Our Thinking

This section sets out some of our ideas and thinking about London and cities in general, in a series of short pieces by Open House Director, Victoria Thornton, and The Rt Hon Nick Raynsford MP and Edwin Heathcote, members of our board of trustees. This page will be regularly updated with new essays.

What is the real value of excellence in architecture?

Victoria Thornton Hon FRIBA
Founding Director, Open House

The way we plan, design and build our cities can transform our lives for the better in many ways: good architecture can capture our imagination, change the way we relate to our neighbours and fellow Londoners, create new employment and revitalise neglected areas, and improve our health and well-being. The impact of good design is a more attractive environment, stronger communities with a sense of ownership and pride in their local area, and new financial investment. Well-designed buildings and public spaces are, therefore, vital in creating and sustaining a vibrant city, from Westminster to Waltham Forest, from Camden to Croydon, and from Havering to Hillingdon.
Contemporary architecture that is aspirational, innovative and visionary can help to create a society with the same characteristics. However, architecture is not a subject taught in the formal education system. From school to later life, we often have no formal way of learning how to express our ideas, needs and aspirations for the quality of the buildings and public spaces in which we live, work, play and learn. Open House believes everyone should have the opportunity to articulate their views and concerns by having the right tools and language.

How is London changing?

The Rt Hon Nick Raynsford MP
Open House Trustee and Chair of Supporters at Large

Cities have continuously evolved through time, but their success has always been dependent on them providing a safe and attractive environment in which people can live, work and relax. In the increasingly competitive global context of the 21st century, the prosperity of each city will depend on its ability to satisfy these requirements.
London starts with many advantages, boasting 2000 years of history, a reputation as a home of world-class contemporary design, and an almost unparallelled economic and cultural infrastructure. As well as all these qualities, London’s unique character reflects its astonishingly varied texture of diverse neighbourhoods linked together by a complex web of streets, rivers and transport networks. This rich urban geography is not static, but is changing all the time as the transformation of Canary Wharf, the Greenwich Peninsula and now the Olympic Park demonstrates so clearly.
The quality of our urban design is therefore vital to our city’s future, and now more than ever we need to understand, value and advocate the highest design standards in our built environment. Open House has performed an exceptional service over the past 17 years in raising the profile of London’s buildings and public spaces, and raising awareness of their value. In Open House’s 18th year I am happy to commend its vitally important work and to urge all those with responsibility for London’s built environment to heed its message.

How do we relate to our city?

Edwin Heathcote
Architectural Critic
Financial Times,
Open House Trustee

The city, the most complex and extraordinary result of civilisation, exists at different levels: as an idea – the skyline, the monuments, the museums; as a network – the intricate weave of streets and squares, of transport and communications; and as a backdrop – the frame against which we play out the dramas and rituals of our everyday lives. Each incarnation demands a distinct approach yet one that communicates and negotiates with each of the others.
Recent architectural debate has been dominated by the ‘icon’ but no city can be made of icons. In fact icons are anathema to the everyday: the city is made of the ordinary. That sounds dull but it isn’t, because London’s deep layers of history and memory, combined with and overlaid by the contemporary, create a subtly shifting palimpsest of endless invention and adaptation. Pieces of the city are reused and reinvented, they fall in and out of favour and fashion, and each era leaves its traces on a compelling background.
Each section of the city has embedded within it a story and is itself a part of the larger urban narrative. Those who have stewardship of the city must become conscious of that story and work with the fabric, not against it, to elaborate the story and make it clearer while adding a layer that brings new life. Every intervention has the potential to be a complex, endlessly fascinating template for a new chapter, but equally could become a dead end, an appendix.
London, possibly more than any other city, has proved able to reinvent itself whilst building on its own mythology and an awareness of the beauty in the subtlest patterns of its fabric rather than in the quest for the theatrical and the formal. Its narrative will develop best when those who are responsible for shaping it dig down into the layers of change, to discern what it is about the areas and buildings that have been and are able to accommodate industry and commerce but also luxury and consumption, that have made the city what it is.
It is less about the iconic than about the fabric, the pavements on which we walk, the blend of old and new, of how the city speaks to us through the parks, streets and alleys, of how the ground and the buildings rising from it become the set against which we can live our lives as best we can, and as we can only in London.

 

 

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