‘Bird’ by designer Zhili Liu has started flying around the web this week… Core 77 amongst other have picked up on the ‘Shanghai-based designer[‘s] lighting series [that] was inspired by gatherings of birds, which becomes obvious when you see them’… Obviously thought for indoor use, I just like them. But more to the point I like them because they are down-to-earth, playful and enjoyable. I wish this sort of thought was put into street lighting all the time…
The image above (taken by hartlandmartin on flickr) is of
I was in
I think the key is context. Whilst it might need some better maintenance and some additional design work perhaps the problem isn’t the building but how it sits. At the moment, if I were to highlight 2 main problems they would be with the spaces around the library: 1) the entire area is devoid of greenery and 2) there is no legibility. If I imagine the library shrouded in all new green infrastructure, mainly some grass, some flowers… some revitalising landscape architecture around it - it becomes rather appealing. This doesn’t distract from the slight ‘problem’ of the buildings scale – nor is ‘greenery’ the only solution - but it would be a big start. In terms of legibility, the ground floor of the library already forms a rather poor pedestrian link between two of the cities main central squares. The solution to this legibility problem according to Birmingham City Council? Demolish the old library!
Except, maybe they won’t. One moment BD are telling us it’s going to be listed, and the next moment, planning daily are saying it isn’t. So maybe they will. I can’t help but think that it would be a little sad to see it go – it certainly has a quality. Perhaps the other issue is use... the way in which the library interacts with it’s users and it’s surroundings… not just in terms of design but in people actually engaging with the building. There just seems to be no interface between the physical elements of library and its users. No art, no cultural programming… in fact never mind that, no nothing. People seem to respond to it almost as if it were a brick wall.
No wonder people seem not entirely sure what to do with it - reaction appears divided into love and hate. There is Prince Charles commenting the library as ‘‘looking more like a place for burning books, than keeping them’’ on one hand, and, Jonathan Glancey commenting this on the other:
‘’The great inverted ziggurat of
I can’t help but feel there’s a little case of wrong place wrong time… with emphasis on the place… watch this space.
The ACROS
Total Green Roof WIN.
Check out this greenroofs.com page and this metaefficient.com post.
Dezeen magazine has recently picked-up on
‘[A] booth for taking a quick nap in busy urban environments’… it’s aimed at typically frenzied urban interchanges – so, railways stations, airports but also shopping centres.
There’s a definite novelty there, and I could image it working in some places akin to the Japanese capsule hotel …however I’m a tad cynical. I don’t think it’s quite the answer for those looking for a respite in busy urban spaces…
This week, CABE launched their Grey to Green campaign, pushing for a shift in investment from grey infrastructure to green towards a more balanced existence in the urban realm… from roads and car parks to waterways, green roofs and street trees:
‘At present, for instance, flood protection requires supersized stormwater pipes. But a combination of living roofs, large trees and soft landscaping can absorb heavy rainfall, store and recycle it for summer irrigation; save energy through insulation; provide shade for offices to cut the need for air conditioning; and make cities more beautiful, so encouraging exercise and improving public health’.
The ‘key financial stats’ they have are:
‘Figures produced by PricewaterhouseCoopers show how a shift in spending from grey to green of just 0.5 per cent could increase investment in urban green space by 141 per cent’.
and
‘The £1.28 billion budget for widening a 63 mile section of the M25 could pay for 3.2 million trees to store three million tonnes of carbon, or 5,000 miles of greenways for cyclists and pedestrians’.
As part of the campaign launch, artist Morag Myerscough ‘used a combination of computer technology and painstaking hand rendering to select only the green elements from aerial photographs’ to attempt to map the green infrastructure of Gloucester, Liverpool and Hackney & Islington. The case for a need to map
CABE has several goals for the campaign, essentially distilled as:
- Engagement and development at the local level (through a city gardener, including young people, involvement of councillors etc)
- An information resource or ‘atlas’ of the nation’s green infrastructure
- A new national taskforce of experts to champion green infrastructure
Ultimately: ‘Nationally nobody knows how many green spaces there are, where they are, who owns them or what their quality is’. The promotion of, linking up of, and forward-thinking about the urban environments ‘green assets’ should surely, in my opinion, always be considered a fundamental corner-stone of urban design, planning and architecture.
Tonight, 20 years after the fall of the
Mercedes Bunz in The Guardian’s ‘The Digital Content Blog’ writes:
'... British performance artist and curator Martin Butler is using the organisational power of today's online platforms for a wall made of people, a "temporary monument of reflection". 20 years after the wall came down 33,000 people are asked to stand united for 15 minutes to form a human chain marking the path where the wall once stood. The Mauer Mob used social media such as Facebook to reach out to the people and organise the event. On their website they rearranged the volunteers along 330 different sectors where they will start the flashmob tonight at 9.15 pm.
And these are only some social media approaches among others. Indeed, it will be interesting to evaluate afterwards if it really made sense to use social media, or if it was more or less just used, because it is a trendy idea’.
It’s quite exciting to see artistic events like this happen with the sort of historical backdrop that
My eyes have been drawn to the Kosmograd blog by Martin Gittins, Creative Director of Interface New Media. In particular, some bits on (re-)branding
He wrote an interesting post back in October last year about his visit to the ‘Shaping the
‘Is the city becoming more fragmented? Or is there a framework emerging for a more coherent whole, within which each of the boroughs has a chance to establish a unique character?’
He follows this line of thought up more recently with a post relating to Felix Barber and Ralph Hyde's book ‘London as it might have been’. He follows through their picking up of John Leighton's plan to divide
‘With a clear demarcation between boroughs, it becomes much easier to define transition from one border to another… Now the jumble of logos and graphical devices can be replaced with a consistent, uniform identity system… Within each borough, each individual hex can also be given it's own identity, further reinforcing the idea of
I’ve previously mentioned the work of Legible London and their work on a new pedestrian way-finding system to help people walk around the Capital. Gittins’ sort of graphic design initiative links in very well with representing urban design ideas of ‘nodes’, ‘districts’ and the like as well as the concept of ‘urban villages’. It would be great to see this sort of clear visual thinking/design link in with the way in which we map and signpost our cities in the future.
The idea of a ‘united LDN’ made up of all its smaller boroughs, or urban villages, paves into thinking about the wider development of the city. Mainly through taking the drain away from transport and commuting into the more sustainable practices of working locally, shopping locally etc, as well as the promotion of under-used areas of London, and the reinvigoration and re-imagination of suburban districts.
This sort of ‘united and unique’ highly visually stimulating approach to
At last the hideous pedestrian guard-rails at
It’s quite funny to note how un-used to being able to go diagonally across a road Brits appear to be – the video posted on this BBC article seems to show one or two pedestrians just avoid getting squished as they are herded by hi-vis vested personnel!
It also goes to show how well received the crossing is though – through the way in which it warranted an ‘opening ceremony’. Although I’m sure there was an extra incentive too in highlighting the shopping opportunities and excitements of the area in credit-crunch times.
I just hope, to quote Boris, that this ‘good old fashioned common sense’ spreads out onto the rest on
There’s more on the project here – at The Architect’s Journal.
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