PASW Regional Newsletter: Spring 2007
Regional Network Meeting Report:
‘Highway Engineering – a cul de sac for creativity?’, Swindon, 9 November 2006
Introduction
Andrew Kelly welcomed everyone to the meeting and to Swindon. He said that having worked on the Legible Cities project in Bristol he viewed the topic of the meeting as critical to current practice. He then welcomed the event’s three speakers, before handing over to Maggie Bolt.
Maggie thanked everyone for coming, and said that she had wanted to organise this meeting for some time as she felt that the focus of the day was a very important component of successful collaboration and integrated public art and design projects.
The highway engineer, she said, was the person everyone loved to hate and it was therefore time to look at the myth that he or she was the person that dampened creativity within highways and public realm projects.
Successful schemes like Kensington High Street demonstrated that creative solutions with regard to car and pedestrian control were possible.
She also mentioned the research that the Department of Transport had commissioned to investigate the effect of psychological design principles on roads to reduce motorists’ speed and the forthcoming guidance to be issued on this matter to Local Authorities.
The creative opportunities to involve artists in creating visual perceptions of risk were very exciting, she said, and presented many groundbreaking opportunities for the future. She concluded by saying that the speakers had been deliberately selected to represent different perspectives and that she looked forward to the ensuing debate.
Stephen Hardy, Principal Transport Planner, Dorset County Council
Stephen Hardy started his presentation by briefly talking about his background and current role in highway engineering.He felt that, given the current complexity within the field of guidance around design, there was a pressing need for everyone to come out of their silos and network outwith their professions so that they could understand how things happened in the round.He talked about risk and the perception of risk, citing the roundabout in the centre of Seven Dials in London, as an example of close pedestrian and car proximity and the culture of the highway engineer profession as being elitist.
Stephen said that the desire to create sustainable communities was a key issue, which connected the design professions in an attempt to create mixed-use development and non-car modes of transport. He then went on to talk about the multitude of statutes that determine what happens on our highways and the fact that many of our anxieties stem from the mistakes that were made in the past with developments such as Spaghetti Junction. Stephen said that the publication ‘Paving the Way’ by CABE had started to unpack why many of these mistakes had been made. He felt that it was often the case that mistakes came about because there was a lack of attention to the context and detail, resulting in a ‘scaletrix’ approach to road layout. Also, he said, maintenance issues often stifle creativity.
There was substantially more statutory design guidance for the Highway Agency than local highway authorities, said Stephen, resulting in an every growing gap between the two approaches. Stephen also cited examples of the plethora of publications that now offer guidance such as ‘Better Streets, Better Places’ and the forthcoming ‘Manual for Streets’ which is due to be published in April. He touched on issues of adoption and how the process behind adoption was the most important element. Highway authorities should, he said, describe the process for adoption, thus making it more transparent.
Construction, risk, and design Dorset-style
Stephen then started to talk about the fabric of the road and how this was the place one should start with regard to design issues. It should be viewed as three components: - width, construction and what it looks like. The Local Development Framework is where one could examine ‘what it looks like’. Here design codes come to the aid of the framework planning and the Local Transport Plan should also be brought in to the Local Development Plans.
Stephen went onto to talk about Dorset’s approach and the involvement of advice that informs the ‘what it looks like’ component. Fundamental to this component is the landscape character assessment and townscape character assessment. With all of these in place we can then start to achieve the quality of developments. Stephen talked about Abbotsbury as an example of where these issues had been used. What was needed, he said, was to model developments by using more creative methods. Public art has a substantial role to play in highway design. Places need to be supported by appropriate detailing within the public realm. Public art influences how we feel about the street we walk along and how we enjoy a space as well as what happens within that space.
The presentation then moved on to look at the issue of risk and how in order to satisfy requirements one needed to address the first principles of design and durable materials with a well evidenced audit trail. Other challenges that exist are in relation to the issue of eco friendly development and disability issues.
Stephen finished by posing the question as to whether the role of the artist was to develop public art or whether the skill of the artist was about looking at issues of local distinctiveness and context and bringing them forth into the equation. He stated that the system is becoming more and more technically demanding and consequently it is easy to overlook the fundamentals; in short we are becoming immune to our environments.
Andrew thanked Stephen for his presentation and invited questions from the audience. Delegates raised questions in relation to the best way to approach an area that is distinctively ugly, the issue of pastiche building developments and the role of the artist.
Ben Hamilton Baillie, Hamilton-Baillie Associates
The Chair then introduced Ben Hamilton Baillie who started by declaring that he was a recovering architect who had an obsessive interest in highways and how our highways and streetscapes had become a focus for communication.
Ben Hamilton Baillie presenting
The debate about the relationship between art and highways, Ben said, comes at a time of major change in our thinking about our streets and how we use them, given that they have to serve a multitude of functions. Shared space is nothing new. Streets, he said, have always supplied a shared function; movement, trading etc. In the UK most of our thinking over the last few decades has come from principles of segregation in order to protect us from the monster of the car.
