T27 Start Again 02: Venice Biennale

What are these exhibitions for? Modern Art is the answer, Modern of what is happening in each country. Let’s see what the UK has to say.

Nationalism is overcome by art, the British Pavilion bows before its hosts saying: W are here to celebrate you, serve your needs. We are the platform for discussion.

The villa Frankenstein designed by muf is made in Venice using local materials and local craftsmen (contrary to previous exhibitions made in Britain and shipped to Venice). It is absolutely dedicated to Venice as a theme: the British artists Steve Mcqueen’s film ‘Giardini’ features the very exhibition site once it has been closed. Every year, a spectacle of nature acts itself around empty national buildings left standing in the Venetian garden. Nature takes part in exhibition in yet another way: local scientist discussion on fate of Venice and its lagoon, marshes being a part of exhibition itself. Venice features in the pavilion exhibition of photograph of Ruskin and Gavagnin. The most UK national among components of villa and its exhibits is the 1:10 model of Olympics 2012 station. This is made to be platform, forum for discussion and meeting with a space underneath for ecological experimentation by children. Olympics is a multicultural event bringing people together as well. All these level of interrelations in the British Pavilion! Nature, ecology, sustainability, participation and discussion on multinational level seem to be the messages.

It’s interesting to listen and read about this description of a pavilion and arts which is to represent modern British arts movement. Has Britain given away its identity or is it looking beyond it’s own boundaries. It does stand in contrast with recent British polices ever more emphasising national identity and separation from Europe. Are British artist and architects misrepresenting their county or are they being the eye-opening explorers of neighbouring cultures and word wide issues, or are they just advocating what’s in fashion? Interesting times.

T16 Application for Urban Design Officer job

To Whom it may concern

I would like to be considered for the position of Urban Design Officer in Corydon Council.

Over 8 years ago I committed to architectural education and profession. The University years challenged my creative potential and understanding of design from pragmatic knowledge of building construction and its elements, through the tectonic and poetic language of design and material. While in my final year at Kingston University I joined Baynes and Mitchell Architects (a small architectural practice based in London) on part time basis. Since completing my degree I continued to work there full time.

I have worked on a number of residential buildings and gained experience in initials and detailed design as well as management and coordination of work on site. My full involvement on the high-end residential refurbishment project in central London was a great experience in working as a team to bring the best in each person involved in the project.

For a year I was involved in a feasibility study work for a group of Grade 2* listed buildings in Historic Dockyard in Chatham which was to become new offices, libraries and workshops as well a visiting centre of the Historic Dockyard. This experience gave me an insight into work on historic sites, collaborating with a number of stakeholders on the development of a public shame for the mixed use of the trust as well as the public. Another project on this site: Chatham Joiner Shop, now completed, is a Grade 2 listed 16th century building which incorporates workshop units for artists as well as exhibition space and offices. The practice has been involved in promotion of the workshop upon its completion and took part in first events organized in the Joiners Shop.

In the years in practice I came to realize that architecture is a truly interdisciplinary art which draw on knowledge of professionals such as planners, landscape and urban designers, engineers and builders. Architect trough practice becomes a social scientist with all the technical knowledge of the builder. I gain a lot of management and technical experiences through training in Baynes and Mitchell Architects. I expanded my knowledge of currents polices in London and UK yet I felt I needed to learn more about human sciences to complete my understanding of the city and its inhabitants and to serve the people better.

In 2010 I joined the MA course in Spatial Planning and Urban Design. In the course of a year I larded to think critically and flexibly of the space making in the city. I was challenged to think at a variety of different spatial and time scales. I expand my understanding of functions of local governments and of the planning processes. I studied in depth the social aspects: causes and effects of projects on local and wider communities. I was challenged to make brave propositions.

