Will Alsop by Porter Tom. Alsop Will

Author:Porter, Tom.,Alsop, Will.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Built Environment
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2010-08-10T04:00:00+00:00

Among his earlier masterplanning projects is the All Barnsley Might Dream project. Conducted in 2003 under the auspices of Yorkshire Forward’s Urban Renaissance panel, the intention, inspired by a poem by Ian McMillan, was to invigorate and electrify Barnsley’s town centre and, by remodelling it on a walled Tuscany hill village, create a more sustainable city. In Alsop’s scheme, a ring of new development comprising real estate and economic activity inserts a ‘necklace’ of architectural jewellery around the town centre – a modern interpretation of a medieval wall06.2. With its high-profile gateways and exotic architectural forms, this ‘living wall’ functions to animate a zone of activity between the dense urban grain of its nucleus and the openness of rural and productive agricultural space beyond06.3. Described by Alsop as ‘a gift to Barnsley’, the wall is high enough to allow people to walk around and above the city by day or night – the elevated circuit of walkway and gardens atop its ‘ramparts’ nocturnally being reinforced by a girdle of light projected hundreds of feet into the air06.4.

Incidentally, in representing an updated version of its medieval prototypes, such as Lucca and Monteriggioni, Alsop’s vision for Barnsley coincides with a Massachusetts Institute of Technology research project exploring energy efficient and self-supporting city models conducted four decades earlier. As part of this research, a computer programme was designed to pose the question: ‘What is the ideal model for a sustainable town?’ – the computer responding with an image of medieval walled town.

Another opportunity to explore in depth theg with an image of a medieval remodelling of an existing town centre came with Alsop’s commission to create a 2020 urban vision for Bradford – also in West Yorkshire. Approached by Alsop as ‘an important urban centre within the bigger picture’, he worked with the local community during a long series of intensive ‘draw and talk’ workshops. It was identified that Bradford’s town centre comprised a stock of fine Victorian buildings together with some good Modernist examples built around the beginning of the twentieth century. However, from the sixties onwards the town had been swamped and ruined by an intervention of low-budget construction – buildings that, although built in good faith, the majority of which were unsustainable and ecologically unsound. If there was to be any real chance of a regeneration that might help Bradford compete with nearby Leeds for jobs and tourism, it was decided that the resulting concrete jungle would have to be culled – demolished in order to make way for a new and imaginative high-performance architecture and, of course, to allow the surviving buildings of quality to breathe again. At the heart of the new proposal is a huge ‘speech-balloon’ shaped lake fronting Bradford’s Victorian city hall which acts as the focus for a surrounding arc of parkland complete with a ‘sensory garden’ and a ‘business forest’ together with an influx of radiating new buildings. The lake is Alsop’s gesture to what was once called ‘Broadford’ and its ancient connection to

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.