#26 Between buildings: Landscape, Public space, Environment
Little Haldens, the secluded valley
Why the talk is inspiring?
The talk will bring together an architect, a landscape architect and a developer to discuss how each profession approaches and treats the built environment, urbanism, landscape and public realm separately and commonly.
What qualities does good public realm design bring to architecture and how does it make new places successful? How to involve local communities in helping define newly designed urban and rural spaces? How do new developments affect the surrounding environment and how these impacts can be minimised through good design practices and sound ethical responses? What tools are available to develop sustainable and well designed environments while minimising impact to fragile environments on local and global scale? How can it be achieved without compromising economic gains? These and other questions will be discussed within a context of Little Haldens project in the Gomm Valley development project on the outskirts of London.
2019
Speaker
James Hampton, Daniel Rea, Jonathan Smales
How the speaker is exceptional?
James Hampton is a Director of Periscope and is an architect with experience working on high profile projects in London and across the UK. James’ clients have spanned local authorities, regeneration bodies, private individuals, developers and other public sector organisations.
Prior to founding Periscope, James was Associate Director at Studio Egret West working on a range of award winning projects. His projects included Park Hill in Sheffield and the London Underground Design Idiom and have been awarded numerous prizes, including being shortlisted for the 2013 RIBA Stirling prize.
James teaches at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London where he co-runs an undergraduate design unit and teaches design realisation in the masters school. James graduated from the Bartlett in 2006 with a distinction.
Daniel Rea is Co-Founder of Periscope and is a chartered landscape architect (CMLI). He has worked with some of the world’s finest landscape and architecture practices on large and small scale projects for public and private clients in Europe, the Middle East, Russia, Asia and the USA.
Daniel has been working in London for past 14 years, and has designed and delivered some of the capital’s most challenging projects. Having worked for private developers and local authorities he has amassed a wealth of experience in the design, planning and delivery of complex landscape and public realm with many stakeholders.
Jonathan Smales is a human geographer, schooled in the work of Jane Jacobs, Ivan Illich, Lewis Mumford and David Harvey, he now puts his interests into practice as a developer and regenerator of places, a promoter of outstanding public realm and sustainability specialist. His obsessions are integrated, multidisciplinary design for places, partnerships across sectors and deep collaboration on complex projects all in the service of places, infrastructures, communities and lifestyles that can deliver both better and inherently sustainable outcomes.
Jonathan is founder and director of Human + Nature. He is currently working on the Little Haldens development in Gomm Valley, High Wycombe.
Prior to Human + Nature, Jonathan was executive chairman of Beyond Green Group, the managing director and international trustee of Greenpeace UK and founded the Earth Centre Charitable Trust – a pioneering sustainability and National Millennium project.
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Why the book is worth reading?
Throughout history men have molded their environment to express or to symbolize ideas – power, order, comfort, harmony, pleasure, mystery. The means by which this has been achieved have varied in scale and composition, from small gardens to complete cities, but it is Geoffrey and Susan Jellicoe’s distinction to have realized that they are manifestations of a single process, and to have linked them all together. To qualify as a ‘landscape of man’, an environment must be deliberately shaped at a specific time. Taking twenty-eight cultures, the authors first summarize the social and intellectual background, then describe how this expressed itself in terms of landscape, and finally demonstrate their case in a series of picture-spread showing what actually happened. The ground covered includes ancient Mesopotamia, Greece, Rome, the Moslem world, medieval Europe, India, china, Japan, pre-Colombian America and the post-Renaissance West in all its phases. The last section, about a fifth of the whole, is devoted to planning since 1945.
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Why the book is worth reading?
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