Maggie's Opening

Maggie’s Newcastle opened on 16^th May 2013 on a wonderful sunny day which saw the building fully inhabited for the first time. The kitchen was packed to the concrete down stand beams, with project architect, project manager and lighting designer perched on the staircase and others spilling into the courtyard  for a view  of the speakers Charles Jencks, Sarah Brown,  Ted Cullinan and Lorna Moran and to listen to bassist Graeme Danby’s wooing of the crowd.

Working with Maggie’s to create the Maggie’s Newcastle has been a tremendous experience and a joy to work with such a committed client. In the month since the opening an unprecedented 1000 people have visited the centre, including a larger proportion of men than at other centres which was one of the key aspirations for this scheme.

The centre sits within a continuum of buildings by our office. The radical transformation of the hospital grounds into a tranquil courtyard exemplifies our interest in place making and the celebration of living close to nature. The centre is sited and arranged to maximise the sun’s winter heating potential, to collect and store its energy and regulate temperature with the mass of exposed concrete. The landscaped mounds provide shelter to the north and quietly delineate the warm courtyard to the south.

Most importantly, our buildings blossom through use and it was wonderful to see the varied spaces of Maggie’s Newcastle being activated for the first time.

 

Making things last

Prevention, Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Recover, and only a last resort Reject - the so-called waste hierarchy.

As we move towards the circular economy we need to stop using virgin materials and make mainstream the reuse of existing processed materials, whether by becoming more ingenious in how we reuse them, or thinking as we design about how their future reuse.

We are now taking part in a couple of TSB funded research projects exploring these themes.

In the REFab House project we are working with EcoBond Cymru, ASBP, C-Tech Innovation, and Bangor University to explore how houses might be designed to promote greater reuse of their materials.

The Steel Re-use project will look at the barriers and opportunities to use hot-rolled steel without recycling - recycling may sound worthy but it is hugely energy intensive compared with reuse. Leading that team is Julian Allwood whose book Sustainable materials with both eyes open is freely available online.

16 years ago when I built our kitchen I used a 40mm slab of maple, bought by the metre, to make a worktop, finished with three coats of Danish Oil.  It slowly scruffies out, so every three or four years on a dry day in the summer we take it outside, scrape it back to the bare wood, reoil it and bring it back to life.

At the rate of wear it should last well over a hundred years, and being loose fixed it can be passed to my grandchildren as a thing of beauty.

Identity & Place-Making: Cullinan Studio Teaching Visit to Tripoli, 21-23 May 2013

“Where should we look for Libya’s identity?”

“How can we make Libya’s towns into better places?”

 

 

These are questions that will - or at least should - come to dominate Libya's built environment debate. They were questions that we asked and were asked by students during our recent visit to Tripoli University’s Department of Architecture and Urbanism and we had discussed the same two months earlier with Libyan academics, practitioners and government ministers during our visit to Tripoli with the Royal Institute of British Architects. This time Roddy Langmuir and myself were in Tripoli at the invitation of Architectural Initiative – an organisation dedicated to connecting international architects with Tripoli University, Department of Architecture and Urban Planning.

We believe that the answers to these questions – “identity”and “place” – lie in Libya itself. “Context, climate and an architecture of place-making” was the title for lectures given to a public audience at the King’s Old Palace in Tripoli and again to students at the University – “The importance of place, people and communities in making architecture that belongs.” This was also the message of our student workshops, working with the next generation of about-to-graduate architects to build up a logical process by which to produce appropriate design.

 

Libya – as across the world – has grown to become reliant on the car, air-conditioning and the light bulb. A warm climate and abundant land and energy make it OK to make windowless, stand-alone buildings in a sea of car parking. Libya has forgotten the importance of street and place, thinking instead of buildings as objects and rarely of the quality of the spaces that surround them. Turning this tide will not be easy but it will become harder still if the international architectural community fails to actively support practitioners, students, teachers and policy-makers at the front line of the debate.

 

The enthusiasm of the final year students that we met in Tripoli was as understandable as it was exhausting. Their eagerness comes after years of waiting for visiting architects to take time out of their pressured visits to Libya to engage with the country beyond the needs of their own projects or the pursuit of others. Further, Libya’s contemporary appetite for icon buildings can tempt students down “blind alleys” of picture-making and shape-making, rather than the greater challenges of mass housing and urban design. Disengagement from the real problems facing Libya’s built environment is no longer an option, even in the university environment.

 

Architecture Initiative partner and Head of School at Tripoli University, Osama Abdul Hadi, has set a syllabus of designing real buildings – “Live Projects”– forcing a relevance upon the students by positioning them between the commercial interests of real clients and the demands for design quality from (what Architecture Initiative hopes will become) a steady stream of visiting Architects as critics. As proxies for the identity and place-making debate, the students must confront the issues that will define Libya in years to come. The evident appetite for our visit showed that Libya’s architectural students and the profession alike are ready for the challenge.


Architectural Initiative

 

Architectural Initiative was created by British Architect Ghada Al-Bayati, Libyan Architectural student Shadda Elmagri and Libyan Architect Osama Abdul Hadi and has the support of Libyan scholars who are interested in creating collaborative academic partnerships between international built environment institutes and Libya's educational institutions. Architectural Initiative's mission is to run architectural programs within Libya to educate and inspire the Libyan architectural community by increasing student and public awareness of the challenges facing the built environment. This will be achieved by providing a forum for interaction with international leaders, role models, artists, academics and other prominent members of international architectural society.

The lecture series is Architectural Initiative's first organised project in association with Tripoli University's Department of Architecture and Urban Planning, coordinated by Ghada Albayati. They have hosted Cullinan Studio who have been supportive of the initiative since its inception and are the first British Architects to start the Lecture Series. The main sponsors of the lecture were the Libyan architectural practice Allabina Architecture & Engineering Consultancy as well as the RIBA (Royal Institute of British Architects) who have provided both guidance and financial support. The other sponsors were Libyan Institutes of Architects, the Martyr Square Media, Libya Design, Home and Garden Show and Andalusia.

The programme consisted of a public lecture as well as a lecture to students, followed by a series of workshops and crits with final year students.