Professional Experience:
Sewell + Hawkins Architects, London
Satmoko Ball Architects, London
Education:
RIBA 1 - Kingston University
The idea of re-establishing the notion the planner-architect was what sparked my interest in the Ma.
...
After graduating from Part 1 at Kingston University I spent several months wandering from practice to practice handing out CVs. By a chance encounter I was put in touch with a former tutor whose practice had just landed a job refurbishing a nightclub in central London as well as several small extensions. I made the call and started work the next day. My time was spent putting together tender packages and planning applications as well as designing fitted furniture, fabrics and lighting for the club. After the completion of the club there was not enough work in the office to sustain me. Having had an eventful New Years in a cabin in the north of Norway, I returned to London and began my search for work once more.
Within a week I had found a part-time position at a practice based in Islington. With them I have been working on a proposal for a mixed use development just off Mare Street in Hackney. The site is owned by the Baptist Church who plan to demolish their existing 1950s church building and erect a new church/community centre to house their growing congregation (currently 400 people). In order to fund this, the church will sell the site to a housing association that will develop the scheme with just over half the area dedicated to two seven storey housing blocks arranged around a private courtyard shared with the new Baptist church. For a time the project seemed to be rolling on steadily until various changes of staff within the council, housing association and church committee members caused progress to slow as each new member aired their opinions, concerns and improvements. During this time we entered into conversations with the planners and housing association members about the realities of getting the project in for a pre-application meeting. The volume of bureaucracy that followed sapped the energy from the project. We became bogged down in HQI forms, pages and pages of tick boxes and multiple choice questions that had no relation to the project. My favourite question on one of the forms was:
21. Are there any hard surfaces or soft landscaping within the scheme?
a) Acceptable
b) Neutral
c) Not Acceptable
...
Aside from picking apart these policies to gain a better understanding of where they have come from and how they may be used constructively in the process of making and planning buildings my aspirations toward the practice of spatial planning and urban design stem mainly from my experiences at Kingston. My final project was a public debating forum. With public buildings come public spaces, I have always felt that these spaces were under resolved in my proposals. With no real framework in place to support a thorough investigation into this issue during my part 1, I am hoping that this Ma will offer the chance to rigorously test, model and analyse such scenarios in future projects. As the architectural profession outside of academia is in constant dialogue with planners, urban designers, landscape designers gaining the specialism that this Ma will provide can only be beneficial to my future career as a planner-architect.
No comments:
Post a Comment