aspire to enquire

A close relationship between buildings and landscape - New Ash Green

I used one of the fantastic days over the Easter weekend to visit New Ash Green, the 'latter 20th century village in Kent' designed by Eric Lyons for Span, a postwar housing developer.

Simultaneously tucked away in the Kent countryside or right next to the M20, it's a modern housing development built around some traditional notions of place and community. I've learned most about Span and New Ash Green in the last few years, but the reason it caught my interest initially was that it was where my parents lived with me and my sister until I was 5, before moving to Wales. I haven't been back since my gran left there in the early 90s.

That's me outside the old gaff :)

Span went bust in the process of building the place, and my parents eventually moved to get away from the commute. But walking around the village, we discovered new amazing spaces around every corner. With the ideas I've formed in this century about sustainable, enjoyable communal living, I was amazed at what was achieved.

Span built around existing trees and woodland, and pushed cars to the perhiphery of the housing areas. In the central spaces, small crofts and landscaped communcal gardens are linked by pathways designed just narrow enough to force an interaction between passing residents.

I've been revisiting my copy of Eric Lyons and Span by Barbara Simms: There are so many great insights from Lyons and the peope who surrounded him, on everything about his practice and methodology. I especially enjoyed some of the structural approaches to encouraging community spirit and sense of place.

Here's an excerpt from the foreword of the book, by Graham Morrisson from also much respected Allies and Morrison Architects:

"In low-cost housing, the two of them were masters of the value of systematic repetition. This was never celebrated in the manner of some of their well-regarded (if over-heroic) contrmporaries, but was used carefully to form elements incomplete in themselves but which, when placed together, would form a whole in which much more might be possible than by the simple sum of individual parts. They knew the value of a well-planted landscape and were unafraid of bringing buildings and lanscape together in deliverately picturesque compositions to the benefit of both."

It's encouraging to see both major parties move towards policies that may see opportunities for New Ash Green style developments to happen elsewhere - it wasn't developed as an 'eco town' or anything of the sort, they didn't exist then. But I've never felt such a connection between building and landscape, and the variety of plant and animal life we saw was amazing. It's a beautiful and peaceful environment, seperated but connected reasonably enough to major places of work.

My only suggestion of criticism would be that it is still too isolated, and it was sad to see the village centre so empty on a public holiday. If we could learn anything it would probably be that we need to go further when we plan spaces like this - Span were groundbreaking in designing a whole village, from positioning of kitchen sinks (so people could wave out of their windows) to the paths through village orchards and meadows, but they were limited in the wider ecosystem. Our New Towns of the future need fast, functioning and frequent public transport links, and enough local interest to draw surrounding people into the town centres for leisure time, so that over time people feel less need to leave at all as the economy develops.

We don't just need New Towns, we need new train stations, new roads, new broadband connections, and new means of generating power for them. I'm starting to wonder if some of the money that's been suggested for HS2 might be better spent doing this kind of thing.

Here is a map link, if you want to go and look yourself.

Floor posters

I've been spotting a few of these recently.

I'm not doubting their effectiveness, I used to put posters out in the same way for a club night in Cardiff. They're more disruptive than you might initially think. I guess that's why I'm a bit surprised to only really recently see the format used officially out in the wild.

Maybe councils are just at the end of their list of things they can monetise. 

Ken Otamendi - A Traditional Era

Just wanted to share this amazing performance:

There are lots of other brilliant videos by watchlistentell on the youtube, not all of which have distinct similarities to the Burberry Acoustic series which I also loved.

Fortunately we all have WiFi

I was loaned a copy of Apartamento last week - it's an interesting read; it juxtaposes people's fascinating living spaces alongside in-depth interviews about significant parts of their lives. It's all done with a kind of art/fashion/new-bourgeoisie lens and on lovely uncoated paper stock.

I got the distinct impression that it wasn't written for me, but I enjoyed reading it none the less.

Up front are a few short essays - this one seemed to resonate a bit:

The call of the wild

This looks interesting for the end of the month - a group of illustrators and designers responding to nature in the context of the London environment. And it's a beautiful poster.

