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Just like Westfield

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Design and detail well a great big shed. Build it to last, not to leak and be flexible.

Invite multiple retailers in to lease a patch of space. Clump them into similar offers. All the butchers go together, so its easier to shop.

Give them free reign to be themselves as a business.

Apply some basic rules on space, height restrictions and signage but otherwise loosen your control within these rules to allow for the human/brand character to come through.

Not that much different from the modern shopping centre. I suspect Halifax market was initially controlled every bit as much as any new shopping centre is. Rigid rules on all elements that make up each stall/trading space.

Over time, Halifax market has become less of a centre for economic wealth in the town. Its slipped off the radar of the style police and is all the better for it.

The market feels alive, not sterile and manicured like your local shopping centre. Not contrived or used as a exercise in how companies can out design each other. Its all pretty cheap and pragmatic. I love how the old rules are starting to melt under layers of cabling, signage and other elements.

And if the market fades which I hope it doesn’t, the building is still there, a loose fit structure that could accept pretty much any use.

So the idea of the shopping centre was never that new. Halifax market will have displaced other local traders, and forced a shift in the fabric of the town, but it did at least stay in the town and provide a focus for trade. It dealt with the inclement weather of the Pennines but didn’t force people to travel across the county.

I am not a fan of the modern shopping centre and what they do to our cities but as a building type in some ways they are not much different from the traditional market hall, just bigger in scale to feed our voracious appetite for stuff. I

I wonder how the mega shopping centre will look in 100 years in a world of shopping on the web where we use our cars less due to the cost of fuel . The distribution centre (I’m thinking amazon) is already the new kid on the block.

It may be that the in-town market hall might well be prove to be the right balance between local and mass. Time will sort all that out.

Drawing is not enough

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Mostly in the world of commercial interior design and architecture, you are limited to what you can draw, set down on paper, quantify and schedule.

Obviously, this is the only way any building work can be costed, and it takes time to produce this information.

There is a real skill in bringing the identity of a design concept and the vision of the client through in the final scheme.

Its a battle to preserve the character of the design. To stop it getting lost in the paperwork and bureaucracy of the process.

Increasingly, the magic I see in completed building design comes from owner/builders, that control their own project, and even their own contracting team.

Here is where you see spaces and places that have a soul, and an identity.

As it happens, this was the only way to approach the latest work we are doing with Fforest over in West Wales.

Here we are developing a complex piece of landscaping using difficult to work with materials, dealing with many levels changes, and all the time seeking to make these old building accessible to all.

We tried a few times to draw our intent, but frankly it was too difficult to make it work in either standard CAD layouts or 3D visualising.

In the end the scheme progressed with a series of sketches by both myself and the client which slowly directed the site work so it hangs together as a scheme.

I know that if we had turned up at site with a finished drawing it would have been flawed in many ways.

This might be counter to the accepted way of directing a building project in the commercial world, but it won’t be news to self builders of residential projects were an intimacy with the build is a given.

I also can’t think of a big commercial project I’ve worked on where there hasn’t been some sort improvisation at points despite what you might believe.

Change doesn’t wait for a design process to run its course. Sometimes you have to respond to what is in front of you instead of drive some abstract intent on a drawing.

The site is now nearing completion, in readiness to receive guests for the Do Lectures coming up at the end of this month. Its also a great wedding venue for Fforest.

http://www.coldatnight.co.uk/

http://www.dolectures.com/the-event/

Hiut Denim

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Think about the difference between the factory space and the workshop.

One is about production, the other is about craft.

Remodel has helped design a new manufacturing facility for Hiut Denim.

One particular challenge was key.

Can you have a modern production space, geared to the high speed needs of the marketplace.

But still create a place that supports the workflow and thought process of craft.

The finished space has the space planning and organisation of an efficient manufacturer.

But also allowed to creep in here and there, is the mild chaos of the creative space, the workshop and the artists studio.

The new space tells the story of a serious little company, with its roots firmly in the craft tradition.

These are no ordinary jeans.

http://hiutdenim.co.uk/

Diversification to Specialisation

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Something that made me smile recently. A now defunct business in Keighley.

Electrical services for two very different markets and all under the same roof. I’d have liked to have been a fly on the wall in this establishment. Just to see how it worked.

