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.
Monday 22 November 2010
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.
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.
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.
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