I think I am an excellent candidate for the position of Urban Design Officer. I have a varied knowledge and experience background. I am very insightful and sensitive to the surrounding and I easily engage with the environment and people I encounter. I aim to make the spaces and situations more beautiful via embodying human needs into the physical form. I seek knowledge about the people and the world. I practice architecture which for me is the monument of the knowledge of a human being, his physics and spirituality, his social condition. I am motivated by the challenges ahead and keen to learn new skills and tools.
Yours faithfully

Dorota Kozaczuk

T17 Manifesto 02

Humans can bare a lot of bad of urban life. They put up with overlooking, congestion, pollution, social problems and through that they got to work every day, get paid every month and pay mortgages till the rest of their days. They are inspired by the dreams of a good life with a house, a car, a good job and a decent local school for their children. It’s not so much to ask for. We are promised a city is our best chance to realize those dreams so we put up with it.

I came to London by bus. I got off in Victoria Central in 2006 and like thousands of other immigrants in the same situation started looking out for a relative – my brother Daniel. From Victoria we set to a long journey to the East of London and after an hour and a half my first neighbourhood in London was revealed before my eyes. Plaistow housed a mixture of Italian, Turkish and mainly Indian communities.. It was dirty and unwelcoming to the unfamiliar eye. The streets of terraced 2 storey housing seemed endless and were dotter with abandoned properties and one of those houses became my first London home. Our ‘family’ of 5 which in 6 month grew to 10 lived in a house of 5 rooms with no kitchen, no central heating, couple of windows missing and a very slovenly running water. But it was cheap. It allowed for existence, it was good.

I had no money at first, job turned difficult to find but not impossible. Soon I began working for a restaurant earning minimal wage. On the way to work from Plaistow to I first saw the towers of Canary Wharf, than a reflection of myself in the window of the tube train and at the end picturesque splendour of Knightsbridge. I served cocktails all day and evening. On the 3 hour journey back I squeezed inside bus 25 from Tottenham Court Road together with Londoners returning home from their night out. I got off at Stratford and hastily walked ‘home’ for 30 minutes not taking any shortcuts. Canary Warf was showing me the way.

We moved out to a hostel in Finsbury Park, I found another job and applied to Kingston University. I was paying rent and eating out sometimes. Everything was going well.

To cut the story short I am now working in architecture, still studying architecture yet these days I don’t look at those past experiences as ‘all was well’. It was hard work, and it still is the work of so many English and Immigrants. The wages are small, the rents are high, the properties are impossible to buy. For some as hard as they work it is simply beyond their capabilities. Yet they look up to the towers of London and go through another thin year. Social inequality continues and the stage of this drama is the city.

This complex urban world houses many differences. City gives jobs and aims to provide for all yet it hasn’t succeeded yet. There are lots to be done. Planning has always tried to eliminate the social injustice and ease the pressures of the city. At the same time there is a danger that overregulation which is an inevitable result of planning policies. This will eradicate the grey area which part of I once was. The cheep flexible adjustable environments which host people of all backgrounds struggling in the city are disappearing replaced by immaculate supermarkets, shiny developments and glamorous parks. I ask myself what is more important.

T17 Glossary 02

Planning - Making proposals for the future which to the greatest possible extent incorporate the needs and aspirations of all parties involved.

Spatial Planning – Translating the needs and aspirations of parties involved into the spatial arrangement to be implemented in the future.

Design – To create for a particular purpose.

Urban Design - To create for use of urbanities.

Market - Economic forces by which the consumption needs of the population are determined.

Quantity - A number observed in a process of research.

Quality – A degree to which the worth can be recognized.

Public – All people for which use and purpose the laws are created and implemented; parties interested and free to express their opinion in the process of social change.

Proposition - The opinion to make a change including the description in a manner in which the change is to take place.

Branding - Means by which any product/ proposition can be made to look good an convincing enough to be sold / implemented.

T15 History, Theory and Policy essay

How are the changing roles and relationships between reformist movements, philanthropic organisations, and the state in planning up to 1940 relevant to the present day?

The extraordinary growth of the cities through 19th century in all England and Europe led to an unprecedented situation of overcrowded city with ever more degenerating areas of what came to be called as slums.

It was brought to the attention of the world by newspaper seeking human interest stories and literature seeking fresh themes of life. Social science and survey was invented and a modern social legislation followed. Poor were to be protected, their living conditions improved. Mechanisms of philanthropic help and organizations back in the 1900s emerged followed by humanitarian approach of the 20th century. And it all led to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights . Its Article 25 that says that “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood beyond his control."

