Dougald Hine of Space Makers Agency
presents
Nomadic Infrastructure

“In seeking to grease the cogs, we came to the loose conclusion that we needed portable kitchens, plugin cinemas and nomadic libraries…”
Temporary School of Thought

The impact of the recession on the high street has led to considerable interest in projects making temporary use of empty premises.  Space Makers Agency is working with the Temporary School of Thought and the Hexayurt Project on the Nomadic Infrastructure project. This will map the physical and social infrastructure needs of temporary-occupancy projects, then develop designs and prototypes for mobile, modular units to facilitate the use of otherwise unfit spaces – as well as social toolkits for running effective temporary space projects.

All designs will be open-sourced and made available online. We are currently negotiating for the use of an empty retail space which will provide a base in which to host conversations and a workshop for designing and building equipment.

•                  Space Makers Agency researches the use of under-used space and works with a range of partners to develop practical projects. It is currently running the UK’s largest empty shops project with Brixton Village indoor market.

•                  The Temporary School of Thought made headlines in January 2009 when it organised a three-week “free school” in a squatted townhouse in Mayfair. Its members went on to work with the Royal Parks to build the Treehouse Gallery in Regents Park this summer.

•                  The Hexayurt Project was founded by Vinay Gupta, the inventor of the hexayurt – an open-source shelter which has been taken up by the US Department of Defense and the Burning Man community. Vinay also works on strategic critical infrastructure mapping and helped found STAR-TIDES.

One of a series of Tuesday lunchtime talks where architects, developers and theorists present and discuss their proposals for the public realm in the post-suburban city.  Chaired by Vincent Lacovara / AOC

Stephen Bates of Sergison Bates architects
presents
The London Sustainable Industries Park, Dagenham

The concept for a Sustainable Industries Park centers on environmental sustainability and involves transforming the currently fragmented and under-developed 142 hectare industrial site at Dagenham Dock into an exemplar park for emerging technologies operating in the field of sustainable resources and energy technology. The aim is to make the park wholly self-sustainable and to develop an industrial symbiosis over time, where businesses use each other’s by-products and share resources.

Sergison Bates propose the creation of a place of distinctive character, a managed and maintained woodland landscape which provides a strong spatial setting for the Sustainable Industries Park to emerge and develop through to 2040. The new green infrastructure builds upon what already exists on the site, from roads and buildings to surface water ditches, but also leads to a complete transformation of the site and the establishment of a new sense of place, a new community and a new London landscape.  Read more.

One of a series of Tuesday lunchtime talks where architects, developers and theorists present and discuss their proposals for the public realm in the post-suburban city.  Chaired by Geoff Shearcroft/AOC

‘From homes to gnomes, how public transport shaped the suburbs’

15 October – 31 March

More information here

At the Royal Academy of Arts

19 October 2009

In the Reynolds Room, a John Madejski Fine Room

London’s outer suburbs have stereotypically been portrayed as safe, boring and uninspiring, especially against more dynamic central districts. Yet London’s suburbia has proved a fertile seedbed for creativity, particularly in contrast to an increasingly gentrified and generic centre. Speakers including sociologist Rupa Huq, geographer David Gilbert, writer Tim Lott and artist Nico Hogg, consider the trajectories, contradictions and possibilities of London suburbia. Chaired by Paul Barker author of The Freedoms of Suburbia.

In collaboration with the UCL Urban Laboratory

6.30–8 pm; £7/£4 reductions (includes a drink)

http://www.royalacademy.org.uk/events/talks/creative-edge-reconceiving-suburban-london,895,EV.html

Chaired by Geoff Shearcroft/AOC

Follow this link for more information

Chaired by Geoff Shearcroft/AOC

5 October 2009, 6.30pm

Economy of Means: James Wines/SITE
Chaired by Vicky Richardson, Editor, Blueprint magazine

Founded by James Wines in 1970 following his career as an abstract sculptor, SITE Environmental Design is a pioneering architecture practice of ecological sensitivity and radical artistic gestures. An acronym for ‘Sculpture In The Environment’, SITE achieved wide and lasting notoriety through their projects for Best Products in the 1970s – big box showrooms that transcended their function with trompe-l’oeil peeling walls, collapsing facades, and invading forests.

Presenting a new lecture, Economy of Means: A Brief History of Doing More with Less in Art, Architecture and Landscape Design, James will profile ways to meet the demands of economic crisis, energy efficiency and sustainable design, without loss of aesthetic quality. From Duchamp’s ‘readymades’ and Picasso’s collages, to Le Corbusier’s ‘Machines for Living in’ and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Usonion houses; from the birth of the Radical Architecture movement in the 1970s to the idea of utilising frugality as inspiration and raw material in the present.

