Last night saw the first of 4 evenings in the 4 x 4 Making Places series at Leeds Met University. This year’s events are entitled Brave New World with the aim of looking to the future and how the environment we live in will change. The theme for the first series of talks was Identity, with the following weeks looking at Enterprise, Community and Place.
The format was similar to previous years with an excellent panel of speakers. The chair was CEO of the RIBA Harry Rich with talks from artist Megan Smith, journalist & author Owen Hatherley, Quantity Surveyor Ken Wood and Architect Richard Murphy.
I found it interesting with the inclusion of Megan Smith as her talk was very different from the others who concentrated their talks on architecture. Megan explained how she uses technology, in particular twitter, to inform her art. She observes people through their status updates to generate intimate and differing stories from a particular place. Unfortunately I felt some of the audience seemed a little lost to the significance of what she was saying, which is a shame.
Owen Hatherley used the writing of J B Priestly as the base of his talk about how the architecture and planning of England has changed over the generation of the early 20th Century. He also expanded this bringing it up to date and how we are now creating new identities of places, questioning how good or bad they are and the reasons behind the decisions made. An interesting talk but maybe concentrating a little bit too much on negative aspects.
Ken Wood was up next, as a Quantity Survey he started off true to form with a series of graphs and tables. But once we got past this he started to make some very interesting points about why the design of buildings are conflicted by being either process or design driven and whether we settle for second best design due to legislation, inefficient bureaucracy and squeezed budgets. Something I think everyone can relate to and generated a lot of nodding heads in the audience.
Our final talk of the evening was by award winning Architect Richard Murphy. Richard openly admitted he was using his talk to show us his buildings. A little bit of ego stroking maybe but they were however excellent examples of architecture. He explained the key to good design was creating buildings of their place and time to enforce the existing identity of an environment, be it a rural location or dense inner city.
The evening was rounded off with a Q&A session with the panel, a lively debate covered several issued raised by the audience.
I found the evening very interesting relating to architecture but thought more could have been made on how people create identity of a place as well as buildings, although this would have been big subject to cover in its own right. Next Thursday the theme will be Enterprise at 6pm at The Rose Bowl, all welcome and free entry.