These agreements and laws now feed back to policies of all countries including The Third World countries.

T19 Belfast lecture

Belfast is divided on many levels. Peace walls come to mind first. Highway cutting city in half follows. But there is so much more.

This lecture started beautifully with a talk on Belfast’s geography, its natural divisions over which we have no control: coast cut by glazier, rives running through the centre, west of 3 high hills not to be occupied due to strong winds and Himalayan weather conditions, east of flat land and softer hills of clay and useless sludge difficult to build on. These are preconditions of human inhabitation. Was it these preconditions that divided people of Belfast in early days and through history. At first Small catholic villages and other enclaves of minorities occupied the western hills. Valley was occupied by mainly protestant skilled workers and craftsmen residing in little palazzos of this part of town. Social division prevented one group walking along the streets of the other. The time of ship building in Belfast has passes, city degenerated and it’s social divisions strengthened. Infrastructure of 1970’s and the highway in the centre of city added to the layers of its division. To help ease down social tensions Peace walls were built. The new housing forts replaced the old housing and even further modified the urban fabric: streets were closed off, tall wall around the community with only one entrance were erected.

And no longer geographies of Belfast but its people themselves divided up their spaces, gated themselves away.

Now let’s make connections shall we? We are after all past any ideology. Lets draw pedestrian crossings, lest build bridges and make more gateways in all those walls. Its time urban design and architecture helped people find others in Belfast.

T14 Liverpool lecture

Liverpool of the past trade and production is slowly disappearing before our eyes. In the past 3 decades in Liverpool Communities have been shifted from place to place and history of Liverpool keeps on being erased every decade or two! Liverpool relives continuous reusing projects and demolitions of older and newer city fabric. Terraced housing and tower block have been demolished and erected and demolished again recently leaving vast unoccupied spaces. It can happen here because Liverpool is almost empty. People have moved and those who stayed are rootless scared communities messed about with by the state. A city needs its history to have a future.

Here the whole process of planning in Liverpool has gone wrong. But why does it still continue to miss the point? Why does the past bureaucracy of Liverpool overrule needs of its people today? Why can’t a house be brought back to use at minimal cost, why isn’t the heritage of Liverpool protected, why aren’t its people asked?

If the city has made a man what kind of man lives in Liverpool? A man who hides behind fences of his house or boundaries of his estate. A man subservient to his fate, to the decisions of the state. A man who feels abandoned, misplaced and lonely in a ghost town with diminishing city centre, with few places to meet. This man asks himself: Who cares?, who will protect us?

In Liverpool artists do something architects haven’t done for a while in this part of the world: they criticize, and they work with people. They help name issues of communities that haven’t been defined yet. They help people cross the boundaries that they grew to accept. People find there can be a common ground. Numerous artistic and community initiatives have taken place in Liverpool in recent years. Boat parade in local canal helped citizens cross the walls of their plots and realize they can do something fun together. Another local group of people bored with the grimness of the vacated dwellings on their street painted the windows and walls of the empty houses, made it theirs made it pleasant. In the most severe of neighbourhoods the brave citizen will spot neon’s of and elephant or a camel shape as drawn by a hand of a child. Here and there a wall rotates in hole of an abandoned building or a house at an angle hangs between rows of detached housing. Initiatives of hope and reflection might cause a reaction or provoke a smile and a thought. When people gather they can make their own fate.

T12 Urban Markers Seminar

City Markers we were told and the awaited return of the hierarchy of spaces that they bring. City in which navigation is easy and places are unique. Markers generate spaces we heard, but can they really? Their directional role is not difficult to attain yet can they be meeting points, people gathering places; objects public will start thinking of as their own?

