Month: September 2018

Landscape meets literature

Those who follow us will know, we have long been fascinated with natures connection to the arts and a couple of weeks ago one of our directors engaged two of her passions for the natural world and the written word through an event at the Gibberd Garden in Essex. Here is what she learned.

Landscape has long been synonymous with the arts, inspiring some of the greatest paintings, sculptures and literature of all time. It is the canvas for our design work and the context of our designs and as such it is a true responsibility to shape it for future generations.

Art for me comes in the shape of language, both reading it and writing it (though I confess to be a novice at both) and I am not the first, nor will I be the last to combine literature with the natural world.

I have visited many places which were either the inspiration for or the writing place of many works of literature. From Virginia Woolf’s Sissinghurst garden to the Bloomsbury’s sets Grantchester Orchard. From the Yorkshire Moors which inspired Emily Brontë’s Wuthering heights to the compelling landscapes of the lake district which inspired many of Beatrix Potters classic tales but I had not, until now, associated the Gibberd Garden with works of literary genius.

The Gibberd Garden is an unusual place. Designed by Sir Frederick Gibberd, it is very much a personal garden and in some ways one which contrasted Gibberd’s work as a master planner and leading post-war architect. His profession required meticulous planning and attention to detail, consideration of how one space would work with the next and continuity across a city.

“Harlow was one of the first and most successful of the new town projects, being both relatively uncontroversial and unusually unified and architecturally distinguished in its physical plan”. (Aldridge, 1996: 32)

His work was unusual in its day because he designed it as a whole and saw ‘connection’ as an integral part of the success of the future town. He looked at connection both in relation to the interaction of the architecture but also the landscape; how the landscape moved between the buildings and how the town related to the surrounding countryside.

His love of landscape is echoed in his garden but replacing the practical and functional rationales driving his work as a master planner, he intended his garden to be a work of art. He viewed his garden, perhaps all gardens, as places of transience. Ephemeral and subject to constant change; apparently once stating that if his garden stayed the same beyond his years, he would be most aggrieved.

From a design perspective, the garden doesn’t stick to conventional design principles and yet what it has in abundance is character, personality and joy. It has been affectionately described as ‘landscape theatre’ and for me this captures its essence. The garden was never intended to be a homage to supercilious design but a reflection of the humour and charisma of one man and his affection for the landscape.

As such, this garden is a wonderous place of inspiration for a writer. It is filled with surprises, eccentricities, history, heritage and stories; the sculptures, each a piece of history themselves and a part of both Gibberd’s and the garden’s stories.

Feeling in myself an echo of the playful nature of Sir Frederick, instinct wove me down the garden to happen upon a fort, drawbridge and peter pan-esque ‘keep out’ sign. Overlooking this mischievous scene was a swing hung from an accumbent branch of a mature beech tree which intuitively became the starting point of my literary adventure.

My literary wanderings that day spanned giant’s pipes, rambunctious sweet shops and macabre ghost stories. All inspired by the vivacious landscape and its remarkable treasures. My prose however and that of my companions was animated only on the page. Our work as landscape architects carries a different weight. Whether we are inspired by the vast landscapes of Brown and Repton or the gentle musings of an individual client, our designs affect the landscape. They enhance it or scar it, evolve it or change it for the future and sometimes forever. There is a great responsibility in that. What we do as landscape architects, as designers, is akin to art. We are inspired by the landscape and use it as our medium, our ink and our inspiration. The landscapes we create have the power to conserve, preserve, facilitate and improve. And a garden like Gibberd’s reminds us of the many delicate and overlapping functions and forms woven into our roles as landscape architects and of the emotive power of the landscape to empower, revive and to inspire.

An anthology of some of the prose inspired by the Gibberd Garden will be curated later this year and will be on sale in their shop in the next few months.

Walkability and health.

