Working with Brian Eno on design principles for streets
Brian Eno’s principles for the One-Minute City projects initiated by Vinnova, laid out as an A5 double-page spread in the playbook ‘Designing Missions’ (Hill, 2021) Bringing a cultural voice into an urban planning conversation that has become narrowly technical, and diversifying the thinking around what streets are about, and what cities are for Planning, designing, and managing […]
Small vehicles of Sandhamn
ThA classic of the genre. Wooden tray, with extra front seat attached, to fore; milk-crate to aft. How a picturesque island setting for a small Swedish follow-up to Small Vehicles of Tokyo is an unlikely contender for a 15-minute city case study. And yet … Admittedly, it’s drawing a long bow to see anything in common between […]
Truly public space rather than technically public space: making ‘platforms for outdoor gathering’
The owner. ‘Utomhusverket 2021’ installation, by Studio Ossidiana for ArkDes Utomhusverket 2021 by Studio Ossidiana for ArkDes; a conference centre for the birds, ‘al masha’, and the beauty, dignity and utility of shared things in everyday life ArkDes are quietly building one of the Sweden’s more interesting spaces out of one of Sweden’s least interesting spaces Sitting […]
Design education needs physical space
SCI Arc studios, when I visited in 2009 Why the ‘jug-and-mug’ model of education is not the future, but well past its sell-by date, and why we might want to use the potential of digital learning tools in order to create more physical studio spaces on campus Ed. This is a re-cut of one of my early […]
Does anyone have information about this Fiat advert from the early nineteen-seventies?
Fiat advert reproduced in the book ‘Human Space Utopia’ by Colin Ward (Penguin Education, 1974) Does anyone have information about this Fiat advert from the early nineteen-seventies? I found it reproduced in the extraordinary 1974 book Human Space Utopia (Penguin) by the great English anarchist writer Colin Ward (also author of the stone-cold classic The […]
Thoughts on a New European Bauhaus
Image made for the front cover, based on a photo of ‘Infield’, an installation by Linda Tegg at ArkDes, comprising a biodiverse meadowland planted in the asphalt car park by the entrance to the museum and accumulating life throughout 2020, and framed by geometrical shapes drawn from a Herbert Bayer postcard for the original Bauhaus […]
A further update on the One-Minute City projects I’m working on here in Sweden.
A further update on the One-Minute City projects I’m working on here in Sweden. Building on the coverage in Bloomberg CityLab, Fast Company wrote about the project recently: And then a great, thoughtful piece in The Guardian covering the project as it extends to Gothenburg and Helsingborg: Our partner ArkDes also produced a short video […]
“Effect of bird species richness on life-satisfaction may be of similar magnitude to that of…
Interesting research, based on studying 26,000 Europeans, indicating that “the effect of bird species richness on life-satisfaction may be of similar magnitude to that of income.” The researchers note: “An increase in bird species richness by 10% is related to a raise in life-satisfaction approximately 1.53 times more than a similar proportional rise in income”. […]
The ‘one-minute city’ idea I’ve been developing, as part of the backdrop to our Streets mission…
The ‘one-minute city’ idea I’ve been developing, as part of the backdrop to our Streets mission here in Sweden, is featured in Bloomberg CityLab. Zooming into the currently en vogue (though ancient, timeless) 15-minute city idea, the one-minute city focuses on the immediate streetscape, exploring models for co-designing, caring and maintaining the street together, and […]
“The G.E. machines will have a generating capacity that would have been almost unimaginable a…
“The G.E. machines will have a generating capacity that would have been almost unimaginable a decade ago. A single one will be able to turn out 13 megawatts of power, enough to light up a town of roughly 12,000 homes.” This is interesting for a number of reasons, not least the sheer scale meaning it […]