Traditionally the kerb has signified the separation of the two worlds of pedestrian and car and that our human world starts beyond the street. We are now, however, recognising that our streets fail to recognise our new values.
One of the main problems, Ben said, is the different needs of our highways compared with our public realm. We accept the need for space that has no cultural value and is completely about movement; motorways for example. There is a need for a clear transition between the highway and the public realm. Ben showed examples of how this was being achieved in Europe. He then talked about Sustrans and the creation of the National Cycle Network and how it was about changing peoples’ mental maps of how you get around. Public art in this context was about giving meaning to journeys and places. Ben then showed slides of a number of artworks commissioned by Sustrans.
The contribution of art to highway design
Ben then proceeded to talk about the role of the traffic engineer and how Hans Mondermann has been one of the first to recognize that if you wanted to change driver behaviour the design of the street needed to be contextual. Strong connections were needed between the street and local landmarks, thus breaking down the barriers between the street and the public realm. These influences, he said, are now emerging in the UK. Ben illustrated this with slides of various places including Fakenham and Ipswich.
He also spoke about the work he is currently doing in Ashford, Kent. He talked about how public art is being incorporated into the environment and how it is important that every aspect of the street is considered in terms of the meaning it imbues. He showed slides of the initial concepts and explained about the role the artist, John Atkin, had in the overall design of the road layout.
Ben finished by talking about how art can influence, intrigue and add humour; changing the way that people think about the place they are in. He showed slides of work by the artist Ted Dewan in Oxford and concluded by saying that he thought we were on the cusp of real change.
Having thanked Ben for his contribution, Andrew asked the audience for any thoughts. The audience raised a number of questions which touched on issues of risk and the need to build hazards into our sanitized spaces, the problems of signing off projects where no precedents have been set and personal liability.
The meeting then broke for tea before returning for the last presentation of the day from artist, Richard Layzell.
Richard Layzell, Artist
Richard started by saying that he was struggling with labels that had been mentioned during the course of the afternoon.He briefly talked about his previous work including projects in Leeds, Canvey Island and Maidenhead.
He went on to talk in some depth about the project he is currently working on in Swindon on a Home Zone.This work, he said, had involved working with children and looking at the streets in a particular area of the town; how the kids felt about the area and how they could get involved in their environment.During the course of this work, Richard had started to look at role and design of bollards and had worked with the kids on developing ideas for bollard designs.Working closely with Hargreaves Foundry in Halifax, Richard had then produced a series of bollards for the area.
He then went on to talk about ‘The Silent Walking Project’ he had worked on in Bristol, for Queen Square and one in Locklease Square. He described the project in Locklease Square as an act of surrealism because he had introduced donkey rides and a temporary forest to the environment. He showed some slides and a film of the projects ‘Red Carpet’, ‘Moving the River’ and ‘Painting the Town Red’ that he had worked on. They all addressed mark making and the creation of trails throughout the city.
Richard concluded his presentation by saying that what most interested him was how these temporary projects functioned and how these interventions had in the main been delivered without permission, because permission, in his view, would never have been granted.
Andrew thanked Richard for his thought provoking presentation and then opened up discussion to the audience. The questions and comments addressed issues of the parameters of the projects that Richard had discussed and the need to seek permission to intervene in the public realm.
Plenary session
With the speakers presentations completed, Andrew moved the meeting into the plenary session and continued the discussion around the matter of permissions. There followed a lively period of comments and debate that included:
- How we accept and deal with danger and risk within our public realm
- The need for opportunities to experience serendipity and chance within our public spaceHow successful public realm allows for contradictions to take place
- The need for local champions to effect change in projects
- That community involvement is fundamental to schemes
- How we communicate with each other in the public realm and how often it is about not having permission
- How the English legal system is based on precedent, and therefore we get a complex level of social behaviour based on fear
- Issues of liabilities with regard to art in the public realm
- How innovation is essential not desirable
- That the fear of litigation is taking us backwards; That there is a need to accept personal responsibility and to challenge assumptions
- Problems of the assimilation of information that faces drivers today
- How we evaluate accidents and whether all accidents are bad; how learning from accidents can make them ‘good’, a force for change
- The need for a cultural change and change of attitude
- The importance of talking to students and engaging them in the debate
As the plenary session concluded Andrew thanked all the speakers and the audience for attending and contributing
Maggie rounded up the day by saying that whatever the area we worked in, we all had a responsibility to be creative and to also react to policy and developments as members of the community, not just our profession. We all needed to raise the debate and be aware of possibilities to change the status quo when they arose. She thanked the speakers and the chair, everyone for coming and mentioned briefly that the next Network meeting was planned to take place in Weston-super-Mare and would focus on artists working with light and what it was that they could bring to a project, which lighting designers could not.