Coffee in the Square

Happy London Christmas

12.45 on Christmas day in Portland Place, London. What more beautiful a city to spend Christmas in than this. The pale Portland stone of buildings which range from the 1890's to the 1960's looked beautiful in the low winter sun. Along this stretch there is quite a variety of styles, but a consistant facing material as well as the uniform height and set-back from the pavement edge is enough.
Design guides are ofter too prescriptive. The variety of design and detail is a joy here and not a hotch-potch. But of course Portland Place has always ensured the developer (of any era) a good return so they could afford to deliver quality. Perhaps that is the secret of it's success.

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How snow changes everything

This was Petersfield Market Square at dawn today. It always looks pretty, but in the middle of winter the extra light reflected off the snow is welcome.
Scandinavians know how important light surfaces are in gloomy climates. Think of the white and gold of Russian churches, the Winter Palace or the pale blue or yellow of so many 19th Century Swedish villas.

But in Britain we are so wedded to brickwork that we often forget other building materials. And architects are keen to draw the artists impression for a summers day but they forget to check how it will look in the gloom.

On the far left of this image you can see Petersfield's funky 70's Barclay's Bank with it's white rendered and concrete surfaces. It would probably never get planning these days. But I must say I think it's a fine bit of urban intervention. And it's wearing remarkably well.

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

Happy Christmas to all our readers

Dear Friends,

This is "raise a glass time" and I thought I'd give you the answer to the little quiz on our Christmas card by sharing a picture I took in a cafe there about this time last year. 

The city is Antwerp and being rather religious even the sugar cubes are shaped like a Madonna here.  However I could not bring myself to let her melt away so if you come to my cottage in Petersfield she is still very much whole and adorning the kitchen shelf.

Antwerp is one of the 21 cities that I studied in 2007/8 and the info can be found on the sister website www.thecitiesproject.com

I'm now working full time on the Whitehill Brodon Eco-town which I am proud to say has the first Eco-town masterplan in the country and is one of four  which will be government supported.  Go to www.whitehillbordon.com if you want to see what we've been up to.  

Though I am still a partner in Shillam and Smith it does mean that my consultancy work has reduced, but I still do the odd piece of work.  To reflect this Mike, who is still running the architecture side of the practice has set up a  special architecture website www.architecturesmith.co.uk Do get onto it and ask him a question.  Its the only place to find free architectural advice!

So Mike and I are in the happy position of having two homes, Great Titchfield Street in central London and I live during the week in a 17th Century cottage in the centre of Petersfield.  So if you are passing either of these locations please give us a buzz!

Good luck to everyone in the new year and we wish you all a very Merry Christmas.

The Eagle Has Taken Off!

Dateline 16th July
Eco-town announcement
Great news for me and the team in Hampshire as we get the go-ahead for an Eco-town in Whithill bordon.

And this is great news for the town. Whitehill Bordon is suffering more than most from the unemployment fall-out from this recession.

When the government started the Eco-towns process it was all about housing. But now we have all come to realise that it's a really vital part of creating a new "green" economy.

In my travels in '07 I saw really clearly that's the towns which were going green were going places.

For us in Hampshire, which is already a focus for high tech manufacturing (thanks to the prescence of the MoD), there are real opportunities.

We are still waiting for all the detail to come through. But I have not been so hopeful for quite some time.

ESADE CREAPOLIS The New Generation Shared Workspace

I received an email from a friend of mine who is a whizz economist called Elizabet Juan Tressera. She says;

"Let me drop a line to communicate that I have recently joined the ESADECREAPOLIS team in Barcelona as Innovation Lead. ESADECREAPOLIS is a pioneer business park with spaces for firms that want to work under an open & cross innovation philosophy. My mission is to facilitate fruitful interactions amongst companies by developing services, activities and events as well as liaising with them to external networks & partners. 

It is a big challenge that I face with great energy. And I have the great pleasure of being back in my hometown after many years working abroad. [Elizabet is an alumni of the ESADA business school.]

I hope that we'll keep in touch personally and professionally. Do not hesitate to contact me if you feel there are synergies or potential collaborations and you are very welcome if you want to pay a visit."