I have this image of a greasy leather clad biker (motor cycle customer) stood next to gent in tweeds (gramophone customer) at a wooden counter with lots of drawers and pigeon holes in it for electrical spares.

Now and Then

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For evidence of how our towns and have changed and will change again, take a trip to Cliffe Castle in Keighley, one of my favorite gritty ex-industrial northern towns.

These images are part of an interesting collection of exhibits on the history of the town and how it developed from the industrial revolution to today.

I was struck by how the motor vehicle has opened up our towns centres (mostly with inaccessible and inhuman space) and that we now fight to reclaim our streets with the kind of pedestrianisation we once had.

Agreed, we can do without the sanitation problems and overcrowding of the past. We ourselves are much healthier people physically, but our communities paid a high price.

The price is we lose a human scale and civic purpose to our towns that sanitised re-development and retail space alone cannot put back.

Time will have a hard task softening what we have done to our urban space, but as these photos show, it will do its work.

http://www.bradfordmuseums.org/venues/cliffecastle/index.php

 

The Quality

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Three restaurants.

One Italian, One Spanish, One Turkish.

All are independent businesses, family owned in fact.

They are not held back by the corporate guidelines of a chain.

They are filled with the kind of customers who value an authentic experience.

These places are not consciously designed.

Rather the spaces are an accumulation of ideas from different people, sometimes generations.

They are about the informal enjoyment of food, not just its presentation

They create and add to the community. These are real places. Comfortable and unpretentious.

They have what Christopher Alexander describes as ‘the quality without a name’. *

The ‘quality’ is something remarkable that makes a place feel whole. It’s not possible to describe it specifically Alexander says, but it’s a feeling you get in a place or space when you feel most ‘alive’.

My three restaurants  feel ‘alive’. I feel ‘alive’ in them. A result of the building, the diners, the owners, and the atmosphere all being in some sort of sync.

My interpretation of this is that we as humans have the ability to discern whether this quality exists (the space is alive) or not (the space is dead). This is a basic instinct that makes us feel comfortable or uncomfortable respectively. This must be a natural response from way back that we extend to our current human/urban environment.

Designing buildings or at least bits of buildings, its assumed by many that this ‘quality’ can just be conjured. Surely it’s easy to create a space with this complex layering of feeling, atmosphere and social vibrancy.

Here’s the reality.

Something this complete must be arrived at over time.

You might get some of the way with a few good decisions but often a ‘designed’ space can miss the mark.

If you try to fake the ‘quality’, it’s obvious.

You must program a space to work towards the ‘quality’. Plant the seeds that will grow. Prioritise slowness in the spaces development. Allow for flex.  Don’t fix things in stone.

A good restaurant will concentrate on delivering the food in the most simple, beautiful way. They reduce the menu choice to a handful of great dishes but rotate and develop these over time depending on feedback, ingredients and seasonality.

A restaurant space should be the same. Do a few things well and grow into the space. Keep what works and discard what fails.

Pretty soon you will have a more amazingly complex space than you could ever have designed in one go. A space that has evolved with the ‘quality’.

Small independent businesses often grasp this approach more easily. They are constrained by budget which limits growth. They find themselves creating a space in a series of steps. It’s exactly this process that allows for the ability to change things as they go along.

It’s exactly this evolution that leads to the ‘quality’. An interconnectedness of context, building, layout, customers, food and service.

These spaces have character, not sterility. They become unique to a particular business and place.

It doesn’t matter so much what my three restaurants look like.

In fact I deliberately won’t share images here. They are best judged on how they feel to actually be there, which is the point of the ‘quality’.  An image reduces things to a visual assessment which is only one part of the ‘quality’.

There are similar venues in your neighbourhood.  They are without doubt the best places to eat.

Go and look for the ‘quality without a name’. How would you start to work towards it in your space?

For more insight into Alexander’s  theories on space and place get his book here;

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Timeless-Building-Center-Environmental-Structure/dp/0195024028/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1323985146&sr=8-3

If you run a business from a building, it would be good to remember that humans are pre-programmed to look for the ‘quality’ If you manage to create this, they will come.

*Christopher Alexander – The Timeless Way of Building (1979)

Waiting

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Kings Cross Station concourse, shortly to be ripped up to make way for another retail ‘destination’ crossed with a railway terminus.