James Wines is founder, President and Creative Director of SITE, and Professor of Architecture at Penn State University.

READ MORE

Studio 2 – Learning from Thames Valley

Every town needs a good creation myth.  On 15th June 1215 in a meadow in Runnymede, at the geographical centre of the Thames Valley, King John signed the Great Charter of Freedoms, Magna Carta.  In formally agreeing that his kingly power was subject to the common law of the people, John (of Robin Hood infamy) laid the foundations for contemporary democracy and established the political aspirations for the archetypal democratic urban form of the 21st century. 800 years after this momentous moment in a meadow by the Thames, the 6,629 square miles of the Valley have evolved into a flourishing ‘town of towns’, providing a home for 13 million people.

For the first half of my life someone else chose the Valley as my home.  For the second half I chose it myself. Personal choice is the driving force of the Valley.  Choose to live in the 390,179 acres that make up its Greater London area and you get to share each acre with 20 other people.  Choose to live outside this sprawl of villages and it’s an acre each, Broadacre City writ large.

Choose the historical period you wish to live in, real or recreated, with contemporaneous values optional.   You can live in a surviving Tudor townhouse, shop at a mock-Tudor Sainsbury’s and drive to the out-of-town retail village on Saturday.  Or live in a mock-Victorian townhouse, shop at a Victorian department store and walk to the food market in a warehouse on Sunday.  A royal racing town, post-war new town, medieval market town and inner city village have provided a wide enough range of settings for me that I have rarely had to leave the Valley, whatever my changing needs.  This diversity of densities, histories and experiences creates both a desire to move within its watery catchment area and a reluctance to leave.

Growing up in the Valley TV was a big influence on what I was told I wanted and that meant California. Everyday snapshots of Los Angeles and Hollywood’s meta-narratives provided a constant stream of lifestyle aspirations from the Land of Opportunity. Saturday afternoons watching Knight Rider and CHiPs induced desires to endlessly cruise along smooth freeways beneath eternal sunshine.  I remember few of the TV storylines, just the imaginary LA I mentally superimposed over just-detached executive homes as my friend and I cruised the estate, mimicking the Californian Highway Patrol on our bicycles.  The continuing success of the Ferrari dealership in Runnymede suggests Valley boys continue to grow up chasing these sun-drenched dreams of mobility.

Yet when the TV is turned off a far more compelling world is waiting a short walk away.  Surrounding the estate, out the back of the superstore, at the end of the track lies Arcadia, the English countryside in all its well-managed glory. Living in the Valley Tolkien’s Shire and the animal inhabited world of Kenneth Grahame’s Wind in the Willows do not seem fantastical, merely a slightly extravagated version of weekends and summer holidays; messing about in boats on the Thames at Cookham, strolling through the bluebells at Bisham Woods, pootling around Mapledurham (the inspiration for Toad Hall) and making camps in the woods at Virginia Water. To live in the Valley is to live near Arcadia, distinctly different to the suburban promise of nearly living in Arcadia.  Proximity to nature delivers a heterogeneity that is infinitely preferable to the monotony of compromised immersion.

J.G.Ballard was the Valley’s twentieth century bard, and much of his work explores the confluence of Arcadia and Californication. ‘Concrete Jungle’ or ‘Crash’ may seem extreme and unlikely to the casual reader but for those of us who enjoyed Friday nights in the Tesco car park at Martins Heron, with three litres of Strongbow Super and mum’s Fiesta, it seems remarkably familiar.

This public loitering is part of an honourable democratic tradition. Hundreds of years before Magna Carta, Runnymede had hosted open-air meetings of the Anglo Saxon Council Of Kings. Debating outdoors, sipping mead, surrounded by non-descript vernacular buildings, seems to have caught on.  Civic life in the Valley today continues this tradition, occupying the multivalent park rather than the prescribed piazza. In car parks and business parks, village greens and office villages, under town halls and round the back of malls, public life occurs almost in spite of the buildings and their designers’ polite intentions.

Revisiting memories of my Valley life the myths and media seem to dominate over memories of actual places or buildings.   Is this because the places are of such limited merit that the imagination was a more enjoyable place to remember? Possibly.  Like most towns the Valley has its bleak points, and these inevitably occur when the built landscape is at its most monotonous.  Yet the eclecticism of this 215 mile long town, its diversity of history, type, density and form, offer the opportunity for everyone to find a place that accommodates both their practical needs and their aspirations and dreams.

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