So of course I immediately paid a web visit to www.esadecreapolis.com which I can report looks very interesting.

It is not built yet so the images are a bit fuzzy still, but the idea of linking a business centre with a business school is brilliant and the ethos of sharing innovation is I'm sure the way to go.  However its a very easy idea to copy (I'm already working out how we can have one in WHitehill Bordon!) so the secret of success will be in the execution.

Good luck Elizabet!

Outrage 2

Oh why, oh why is it so difficult to find bikes with coaster brakes in the UK? I spotted this very nice Batavus at the lovely Dutch bike shop in Littlehampton, but unfortunately the colour doesn't suit me.
I scoured the Internet and eventually found the Dannebrog by Velorbis (Danish design and German construction).
However this Danish beaut is maimed for the Brit market by swapping the coaster breaks for drum breaks. An outrage!
I checked with my local bike shop Robin Cycles in Bordon and yes there is no option but to apply direct to the factory.
So who put me onto these chic amongst chic bikes? Why a great little site called copenhagencyclechic.com of course! The Times and The Guardian got there before me. But if you are keen to start cycling without losing you streetwise style then this is the site for you. Go to the list of posts for a run down of the best Nordic bikes and browse the spin-off sites all over the world. .

Copenhagen Cycle Chic



Velorbis

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

Equality for Bicycles!

I visited Freiburg over the New Year and the information I picked up was very rich.  You will see quite a few blogs on the new developments there over the next few weeks I guess.  Something one of our traffic engineers said before I went away made me think quite a bit about street widths.  Here is a tram in a really narrow street in Antwerp.  So don't tell me that you need a really wide street for a tram! (You know who you are.)

We measured this street out as 6m wide - and you can see that a good metre and a half each side is the footpath.  So a tram takes up about 3m.  (If you look very closely you will see my dog Astrid waiting at the side!)  Yes and cars are allowed down here as well - but woe betide them if they try and park.

However a thorough-fare for all types of traffic needs to be designed differently.  Vaubanalle in Frieburg, is the main road that runs through the Eco suburb of Vauban.

This street is 35m wide. Download the info sheet for a detailed section and more images.  What's really interesting is the fact that the roadway section - two way traffic and a line of parking - is only 6m wide while the pedestrian/cycle track is also 6m wide.  Designing cities for cycles does not seem to mean less tarmac unfortunately.  But it does mean a different balance between car uses and other uses.

Ammersfoort

Is Amersfoort all its cracked up to be?

Well to tell the truth it seems a bit disappointing in parts - perhaps because I was expecting wonderful things.  We are always told that the Dutch and the Germans are streets ahead of us - now I've seen Amersfoort, I'm not so sure.

Let's start with the good side of it.  Above you see the serried ranks of bikes lined up at the station.  This is clearly a town where the bike is king.  Even on a cold December day the roads were empty of everything except bicycles. The town centre has an ice rink at the moment, because its Christmas and everyone who was visiting had come by bike.  There were whole families arriving together on bikes of assorted sizes.

The centre of town is small and inviting.  We parked in an empty - and expensive -  car park  then walked down the most charming of streets, a mixture of old a new where there seemed to be no space for your car at all.  All these houses were very close to the main station and obviously owned by wealthy people.  They all had small gardens in the rear.

Because the main living room is very close onto the street all front windows had etched glass "net curtains" just covering the lower section of the frame.

We also encountered some stunning modern houses in the same street.  But these had a different arrangement.  Still the very close relationship to the street, but at the rear, which was also seemingly open to public access, there were large parking areas.  In these blocks, three stories high, it seemed as though the main living space was upstairs. 

But what I found extremely odd was the lack of obvious Eco- design.  The window to wall ratio would not pass the UK building regs, there seemed to be no solar panels or sign of any micro generation?

I think these units are designed as live/work, the very glassy room on the ground floor might be an office reception or a small shop.  

Going around the back we have more glass and a balcony.   At least the parking areas are well overlooked. But it seems as if the need to have really small front streets has meant that the rears become tarmac heaven too.

Part of the problem lies in the fact that Ammersfoort is only 40km from Amsterdam and less than 20km from Utrecht.  How many of these householders are commuters?