1st example: Olympic Park Orbit (Daniel Bosia, Arup, Kathryn Findlay, Ushida Findlay Architects) is an awkward engineered rather than designed shape. This metal triangulated tube wraps around itself, opens at bottom, meets 9 times and rises to create a viewing platform. Its designers claim it will bring city into area, connect and interact with urban fabric, yet it feels unnecessary in the Olympic Park. This unique structure stands among other equally unique large objects and between them there are kilometres of sidewalk and car parks. The viewing platform asks for some other than those car parks and emptiness. The only real purpose for the Orbit to come to existence is to be as stage of the Olympic Games 2012 opening nights’ fireworks exhibition. In a way it is a successful marker due to its uniqueness and size yet I believe it is in the completely wrong place to be significant for the city. It does not make a place since the place is already carefully designed. It is an add-on and quite an expensive one.

Euston Arch (Alan Baxter, Alan Baxter & Associates) represents the idea of restoration, the romantic idea to bring back arch which has been crudely demolished in 1962 and dumped into cabal. A nice thought, sympathetic with the history of Euston Road. Arch was and if restored will be a gate in and out for the city. Great! I wonder however how visually noteworthy it is among tall glazed elevations of Euston road. Maybe it’s relatively small scale is insignificant since this will, when restored, be the rare old among the masses of new.

Return to the Olympic park theme: London Gate in Aldgate (Fernando Donis) wants to be both: a marker and a gate. There was a long classical introduction of the concept of the gate and the project resolved in 2 dots on the footprint of the Aldgate traffic junction. Those 2 doors in elevation grow to become a long thin rectangle which is to be a gate: the beginning (or end) of High Street 2012. It is definitely not a gate, no one crosses under it. It is in a middle of a roundabout not allowing itself to be used or to be close to neither. It’s definitely not a marker not making any impact onto the space. A thin nothing with no purpose to be there.

Finally The Ebsfleet Horse (Curator) represented something different altogether. A horse in a field. Simple. It is not trying to do anything else than to be this enormous horse and be seen and recognized for what it is. Huge refreshment after all the previous conceptualized talks trying to make a case for the existence of its subjects.

All objects presented this morning are very particular. Will they however be the recognizable markers of the city? Maybe yes or maybe they will get lost among other architectural building attempts of uniqueness. What makes a marker and a place is an object itself as well as its placing and its surrounding. Some of this lectures examples have it all and potentially they will be successful as space indicators, recognizable points of the city. Will people like them is a whole different story.

T11 Lecture 03: What went wrong with the Thames Gateway?

I sat there in the lecture theatre on Thursday evening and I knew I am supposed to find out something about Thames Gateway. Yet I still don’t know what went wrong with the Thames Gateway.

Mark Brearley spoke in length about ‘standing back’, ‘exploring’ and ‘troublemaking’, ‘trying to dream’ and ‘making projects’. But I felt he was speaking with some coded language and wasn’t sure whether there was any essence behind this code. Still there may have been a purpose there. I saw slides of highways in the rain, empty riverside fields and sadly looking new developments and all these between some ‘minty phrases’ which were supposed to tell a story. The tale of Thames Gateway is vague and unclear which is maybe why Mark chose to speak about in such meandering manner.

As far as I could figure it out the story was: there were ‘blind policies’ and there were people who stood ‘on the church steps’ and talked about a big regeneration plan. Those people finally sat ‘in the control room’ but still had to produce some maps since they did not know where they were going, lacked spatial understanding and general idea for Thames Gateway. As they were finding their way around this regeneration program they focused on projects, gave advice and helped in the process. In the meantime they analysed the existing situation but as ‘they were sleeping and trying to dream’ more things happened: extensions, leisure boxes, shopping centres, retail parks, suburban housing, and river frontage, DRL, Jubilee Line and Airport. But it all seems accidental in the big scheme of things. Around London Riverside with 50 local area strategies and subsequent policies no big plan becomes implemented in the end.

The second lecturer of the evening Geoff Shearcroft chose not to speak about Thames Gateway at all. Instead he ran through his research on Thames Valley.

Thames Valley, as I found out that evening, in contrast to Thames Gateway is ‘participatory, productive and popular’. These three phases house a lot of cars and car parks, many sheds, business parks, retail parks, industrial parks and a lot of suburban housing. This is what public wants we’re told because it is the happy area of Britain.

But what about Thames Gateway. It’s hard to grasp the issue. No one wants to speak about it directly and this is, I think, what went wrong.