There's more information about the show and the contributors over on their website.

Aspiring for more enquiring

I'm not posting here as much as I would like to.

Over the past 4 and a half years, so much of what I've explored here has developed afterwards into a useable perspective; I'd hate to loose the outlet for that. But a lot of what I'm thinking about these days could conflict with the confidentiality of the projects I'm working on, so it's hard to know what to write about from week to week. 

I'm going to have a go at posting at least something for the first half of next year, and then see where we get to.

What is an interface

There's an ongoing debate at work right now around the idea that 'the best interface is no interface', following on from a blog post by the influential and awesome Cooper studio in San Francisco.

I haven't really formulated my thoughts on the subject properly yet, except to say that there might be something about the interface often being an extention of the product/activity being an extention of the brand being an extention of the user's aspirations? Not sure. 

Anyway. Until I have something, here's a beautiful picture of some Braun/Rams style hi-fi equipment:

Via Wit & Delight

I think it might all be Rams equipment actually, that's a Vitsoe shelf isn't it.

 

Access for the rest of us

I spotted some new map symbols on a Victoria Line train this week - I'm not sure if they're new or have I just not noticed them before. Can you see them? 

There's a new symbol for, essentially, 'a little bit accessible'.

It's a blue wheelchair on a white circle, instead of the more traditional white on blue.

The blue ones that we're used to are few and far between on the Underground, as they mean completely step-free access from train to street, which obvisouly makes them 'wheelchair accessible'. The new white circles mean 'step free access from platform to street'.

I'm assuming this is to do with the Paralympic Games coming to town, but I hope it's something that we keep afterwards. It seems completely sensible to recognise that not everyone with an 'access need' requires fully step-free access, but maybe they'd appreciate the extra advice on which of the other stations would be most appropriate for them.

I've always been a bit uncomfortable with the wheelchair symbol as a generic disabled access indicator, but up to now at least it has usually meant 'suitable for wheelchairs'. If we're going to use one symbol to denote all kinds of access arrangements, do we need to consider changing to a more appropriate symbol, or some sort of gradient?

In digital accessibility the AA/AAA system seems to work reasonably well, but too often I think we still revert to thinking that 'accessible' sites are just the ones that work for blind people. That's kind of like the 'step free from train to street' of the internet; blindness.

I'm not suggesting we shouldn't be putting virtual ramps into all of our projects, but what about everyone who just wants a little bit of help?

Remember Old Cardiff

Some fascinating browsing to be done in the Remember Old Cardiff Facebook page

I think the group has only been going for a few weeks, and already it has had over 7,000 likes and streams of comments on each picture. It's actually quite fascinating reading how the page owner has kept up with the demand and level of engagement, following her various posts of despair as people insist on contributing to the page in an overwhelming fashion. It's a cautionary tale for any local history groups looking to expand their reach in this way (perhaps this could work for Brixton Society?).

The stories that people are sharing alongside each photo are fascinating, and really bring to life what can sometimes feel like dated, irrelevant pictures of unfamiliar people and places.

But the pictures here also tell their own story, of a Cardiff that has constantly brushed away its history to make space for the next big thing. You could say it was a city that constantly re-invents itself. You could call it progress. You could call it keeping up with the joneses, you could call it vandalism, you could call it short-sightedness.

The Penguin Postcard Project

There's quite a cool little gift box you can buy which contains 100 postcards with different Penguin book covers on. Much like Phil Baines's book, which I love, it seems to have captured the imagination of the design / literature crowd, who find a sort of quaint excitement amongst the dog eared edges, the vintage colour palletes and the modern designs spanning nearly 80 years.

My good friend Jess had an amazing idea to capture some of this excitement, with The Penguin Postcard Project. The idea is quite simple; you sign up, she'll send you a randomly selected postcard. You then obtain and review the book, writing your review on the back of the postcard, and send it back to Jess. Her blog showcases the reviews as they come in, from all over the world.