Category Archives: Time

The Veranda, The new Hallway?

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Its been a long summer of hard graft, hence the last post being in April. I did get away on holiday once and managed to find the time at least to think about the blog, even though its taken me until now act on that thought.

Readers in Pembrokshire will recognise the building above, the Tafarn Sinc in Rosebush. Its a familiar haunt for my family, well the Welsh half at least.

Vernacular buildings are often of the place, built using local materials, techniques and traditions so the Tafarn Sinc has always intrigued me.

You usually see the veranda building type in tropical climates, where its extended roof-line shades windows, provides cooler outdoor living space and allows separation from the ground promoting airflow under the building.

The appalling weather we had during our week convinced me this building type can also work well for a wet British summer, allowing covered outdoor space and a connection to the landscape. A place to be outside without fully committing to the elements.

Perhaps some building types can translate across climates and cultures. I’d love to see a new housing development with veranda’s promoting street side living, with residents out on the street. Better than the dingy hallway surely.

http://tafarnsinc.co.uk/

Woodwork – A Shed Manifesto

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My dad has just built and fitted-out his own workshop, the realisation of a lifelong dream and an escape from a dark an cramped garage.

Common with other structures of the type, here’s a few ideas we could borrow to some degree when building bigger interior design schemes;

-Simple materials. They can be modified at will with local non industrial scale skills ie. your neighbourhood carpenter or in this case, Dad. Timber frames can be easily adapted, simple wall linings and cladding that is screwed rather than nailed can be swapped out. What if he needs a bigger door to move larger projects in and out.

-Basic Finishes. The concrete floor can be left as is, honed, painted, covered. Its all adds to flexibility.

- Indecision is OK. If there is hesitation about an element of the build (in this case the floor finish) its usually for a reason so can you then leave it unit later. No point in going down the wrong road.

-Re-use of old Building Elements. In this case, dads old kitchen units make ideal workbenches. Also the old back door from the house and a fully double glazed window found by the local timber merchants lurking round the back of their warehouse.

-Spend money on the things that matter. Dad’s made an amazing beech workbench (which he planed by hand before he bought a flat bed planer!) which will be critical to the quality of the work he produces.

-Organisation. Fix what is known to be more static, like machinery, plumbed services etc. and allow for flexibility around what will change, like storage.

-Time. Its taken a while. No set of blueprints has been drawn. There is a reason for the location of nearly everything in this space, fitted precisely to the way he works with wood.

-Not quite finished. I think this is a good thing. There’s always a new project, something left to chance. He might decide he needs to work with metal.

-Worry less about what it looks like. Worry more about how it works. If it works, it will have a beauty of its own.

-Limitations. The scope of this project was based on what he could do himself. This drove many of the design decisions in the direction of economy, re-use and practicality. No bad thing in building design.

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)

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.

Real Estate

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Took a trip today to Salts Mill, Saltaire, nr Bradford.

A building that reminds me every time I go how to provide space for commercial enterprise.

The old weaving sheds are cavernous, customisable and flexible space. They play witness to the ebb and flow of commercial ventures. Allow space for expansion and contraction.

Plumbing, heating and electrics are exposed and adaptable.

The whole contents of the galleries, the book shops and the cafes feel like they could ship out and be replaced by something new at an moment. A building for possibilities and change. A building that you can actually see has a future, if only it could be made to be energy efficient which will be no mean feat.

Of course the designers had no idea what would become of the mill. They had no foresight that textiles and weaving would die out in West Yorkshire, and that these vast shed-like floors would host different quieter, cultural functions.

It doesn’t matter. We now have the benefit of hindsight. We now have the knowledge of time. It enables us to programme commercial buildings to take account of numerous functions. Ones that we can’t even conceive.

This is real estate.

Battle for Control

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I’ve been thinking today about control, the ultimate desire of many a building designer. A memory resurfaced about another trip I made some years ago to the Royal Armouries in Leeds. It made me smile so I thought I’d share it.

It was a week after the building had been unveiled. Just enough time for the designers and contractors to have left, and for the occupants to start putting their own finishing touches to their new home.

Two huge granite columns flank the main entrance. It’s an imposing castle like facade. No human friendly scale here. Turrets and forts spring to mind. Its all steel, glass and masonry. Imagine the distress the architects would have had then, to see one of their granite columns imaginatively encircled with a large piece of A2 paper displaying the opening times scrawled in marker pen. It was literally cellotaped around one of the columns.

Now I was younger at the time. I’d been taught in the old architectural way. You come up with a big idea and then push it through in as complete a form as possible regardless of what else came up along the way. I remember smirking at what I thought of as a naive mistake on the part of the designers. I resolved to work harder to eliminate this sort of thing from my own work. Control must be everything.

Here though is the problem though. You can’t eliminate this sort of thing. This is life in buildings. I see time and again the futility in trying to design everything. Unfortunately my profession brings out the worst and most anally retentive traits in some of those that practice it.

What would a military general do here then? Perhaps he’d realise that you can’t fight an invisible enemy. The desire for control is unrealistic. Most of all he’d know that change is inevitable. Given the flux and flow of reality, perhaps we should wait when designing some parts of buildings until we can see what moves will be played out by the occupants. Then we can commit to a course of action that compliments the situation.