T10 Mapping

T9 1 minute presentation for MA and unit meeting

3 Weeks Ago

When I joined the MA in Spatial Planning and Urban Design I was only following my gut feeling. I couldn’t pin it down to why exactly I need this second qualification. I imagined it to be something spatially bigger than architecture and possibly with more of an impact.

Couple of days later I chose to join unit 6 precisely because it has such a strong emphasis on people, on working with the communities and 1 to 1 interactions and reactions.

Now

In unit 6 people are at the centre of things. One person with their story is possibly a project. This year the unit will travel to India and project will be focused on slum communities in Agra. To begin with however we had to go to Walworth Road in London to discover hidden immigrant and local communities there. We did this through talking to people who wanted to talk to us and observing those who refused to make contact. We learned to take as much as we are given by the local people and to build closer relations with them. We collected stories, characters and places. Those characters with their particularities will inform any modifications to a selected location for this short project.

So far on all classes associated with Spatial Planning and Urban Design we did a lot of talking: debating and reflecting the present and past political and social condition in Britain. Little is clear, everything has many interpretations and politicks turns this weal of fortune. Gradually I learn to recognize the connections between the big planning statements and the fortunes of ordinary people. They after all are the centre of all conversations. Yet people in Masters Course still feel so small and number like.

Future

I like these two approaches to come together. I want to give faces to the numbers in planning statistics. I also want to know how a life of one person with all its complexities is translated into numbers.

T8 Lecture 02: What makes up the contemporary city?

Politicks, politicks, politicks and architecture somewhere in between. Owen Hatherley is a very critical voice. He is not trained as an architect so his words were free of preconceptions and educated judgements of what should be considered beautiful and good yet his outlook carried a very Left sided bearing. The slides he’s shown were amateur but very real, they were the holiday photos you wouldn’t like to have in your album. It was interesting to hear what non-architect that actually pays attention to his environment observed.

I hear there were 3 Britain’s before II World War and 2 more since:
1) Oxford standing for Tories international prominence
2) Sheffield steelworks and sublime, deeply inhumane social housing of the north of England
3) Suburban, increasingly leisured capitalism of mainly south of the country
4) Post war settlement in a form of council estates and new towns of social democracy
5) Blair colourful flats of newly found urbanism

Britain 5 counts for the last 30 years of British cityscapes and it was the primary subject of the critique.The cityscapes of 1990’s Blairism have turned out to be brittle and superficial with little space in between high density blocks of residence covered with colored paneling, terracotta, pale wood or glass. They replaced some old urban fabric under numerous Regeneration Schemes of 1980’s and 90’s that still continue today.

Owen recalls examples of 1980’s sub urban Ocean Village right in the centre of London next to metropolis like, strictly controlled Canary Wharf. He calls 1990’s Sheffiels high density student housing ‘blaisboxes’. He has no mercy for BDP’s West Key in Southampton, or Park Hill in Sheffield by Urban Splash. He suggests regeneration shame designed by one, and executed by the fourth party, timidly founded by whoever is in power cannot be good. It’s hard to disagree with him.

The up-down policies failed to recognize the inhabitant of all these shames.
Owen Hatherley however leaves us a positive note at the end of his lecture. Beautiful or not doesn’t matter here, these were citizen initiatives, to make space of their own or to build community block they actually wanted to live in.

T7 Urban Design Roles

Urban Design is a complex process with requires advise and knowledge of many and authority of a few. It is a real interdisciplinary interface and a multidimensional activity.
Urban design takes place between planning and architecture, yet at the same time other seemingly independent disciplines play equally crucial roles in the study and/or creation of cities:

Individuals with their own urban initiatives
Furniture designers,
Architects
Landscape architects,
Structural and mechanical engineers
Communication and transport engineers,

Behavioural studies researchers e.g.:
Sociologists
Economists
Group and individual psychologists

Humanities scientists e.g.:
Artists
Musicians
Historians
Philosophers
Lawyers

Developers
Planning consultants
Politicians

T6 Urban Design Definitions

Richard Rogers, Lodnon as it could be ( from www.richardrogers.co.uk)

‘At the heart of our urban strategy lies the concept that cities are for the meeting of friends and strangers in civilised public spaces surrounded by beautiful buildings.’

