Working with Creativity

This evening was the 21st December,  one of the biggest nights of the year, and the last Friday before Christmas. I'd had a big night planned for quite a while as it was my first weekend after breaking up. The evening started with a chaotic journey home but soon felt better after my first glass of Vino. I find in life the nights where you only plan a quick drink after work turn out to be the best evenings, whereas the evenings in the diary for a month tend to be an anti climax. 

This evening out had followed a pin up on Monday, working physically from Tuesday to Thursday in some fairly adverse weather conditions and then on friday driving to the arse end of Kent on the busiest traffic day of the year for a private lesson with an ex BA student for hints and tips for the next five months. In between work I'd also successfully food shopped, present shopped and done all my cards - all in all, a busy busy week.

The gig we went to see was 'south coast soul revival' at the Brunswick. Their lead singer Ruby knocks the socks off any X Factor finalist (inspite of not watching X factor but having to tolerate Simon Cowell's monopoly on Christmas number ones. If there's a firing line for him I've got the first shot).  Its also clearly something that Ruby loves doing. 

In turn, in my drunken overtired fuzzy, state got me thinking about passions. Ruby obviously does this as she's passionate about singing. I travel 140 miles a week as I'm passionate about design and learning from some really great characters. 

Given my last blog about education and creativity, what would the world be like if everyone followed their passions.  Would we have a glut of over excited over emotional creative either running very high or very low?  I know that if I had an office job right now things would be a lot calmer on the home front - but goodness they'd be boring.  Although I'm really challenged by this degree I am loving it and growing in leaps and bounds both as a person and a designer. 

South Coast Soul Revue photo by James Pike

I guess it comes back to life not being a spectators sport but equally having some balance in that ride.  Bring on 2013! 

Being distracted from Edward de Bono by Ken Robinson

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U

Ken Robinson's talk on Changing Educational Paradigms

Jamie was giving feedback in tutorial about education.  He talked about how it was tending to branch into two directions.  There as the broad vocational based education and then the specialist.  If one wants to design an educational park then one needs to decide whether it's going to specialise or be broad reaching.

This got me to thinking about education as a whole.  I hated my schooling with a passion and it took a lot of courage to return to it in my 30's.

It helped me last year to go for an initial dyslexia screening and discover I'm borderline dyslexic with my word formation.  My memory and problem solving are really strong to compensate for my word formation which is weak.  This therefore means that if I read anything I don't take it in but if I hear it, it's remembered forever!  Very handy to know.

I therefore got to thinking about modern education. When I taught English, I used to do a study skills lesson with my students during the first week of the academic year. All the students I taught were adults and without exception none of them had never learnt how they learnt i.e. auditory, visual etc.  It fascinated me that they'd spent so many years in education without realising how their brains received information.

Once you've then worked out how you learn how do you decide what to include on a modern syllabus. Ken talks in his fascinating lecture about modern educational syllabus's being laid out based on an old fashioned Victorian model.  I find it interesting that children are leaving school as I did with no teaching on how to handle your own finances or a rough outline of politics. Jamie criticised his daughter's school for having a regular Skype chat with 2 schools around the world (I guess the modern equivalent of our pen friends). However I feel this is really important for children to learn that the UK isn't the epicentre of the world and others have very different lives than us.  When I left school at 15/16 I bundled myself off to India for 6 months to travel on my own.  It was a bit scary but I learnt more about life in that 6 months than I did in all my education.

I've decided to put Serious Creativity by Edward De Bono down for a while and replace it with The Element by Ken Robinson.  I'm quite keen to introduce Education and Creativity to my Calverley Ground design, so I need to make some decisions about how I'm going to do this effectively in a public space.  I'd also like it to be a place that inspires rather than preaches.

Belief and Fact.

As this course progresses I am beginning to understand and get to grips with my style as a garden designer. 

Initially I was really daunted by developing a style as I felt it would typecast me as a designer. However as my confidence and knowledge grows my style develops. 

I see my style as becoming subtly naturalistic working with organic shapes and forms and emphasis on the interplay of light and shadow.  Hark at me almost sounding like a designer already, just as long as I don't start overusing the word 'juxtapose' like so many of my fellow designers. 

A few weeks ago Tom lectured us about belief and fact. There's a belief in society that green walls are sustainable. In reality they aren't. They require a huge amount of watering and fertiliser. Recycling paper can use more energy within the recycling process than using virgin pulp paper. If one were to apply a sustainable approach one would consume less and reuse rather than recycle. 

It seems all too easy to say that you want to be a sustainable designer. My mission over the coming months is to separate fact from belief with regards to sustainability. 

I'm starting with 'Design with nature' by Ian McHarg, a recommendation from the wonderful Professor Weston......watch this space. 

PS. I'd love to fill you in on my 45 minute phone call with Professor Weston, but it was too exciting to share.  Suffice to say I now have 4 hugely valuable powerpoint files on my mac of his clearest images that i can't stop perusing and a head full of advice to mull over.  He was incredibly kind and inspiring. 

Justifying Scarves

I've become a little obsessed recently with Professor Weston and his scarves. Although he's a professor of Architecture at Cardiff, he bought a scanner and started scanning leaves, fossils and minerals. I was very naughty and bought one of his scarves which I now can't take off. He scans these images and then has them printed in Lake Garda in Italy and then hand rolled and stitched.  I know, I know, I'm trying to justify an incredibly expensive purchase.

From this scarf I started researching the Professor and also Ian McHarg who he studied under during his Landscape Architecture MA in University of Pennsylvania.