The floor, which is grim indeed got me thinking about change in buildings. These ‘queue’ lanes have been here since the last time it was re-designed (80′s?). The idea is that everyone neatly lines up for their train in designated lane.

How very British. First come first serve, rather than the every man for himself dash of today. The lanes are now redundant. Too higher volume of passengers for them to work.

So now we await a new design. The question that intrigues me is how traveler’s will be serviced in 30 years time? What will we be doing differently at transport hubs that can’t be anticipated right now.

Will King Cross avoid the curse of the queue lane.

High Road, Low Road

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The title is robbed from my favorite writer on building design and architecture, Stewart Brand in ‘How Buildings Learn’.

I’ve twisted the meaning a bit.

We have a choice when it comes to specifying the materials we use in buildings.

1 – High Road – Spending more on something that lasts (usually because it’s a slow moving part of the building, or something that won’t change too much).

2 – Low Road – Spending less on something that will likely need to change in the not-too-distant future.

I don’t believe this is a sustainable versus non sustainable choice. Both should be low impact.

I do believe this is a choice based around use. Can your choice of materials be based on a rate of change measurement. Different parts of building’s recycle at different rates.

I had this choice to make recently. Slate worktop versus a chipboard laminate finish.

It was easy actually. A domestic residence, a low rate of change, a timeless finish required that would last and still look good over time.

The hard choice? Finding the additional money from somewhere else in the budget to pay for it. It came down to choosing cheaper unitry and other small savings elsewhere.

Confirmation that ‘Use’ should drive specification and other decisions in the wider building project, not aesthetics alone. Here we managed to consider both.

As a bonus our choice will likely have more than one life in its current form

I’d be interested to know where it will end up in the next hundred years. It’s satisfying to know that someone will reclaim it and use it again.

Bar and Kitchen

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Friends of mine at Path Design have recently completed the Bishopsgate Kitchen, a great new tapas bar near London’s Liverpool Street.

The food is fantastic and the space feels great. Reclaimed timber and a lack of synthetic finishes give the scheme an atmosphere that many new projects lack. Often newness make for a sterile, too obviously designed experience. That coupled with no-one taking control and owning a space means many projects never achieve that magic lived in quality we all look for in buildings.

This space has a relaxed and open ended feel. You feel things are left to chance, for future development and experimentation. It strikes me that tapas might be a good analogy for building design. The endless combination and re-combination of ingredients and dishes. That’s pretty much how we make use of our spaces in real life.

Building Ecosystems

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‘An ecosystem is a biological environment consisting of all the organisms living in a particular area, as well as all the nonliving, physical components of the environment with which the organisms interact, such as air, soil, water, and sunlight. It is all the organisms in a given area, along with the nonliving (abiotic) factors with which they interact; a biological community and its physical environment. ‘ *

Shouldn’t the theory go then, that it’s human relationships within buildings and between buildings that bring them to life. Aren’t they are just a backdrop to a human ecosystem if you like?

Where do designers, planners and builders talk about our lives in buildings?

Where’s the interesting post completion stuff where we get to see exactly how useful new buildings really are?

Maybe I’m missing something here but I see an awful lot of web sites devoted to architectural eye candy, the sensational, the new and the latest.

Where exactly can I find information on ‘use’ in the architectural and building design press?

Type in the name of any decent sized town into Google. For example let’s say Skipton in North Yorkshire.

You will find here a mass of information on life, culture, social interaction, events and business. It all reveals use patterns. The way a town puts its buildings to work and what it needs at a particular time.

If the building industry isn’t talking ‘use’, the people who make up the communities where you and I live certainly are. As well as talking they are just getting on and using their environment as best they can.

It would be great to see a building design, planning, and construction related publication in whatever media, dedicated to the real life that takes place in our buildings. A journal of the human environment perhaps.

Maybe then we might be able to build much less, but put what we have to better use. Skipton’s ecosystem is looking pretty healthy. How about your town?

*Biology Concepts & Connections Sixth Edition”, Campbell, Neil A. (2009), page 2, 3 and G-9. Retrieved 2010-06-14 via Wikipedia.

http://www.skiptonweb.co.uk/