Urban Design Compendium (from www.urbandesigncompendium.co.uk)

'Urban Design is the art of making places for people. It is therefore concerned with how they function, not just how they look. It covers the connections between people and places, movement and urban form, nature and the built fabric and the processes for ensuring successful places are delivered and maintained.
Urban design draws together many strands of place-making – environmental concerns, social equity and economic viability – to create places which work and are sustainable in the long term.
Urban design brings together issues of planning, transportation, architectural design, development economics, landscape and engineering to create a vision for an area and then ensure it is delivered.'

Urban Design Gorup (from www.udg.org.uk)

‘What is urban design?
Urban design is the collaborative and multi-disciplinary process of shaping the physical setting for life in cities, towns and villages; the art of making places; design in an urban context. Urban design involves the design of buildings, groups of buildings, spaces and landscapes, and the establishment of frameworks and processes that facilitate successful development.'

T5 Site 01: Walworth Road, Histories and Planning Policies

History (ref. Southwark Council, Old maps of Southwark)

John Rcque's John Rocque's A Plan of London, 1766 Fragment
In this earlier plan of London Rocque soberly describes a physical superiority of London over Paris. The header text calculates London to be 8 ½ square miles compared to Paris's 6 ⅓ square miles. Did Rocque's royal patronage oblige upon him this subtle exercise in cartographic propaganda or was he simply emboldened by his position?

Plan of London free from the United Kingdom Newspaper, 1832
A rather generous giveaway from the United Kingdom Newspaper from 1832. The title reads: Plan of London from actual survey 1832. Presented gratis to the readers of the United Kingdom Newspaper by their obliged & humble servants, The Proprietors.


Kennington to Peckham, circa 1830.
This map includes the Kennington, Walworth, Peckham and Camberwell areas around 1830. Note the marshy land where the Bricklayers railway depot later stood and the slightly dramatic hill shading around Denmark Hill.


Stanford's Map of the County of London 1894
This detailed map shows the central southern section of Stanford's Map of the County of London. Note the commercial docks in Rotherhithe and the profusion of railway lines leading to the former Bricklayers goods depot on the Old Kent Road.


Walworth to Penge 1894 to 1896 Fragment
This detailed map shows building detail from Walworth to Penge and from Brixton to Deptford. Note the detail of the Crystal Palace before it burnt down in 1936.

Panning Policies

T4 Lecture 01: What is the city for? Reflections

It was a long day. First day in the studio around MA SPUD activities. I was a bit anxious not knowing how tricky it would turn out to be. In the Unit 6 we registered our details for the India trip and were given the preliminary project. We were asked to head off to Walworth Road and look for stories as we will when we are in Agra in a month’s time.

I didn’t go, I went to the library, borrowed a few books. I relaxed on a sofa reading about cities tuning into the climate of the lecture to come. As 6.30 pm was approaching I went back to Spring House just in time to find a chair in the fourth row of lecture hall. I was pleased witch myself sitting comfortably and looking at a larger and larger number of people gathering in this gray space. I reached for my notebook only to notice I left my documents together with my passport in the library. Passport is the last thing I can lose just before the India trip! In a hurry I squeezed through already full room hearing behind me the first words of the lecture!

I found the passport, but didn’t make it back to my fourth row seat of the lecture hall. When I returned I could only stand in the third line behing very tall men surrounding both entry doors of this room. The fragments of words I heard and quarters of slides I saw made little sense.

I just left thinking this hall is too small, or there are too many of us future Architects, Planners, Designers competing for the first seats.

T3 Film: Koyaanisqatsi Reflections

At the beginning there is a drawing of men, a drawing of distinct long gone civilization. There are plain black figures gathered on the pink rock of a cave. At the end there is another drawing of men, of a recently gone civilization. Black patterned figures just look back at me from this pink cave rock. Between there is meditation.

