Future Proofing V 2: v. 2

FUTURE PROOFING 02:

Stuart Lipton, Richard Rogers, Chris Wise, Malcolm Smith, Editor Nina Rappaport, Yale School of Architecture, 2007, £17.99

This is the second illustrated record of a design studio at Yale University School of Architecture that set out to investigate issues of how to plan and build major projects adaptable to future change - using the 72ha Stratford City project master plan by Arup as the starting point. The site is to be developed around the new CTRL station adjacent to the 2012 Olympic Park to become the ‘largest development in the history of Great Britain’. The students were to re-design the Arup plan to become a one-hundred year future proofed city that could evolve and flourish to become a new metropolitan hub for London.

The Introduction summarises conversations between the four visiting professors on the nature of cities, change and team working. The part of this discourse that stands out is Chris Wise’s comment “there has not been a design response to the environmental issues in London, nor a change in thinking in the last few years”. It would have been interesting to hear the response of the others who have rebuilt significant chunks of the City over the last two decades under the guidance of the City of London planner Peter Rees who briefed the students on their visit to London.

The students who examined aspects of the plan in pairs, hung their drawings in a crit room of heavyweight faculty and visitors, and the jury’s comments make interesting reading; but this would have probably been of more value during the design process than at the end, which raises the issue of whether the inquisitorial crit system is the best way to train designers rather than more personal tutoring. The student’s sketches and CAD images showed a range of approaches. Some bridged over the constraining ring of roads and railway lines to connect to the adjacent neighbourhoods with retail spines, green wedges or air rights structures. ‘Catchment City’ showed a more human-scale while several proposed large buildings rattling around in amorphous spaces. It was hard to tell if the designs actually were future proofed and it would have been enlightening to see how the tutors themselves would have responded to the ambitious brief had they wielded the pencils instead. The result is an attractively illustrated book which will probably be of more interest as a record for the participants, than to an outside reader who will be left wishing they had been there in the flesh rather than reading the edited highlights.