It is recommended that for good health we walk 10,000 steps per day (Tudor-Locke and Bassett, 2004). However, since the 1970s the number of people walking has steadily declined both in frequency and duration. It is now estimated that the average time people spend walking per day is just ten minutes; at an average pace this is closer to 1000 steps and not enough to demonstrate measurable health benefits (unless of course we connect with nature in that time). A fifth of adults only walk for 20 minutes once per year (or less) and a sixth of children never walk for this long (DoT, 2013). A stark contrast to what would have been the walking habits of their parents and grandparents as children.

Many factors have perhaps contributed to this reduction in walking. Movement out of cities could be one, with statistics showing that residents of London walk 292 miles per year but rural people just 122 miles (Pretty et al, 2017). Within cities themselves, there are other factors though, not least the increase in use of technology both as a leisure activity and a form of social interaction.

We all know walking is good for us. Just some of the known benefits are increased mental health, decreased blood pressure and reduced obesity levels (thus a reduction of the associated medical conditions). The benefits of walking are not linked to health alone though. When we look at information regarding walkability of cities, we learn that in areas where walkability is better, house prices are higher, GDP is higher, the streets are safer, and people are happier. So why do we not walk more and could it be that design has a part to play?

In a world where there is increasing pressure on design practices to be “innovative” and remain “ahead of the trend”, there has, historically been a tendency to design only for modern life and convenience. But with the movement of health and well-being up the government agenda, there is increasingly more and more consideration for how we can not only facilitate people to walk but also connect with nature and green space in cities.

Daniele Quercia, founder of Happy Maps, supports the theory that convenience doesn’t necessarily go hand in hand with health stating “being more efficient doesn’t necessarily make us happier”. He was responsible for designing an app with an algorithm to change the way that people navigate cities; Instead of simply looking for the fastest route from A to B his app found “the shortest route with the most emotional gain”. Discovering, through his work that architectural and natural features were significant factors in the benefit of the route. This emotional benefit of nature fits with the increasing theory linked to green exercise and the abundance of emerging theory relating to urban trees.

Science cites the benefit of trees to our cities as many and varied at both an economic and environmental level. And these benefits translate down to walkability scales too; urban trees provide shade, shelter and aesthetic benefits. They make navigating our cities on foot more practical, more appealing, healthier and a happier experience.

In terms of design considerations, there are practical implications of walkability too. Where design is focussed on easing the pressure of vehicular travel, pavements can often be narrow and poorly maintained meaning navigating by foot is difficult. To combat this, there is an increasing trend to specifying “shared-space” which advocates the design of streets so that vehicles and pedestrians move together across it with mutual consideration. This is, in theory, a good idea and has been successfully implemented in many cities across Europe but as with all new solutions can present its own design challenges. One concern for example, is with regard to accessibility; especially amongst people who are blind or partially sighted and who, without the use of pavements may feel at greater risk of isolation.

It is of course important that designers of today design for the modern world but with such a responsibility on our shoulders, should we also be designing for the modern and increasing health demands of people living in cities? If we, as designers can make a city more walkable, then we remove (at least some of) the barriers between a city-dweller and walking, thus make walking more desirable and more likely. There then comes with that the host of environmental, economic and health benefits that are scientifically linked to walking. National scale initiatives such as the national park city campaign are providing opportunity to push ideas like walkability in cities higher on the design agenda. The spaces between buildings could be designed not just to help move people between buildings but between green spaces and as part of a wider network of routes designed for walking, connecting and health.

 

 

References

DoT (2013) National Travel Survey. London: Department of Transport.

Pretty, J., Rogerson, M. and Barton, Jo. (2017) Green Mind Theory: How Brain-Body-Behaviour Links into Natural and Social Environments for Healthy Habits. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. 14: 706

Tudor-Locke C, Bassett DR (2004) How many steps per day are enough? Sports Med 34:1-8

http://goodcitylife.org/happymaps/index.php

 

Photo by Tolga Kilinc