2014 Programme

Urban Planning and the value of space

The second part of the year will be spent looking at urban planning and the relationship between place, space and buildings.

The outline month-by-month looks like this:

September: A Short History of Urban Design: prehistoric to present-day. In reality it can't be, there's simply too much to say. But I'll pick some key examples, people and movements and scamper through it in 45 minutes. We can always return to anything that we collectively feel requires more attention.

Followed by a session on public spaces, our own chosen examples, and a discussion of the criteria we use, could use and don't use to judge the attractiveness, usefulness or ugliness of the spaces that surround us.

October: Following on from the September examples. the interplay between buildings and the spaces they surround or occupy. Some obvious, well-known examples and some not so obvious. An introduction to the ideas of Townscape and Gordon Cullen.

November: Streets. What makes a good street? Our own examples of streets that work, and don't work, and why.

December: A return to urban planning history: the garden suburb and suburbs generally.

Resources

First of all, some classic books:

The Death and Life of Great American Cities,by Jane Jacobs (1961)
City Planning According to Artistic Principles, Camillo Sitte (1889)

The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects, by Lewis Mumford (1972)

The City Shaped, Spiro Kostof (1991)

The Image of the City, by Kevin Lynch (1960)

The Essential William Whyte, by William H Whyte (2000) 

Great Streets, by Allan B. Jacobs (1995)

The Hidden Dimension, by Edward T Hall (1966)

A Pattern Language, by Christopher Alexander et al, (1977)

A Timeless Way of Building, by Christopher Alexander et al, (1980)

Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century
            by Peter Geoffrey Hall (1996 Updated Edition)

It has to be said that many of these books are both expensive and hard to come by as second-hand at decent prices. Cumbria Libraries has a few of these, if you are interested.

On the web, there a few places to stop by:

http://www.jonestheplanner.co.uk/
http://miladzabeti.wordpress.com/
http://www.ca-north.org.uk/assets/files/Parish%20Plans/West/Haydon%20Bridge%20Village%20statement.pdf
http://places.designobserver.com/media/pdf/The_Immature_A_1284.pdf
http://id2125cl.pbworks.com/f/urban_design.PDF

A very broad reading list on Urban planing in the late 19th and early twentieth  centuries is :
http://urbanplanning.library.cornell.edu/BIBLIOGR/titlesub.htm

There will be a lot of others eventually.

Sharpe, Paley & Austin

My outline plan for the first half of 2014 revolves around the Lancaster architectural partnership of Sharpe, Paley & Austin. They built a practice that spanned a century, and their output populated North Lancashire and Cumbria with churches, railway buildings and a whole host of other secular buildings between 1836 and 1942. Studying SP&A will provide the opportunity to look at church architecture in general, but also the development of Barrow and the railways. Should be enough variety in all this.

I've put together a one page timeline of the history of the practice here.

I propose that we go about this investigation along the following lines:

January: An introduction to church architecture - JPK

              An introduction to Sharpe, Paley & Austin - JPK

              A visit to St Mary's Ulverston, an Edmund Sharpe rebuild in 1864-66,
              and possibly to St John's, Osmotherley, also an S,P&A build, but very different.

February: The Victorian Gothic Revival: some names we have already come across (eg. Pugin), but there are lots of others, such as William Butterfield, Charles Barry and Gilbert Scott. It would be good if we had some volunteers to present briefly (10 mins) on some of these.

Victorian Gothic Revival Architects (an incomplete list...)


William Butterfield
William Burges
Charles Barry
Benjamin Woddward
James Wyatt
Alfred Waterhouse
George Street
Giles Gilbert Scott
William Hill
Thomas Rickman
John Carter
R C Carpenter
J T Micklethwaite
Thomas Taylor
G F Bodley
Thomas Garner


No visits (weather forecast poor)

Also coverage of the ecclesiastical changes in the period that impacted hugely on the architecture (not just Pugin...)

March: Sharpe, Paley & Austin churches in North Lancashire/Cumbria: a day's outing

April: Sharpe, Paley & Austin in Barrow: A day's outing

May: Sharpe, Paley & Austin and the Furness Railway: A day trip visiting their stations along the Furness line.

June: SP&A in Lancaster: A day trip: a huge range of work we could see.

Resources:

The key book on Sharpe, Paley & Austin is a tome by Geoff Brantwood: The Architecture of Sharpe, Paley & Austin, English Heritage 2012. It's seriously expensive (£45), but the Cumbria library system has six copies around the county. My copy will be under the Christmas tree, which means my library copy will be back in Ulverston Library.

A second, slimmer, cheaper, book is Sharpe, Paley & Austin: A Lancaster Architectural Practice 1836-1942, by James Price. The Cumbria library system has four copies, but secondhand copies can be found for around £6. I hope to be contact with Price in the next few weeks.

The Wikipedia entries for Sharpe, Paley & Austin are very good, heavily (very heavily) reliant on the Brantwood book, and there are good lists of all the buildings as well. The other aspects of Victorian Gothic are well covered too.

On church architecture generally, there are: 

Mark Child: Discovering Churches and Churchyards, Shire, often available cheaply (Henry Roberts etc.). Good short chapter on the Victorians.

Mark Child: Discovering Church Architecture, again Shire 

Matthew Rice: Rice's Church Primer, if you like the style (I find it difficult)

Recording A Church: An Illustrated Glossary, Council for British Archaeology

Roy Strong: A Little History of the English Parish Church Vintage. Really, a gem of a read (Again Cumbria Libraries has five or so copies)