with a picturesque hamlet of barns and outbuildings

- And a frill-free retreat to a yoga camp in the Turks and Caicos, retailing at £3185 per person, previewed by a supremely cheese-on-cheese byline

Just when did life get so busy? We all need time to think to de-stress, to recover, to lose weight, to get fit, to find inner peace - and spas have evolved to just do that.

If 2008 is to be a year of 'emotional design', we're going to need a road map to help us through this mash of aspiration and austerity.

And rather than renew that subscription to the anarchist journal Black Flag, I can see 2008 as the year of finding ways to celebrate but also turn this  new emotionalism in to something other than an expression of surplus wealth.