The centre of town looks buzzy but we were dismayed when we drove out to the new suburbs.  There are a series of new development zones which have gained fame because of the quality, quantity and dispatch with which they have been built.  Ammersfoort is expanding from 130,000 to 160,000.

We looked at a well established suburb of Hoogland and then at Vathorst an extension of an existing village which is still being constructed and will eventually hold 11,000 new homes. 

A lot of the housing in both neighbourhoods has two fronts as described above, mainly pretty high density, supposedly up to 100 dwellings per hectare, though surrounding the neighbourhoods is much wasted space.  The poulder land here is pretty open and bleak.

An interesting aspect of the project is the use that water has been put to.  The masterplanners found that people liked the traditional canal-side dwellings so the latest neighbourhood has been developed in quite a retro style to mimic old Amsterdam.  

These are not lifetime homes. In the latest phase of development all the front doors were approached by a flight of steps - possibly in a bid to create some defensible space between the street and the front rooms. 

These are very pretty houses but again the pay-off is in the garage courts in the rear.  

Each home has at least two parking spaces and the "garages" you see are not for cars but for bikes!  However thee courtyards are private and of town and the quality, directness and flatness of cycle routes is impressive. This suburb is about  4 km from the centre.

Developers have opted to keep the high car provision because they found that people did still need their cars. However the driving arrangements are fiendish and its impossible to travel easily from A to B. The road layout is illogical and illegible - we kept on getting lost - even though we had a large scale map.   We were visiting on a quiet day, but during the week we understand that the traffic jams become horrendous in some areas.  Shops, schools and public facilities are buried in the centre of estates, making them inaccessible to passing trade.  Consequently the shopping centre in Hoogland looks dire and downright dangerous.  

The road layout completely collapses in the centre of this neighbourhood the arrangement of buildings a seemingly random mix of large public buildings amidst car parks.  The shops themselves are hidden from what could be an attractive lakeside by a wall of nasty looking flats.  Below the concourse there was an evil looking empty public car park.  It reminded me of many of the nasty 60's estates we have in London.

Each neighbourhood is encircled by a ring road of mysterious layout.  Its a dual carriageway with one carriageway in each direction.  On either side are wide verges, a cycle route and a footpath.  In some places there is a separate service road in the centre of everything for heavy vehicles.  I've never seen such lavish use of kerbs and white lines.  But what happens when a car breaks down and where do the buses run? (We did not see any buses)

However there are lessons to learn in the management of the development.  A development company owned by the city who prepared the sites and then sold them onto five partner developers at pre-agreed costs.  

No architect can design a block greater than 80 houses though the developer all had far bigger chunks.  And there is 40% social housing buried in here somewhere. This does make for a mish mash of styles and after a confusing afternoon we were crying out for better design codes!  (Something I generally don't like.  But you could see all sorts of nutty ideas, which would have been better for stronger codes.)

Anyway I'll leave you with a few images of some of the nicer (and I guess more expensive housing)

Become an Antwerp City Fan - get the logo!

This is  Antwerp's award winning logo - its visible on anything from coffee cups to planning application forms.  I've been pondering just why its so successful and here are a few of my thoughts.  For a start Antwerp is a kind of grey place, even the fashion here doesn't stray far outside the black and white.  So a bright orange sunny logo is just the ticket.  Its also very simple and very striking - so it lends istelf to many different locations.  For example check out the flags and christmas lights in A's along Antwerps main shopping street this Christmas above right.

I've tracked down the firm who designed it - Redstar Design  [ www.redstardesign.be] but rather dissapointingly this is no underground cell but an offshoot of LDV United who themselves are owen by media giants WPP.

However this being forgiven I must say that LDV deo have a sharp website with an interesting and eloquent argument for why a brand is important.  It's something to do with following your favourite football team.  Check it out here

Anyway Happy Christmas to all our readers and have many good wishes for 2009, which as they are saying here in Antwerp - just has to be better than last year!

Sustainable Islands

Check out this wonderful home made directions sign spotted last week on the Scilly Isles. I had not realized how sustainable such islands have to be. We can learn lot from their enforced containment. (The in word)
On St Agnes all houses have water catchment and the LA owns the power station. And don't get me started on the cool recycled jewellery.