I watch from the distance the landscapes of interconnected elements of nature and all is beautiful and all feels natural and in place. Here human interventions single at first but nevertheless large in scale look like scares. I see mines, iron factories, ducts, oil pumps and the nuclear bomb, I look at rockets, airplanes and cars and then I see men proudly watching at their own creations, confident of their power over elements. I watch human landscape now. Initially from afar i observe the quick factory like order in the city. I am drawn deeper into this life until I become one of the characters and as I lost the greater perspective I also lost the ability to recognize things. Everything passes too quickly except from few personal encounters. I am not in control. I am falling and the sky is around me.

Koyaanisquatsi: Life out of Balance is a spiral of reflections. It shows human rise and fall and suggests that soon all that remains of us are a few hand drawings on the everlasting rock. It asks for a change.

But what can we change? Isn’t modern existence far too quick and inflexible? Have we gone so far in utilization of the process of living?

For me the hope comes from those few faces in the film show slowly and closely. A homeless man, a blond girl, a fire man and a man in a window of his flat are all more than workers, tax payers, National Health Service users and generally statistics. They have histories and dreams, they are unique.

T2 Manifesto 01

I grew up on a ground floor of a 3 storey block of flats on the peripheral housing estate built in mid 1970’s. The estate Słoneczny Stok in Białystok was an answer of the government to a growing need for housing and like many other estates in Poland at that time it was built rapidly. The estate consist only of a large size precast concrete slab OWT-75 system blocks and these were the view from the window of my bedroom cross the little garden and a sandy playground. I used to count the little air bubbles in the surface of my 2.3 metres tall wall of my grid 4.8 x 5.4 metres room, which, I now know, was only painted and never rendered concrete. We had a local school, a shop or two, few other facilities and a long way to the city centre but only few metres away was the local river and its marshes. I spent holidays in a red brick country site house built by my great grant father, sharing the room with a bunch of cousins.

I began my architecture studies in Bialystok Technical University. After my first year in the summer of 2002 the department of Architecture and Urban Design moved to and old School of Engineering building which had unusually high ceilings and a large ‘machines’ hall which became our first exhibition space. There was no security at the entrance, only a good common cloakroom lady which wasn’t too busy most of the year since the building was hardly ever warm. I learned a lot in that university about building construction and mechanics. We also drew, painted, sculptured but mainly collaged our 3 designs per semester.

Kingston Universities Department of Art, Design and Architecture building’s beautiful setting was in tune with the phenomenological approach of the School of Architecture. The school was vibrant, live, with great workshops, yet it was far away from the little hostel room I rented in Finsbury Park with 2 others. I travelled to university only when required and back in the hostel I converted every flat surface into my studio space. Thin walls of this Edwardian building were unfortunately the ultimate restrictions to my working hours.

I later learned a bit or two about insulation, toilers, tiles and all other details as I worked for Baynes and Mitchell Architects in an open plan office in Oxford Circus. The refurbishment was the name of the game. The big rent for small spaces was the winner in rental, spotless kitchen and shinny bathroom got the applause in private commissions. Most days I heard about clients with fat wallets watching their every penny, later I pass my local homeless “Big Issue” man on the way to overcrowded tube, I bought vegetables and said thank you back to the machine before getting ‘home’.

I aspire to learn more about policies and thinking behind Spatial Planning and Urban Design for Modern Living to make more sense.

T1 Glossary 01

Planning:

making plans
preparing for the future
organizing points / moments in the future
drawing up the route, the road, the journey
accumulating means for the plan, to realize the dream, the aim
map and road
gathering information, knowledge of the road


Road
Route
Path
Journey
Future
Preparing
Map
Information

Spatial planning:

organizing object in space
composition of objects
matching of sizes, colours, shapes and textures
drawing / testing locations of objects in space
defining distances and scales
making connections, visual and/or formal contacts


Objects
Sizes
Colours
Shapes
Textures
Location
Contact
Composition

Design:

create, compose
put together in a new (beautiful?) way
unique shape / idea
bring to being / existence something that hasn’t been done / thought of before
connect in harmony / in a meaningful way


New
To make
Unique
Idea

Urban design:

idea for urban living
routes for human movement in the city
shapes of spaces for human mass and for individual in the city


People
City
The human mass
Communication