T2 Manifesto 1

I’m English I suppose but not necessarily.

I never knew this before I came to London.

I was from Yorkshire; from Sheffield; from High Green; from the North side of High Green-oops, don’t tell people that, they will think you are posh.

No design is or can be perfect. Does this make design worthless? Design is necessary.

The intricacies of the city mean that making improvements mean exaggerating other faults, many changes are often wholly detrimental.

We make assumptions as designers that we will forge inherently positive objects for our built environment. However, with the different interests of those involved this becomes diluted or even purposefully the opposite.

So, I like to be critical.

Added Value is my favorite phrase at the moment.

Working on community gardens for the last year has given me a good insight into what added value can mean. Neighbors who had never met, water each other’s plants, socialise, fix each other’s washing machines, say hello, even fall-out. Better to not like someone than to not know them…?

The relative monitory cost of these projects is tiny compared, I believe to the outcomes. Can this value be quantified> It’s much easier to spend all your money on a couple of big projects than think of lots of tiny one’s with much higher added value.

I don’t like gardening that much, though, neither do they.

My third year tutors told me, that I was the worst student they had ever taught. My collection of buildings too understated (for a World Heritage Site). The reasoning of the different aspects too overstated.

‘Why don’t you put a dome on it?’

I didn’t have a reply to that one.

Good design is an inefficient process of change.

A planning role seems much more honorable than that of most architects. At least Planners work to minimum standards, doing a job of much less egotistical fancy.

For my degree dissertation I wrote about T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. In it Eliot suggests that everything has been done before and we can only re-jumble. Well, perhaps it has, but we seem to be constantly re-jumbling the same pieces. It makes sense that architects and planners are re-jumblers. Deck chairs on the Titanic? If people had been spread equally amongst the lifeboats, everybody would have got off.

Écriture-signposts of language; T.S. Eliot’s copy and paste style.

Think I may have given myself away.