The reason I've been researching this is that I'm fascinated by the shapes nature throws up. I hate using the word perfection as I don't think perfection exists, but the shapes and colours within nature do seem perfect even though they aren't.  For example, the colour of a penstemon 'Raven' within a planting scheme is magnificent but try to reproduce that colour in a wall paint or even item of clothing and it's just wrong.

Nature has a way of perfecting something that we can only watch and admire. My scarf being one. This is also the reason I'm training as a Garden Designer not an Interior Designer. Garden design is so much more faceted than Interior and it works with aspect, topography, light, microclimate and seasonal change. It's all in there. This leaves a space which can be watched from indoors or enjoyed within.

Anyhow, my thoughts with Professor Weston developed into an embryonic idea of using his patterns as cladding for my buildings within the park.  Whilst emailing his business manager about another matter I mentioned the seeds of this idea.  You'll never guess who I just got an email from!  Professor Weston telling me he's intrigued  by my idea and wants to discuss it further, could I call him at home.  That was 4 hours ago, I've only just calmed down, so what am I going to ask Professor Weston...........

 

Liquid Gold

http://tineye.com

This beautiful website takes my low resolution images from random google searches and finds higher resolution images, get in!

Second Visit to Calverley Grounds

On Tuesday I revisited Calverley Grounds.  I gained a lot more understanding of the site this time. It was nice to visit alone when I had time and space to fully take it in.

The view of Calverley Grounds from Hotel Du Vin

It also gave me time to reflect on whether I would remove any buildings surrounding the park in order to make it more integrated with the town. There are some seriously ugly buildings neighbouring the park.  

Nice little design detail in this local butcher in the Pantilles

The Grove is only two roads away from Calverley Grounds but has a really lovely atmosphere.  It's about a third of the space of Calverley and had more visitors.  I feel this was due to the children's facilities and the unity and cohesion of the space from the tree planting and pathway layouts. 

 

I thought Camden was an actual park but it's mainly an area of large detached houses of all different architectural influences. It does have some interesting private green spaces Although they don't affect my design they are nectar belts and some have water too.  

St. Leonards Gardens and accidental detours

On Saturday Caroline and I visited St. Leonard's Park.  It's another Decimus Burton Park which received Lottery Funding to restore it.  Its an interesting case study as it's topography and views are similar to Calverley Grounds. Purely by chance we picked a beautiful winter day to do it, cameras at the ready.

The park feels a lot more unified than Calverley.  This is mainly due to the purity and cohesion of the materials used.  There are some lovely details too, the resin bonded aggregate is edged with sandstone.  All the retaining walls are either original  or restored sandstone.  The restored has breeze block retaining walls behind the sandstone. The water in the centre of the park focuses the eye in and then out. It also offers some stunning reflections and impressive looking fish.

Upon leaving the park I realised it was 2.30 and I still hadn't eaten that day (it doesn't often happen). On route home I decided to grab some lunch at the De La Warr Pavilion. While there I had a quick look through the Ian Breakwell 'keep things as they are' exhibition.

The lady at the entrance let me know the background bits of information and then I stumbled my way through the exhibition. Ian seemed (like lots of creatives) a soul who was very sensitive to life and people but had a marvellous creative spirit and observation running through him. In an age now where some artists can just be controversial for the sake of controversy maybe he seems to have really thought out the boundaries that he set out to break.

He was heavily involved in the restoration and reopening of the De La Warr in 2005 and then died the day of it's opening. I feel that there must be a very large part of his spirit that lives on within the Pavilion.

Two pieces that really stayed with me were 'The other side' in the second exhibition hall. The stillness and simplicity of the piece was very meditative.

Another piece was a piece of prose about waiting for something to die and gutting it. It was quite a visceral piece of writing and had the reader reacted to that they might have thought it was writing about a murder. I had a feeling it was something else though. The way he described the men carrying it out there wasn't any reference to aggression or malice, it was just procedure which got me to thinking that maybe it was about an animal. Having spoken to the lady I was confirmed correct.

Many years ago I would have reacted like the majority of the people, thought the worst and stopped reading. Developing a bit of critical thinking through my degree has been really affirming for me.  The trouble with developing critical thinking is that it opens many more doors than it closes and it's therefore quite important to also try to tune into your gut and follow it.

To tie this back into Calverley Grounds I find it quite daunting at the beginning of master planning to be staring at a piece of blank A1 trace and looking for inspiration. There are so many different options and ideas and trying to whittle them down into something workable is tough. My old method of handling it was to run around like a blue arsed fly gathering far more information than I could digest.

Now I'm going to try a bit of calmness and trusting that the idea will come and when they do I will know which are viable.

******

Life's such a comedy.  While you're pondering on something, lots of people input with their five pennies. 

In our final lecture from Tom he talked about the Post Modernist movement and how artists started to work from their subconscious (Kandinsky / Jellico).  With this came more symbolism in their designs in contrast to their Modernist predecessors. 

Tom talked about the High Line and the symbology behind it.  The rail track used to take livestock to the abattoir in the meat packing district. Now from death comes life in the form of the garden. He talked about the lack of symbology within modern design and the need for it. 

Then Jamie lectured us about the 5 why's. During your designs you keep asking why.  This cements your justifications for your designs.

What I've taken from this is the trust in your gut/ subconscious/ creativity but then fully interrogating that idea so it contains the practicalities to deliver. (And save enough to go visit the High Line!)