38 C O N T E X T 1 2 0 : J U LY 2 0 1 1 What would you like to be doing in five years time? Developing an amazing heritage/ landscape design/enterprise project on our doorstep along with others in the trust. The former mill owner’s estate, a designed landscape, now ruinous but held in considerable affection locally, has huge potential for sensitive development as a local resource. The adjacent mill, &(","""sq ft of Grade B listed industrial heritage plus the mill lades (races) and so on, also needs a future. Both are in the ownership of a local family which is amenable to looking at future possibilities. Any champions out there for the Lost Gardens of Cowdenhall? (Come to think of it, Heligan would come a close second for my favourite place.) What is your favourite building? So many, especially those modest buildings that speak of careful conception and execution. All those pumping stations and signal boxes dressed up to echo Tuscan campaniles, still gracing sidings and the work yards. But probably three buildings stand out, all religious, but very different. Sacred architecture is as near as you get to ‘pure’ built form, I always feel, where the building’s functional programme is subservient to its poetic or symbolic purpose. The first is St Oran’s Chapel on the Isle of Iona, on the Street of the Kings, a tiny space, unadorned except for Norman embellishment around the door. The second, Sta Maria Dell’ Assunta on Torcello in the Venetian lagoon, with its stunning mosaics and melancholic air. The last, Sta Maria del Mar in Barcelona, with its sparse and dramatic loftiness, and that wonderful ambulatory. These places have seen history with a capital H.Whether powerfully or serenely, they still pose the old question: quo vadis? Your favourite place? Probably Girvan in Ayrshire, and its surrounding landscape, where I spent the summer holidays with my four sisters every year, and where we brought our own boys as toddlers. A little seaside town, with main street, a harbour, a good beach, ice-cream shops and a putting green. Like so many such places it is having a hard time to keep going, but it is full of character, texture and memory. Enough modest architecture in the glowing red sandstone of the area and vernacular building for something new always to catch the eye, even after all this time. Your favourite book? In this context, it has to be Life Between Buildings by Jan Gehl. It reached me just at the point when my interest in architecture had morphed into a concern for spaces and the way ‘public’ life is sustained or impoverished by how places are stitched together – the spaces between. What do you do in your spare time? Gardening. Not a big garden, but getting it right is a work in progress and an exercise in hope. Which one issue would you particularly like the IHBC to campaign on? Preserving and enhancing our ordinary places. Imperceptibly, the fabric of our everyday places is being eroded without anyone passing remark.Who is there to champion the high street that has no distinguished buildings but has something coherent about it? Who is on hand to combat the diminution of public space either by its removal into the private zone or its degradation into a desert of paviors and signage? The problem with regeneration efforts is that they have typically been focused on town-centre remodelling or investment in areas of high deprivation. No problem with either of these, but they do skew the investment and, more important, distort our understanding of what planning and placemaking are about. By virtue of its name, I take it that the IHBC might not be able to major on these concerns. But as people passionate about the built environment and the future of our places, it would be hugely useful to enlist the conservation sector in the plea for higher standards of ‘ordinary’. A sketch drawn by Richard Carman for Urban Design Skills at one of the Neilston visioning weekends.
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