The Castleford Project
Sep. 1st, 2008 09:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pezI've been very interested in this programme since I first heard about it, partly because of the actual regeneration ideas, but more because I want to know if they'll highlight the sort of difficulties that always arise (public consultation, funding, all sorts of hoops to jump through). It turns out they focus more on the townspeople's reaction than the other bits, which I suppose makes sense because that makes good TV and connects with the viewers. But I wish they'd talk more about, for example, how hard the architect had to work to get the railway underpass - something that small, with a budget of only £100k, can take several years to start work and by the time it starts, the client/funding source changed. Sometimes it means you'll have to start the procedure all over again. It's the sort of struggle that I hope more people can see so that they'd think again before they start saying "I've been complaining about [thing] for years and nobody's listening or doing anything about it."
The programme does say a bit about how hacking away bits of a design, for cost or other reason, can completely destroy it so that it doesn't serve its purpose anymore. And then the people'd say "well all that money spent and all we got are a couple of plastic chairs!" - no, that wasn't the original intention. But so often a patchwork approach gets adopted, taking bit and pieces from different designs, and in the end it just doesn't work. You like Stephen King's plots and Haruki Murakami's writing style, but you can't mesh the two together, it'll end up horrible. Really. The designer and the community need to work very tightly together to get things to work.
Um. By the way. Don't let architects try to create traffic calming designs. They know fuck-all about traffic calming.
The programme does say a bit about how hacking away bits of a design, for cost or other reason, can completely destroy it so that it doesn't serve its purpose anymore. And then the people'd say "well all that money spent and all we got are a couple of plastic chairs!" - no, that wasn't the original intention. But so often a patchwork approach gets adopted, taking bit and pieces from different designs, and in the end it just doesn't work. You like Stephen King's plots and Haruki Murakami's writing style, but you can't mesh the two together, it'll end up horrible. Really. The designer and the community need to work very tightly together to get things to work.
Um. By the way. Don't let architects try to create traffic calming designs. They know fuck-all about traffic calming.
