How to Create a Sense of Place

Here is an interesting article from our new Architecture Expert, Deborah Shaw.

Deborah has grown a reputation delivering both simple and complex projects, ranging from small domestic extensions to large municipal buildings encompassing urban design. She is able to advise on both architectural and developmental matters as she has worked on a number of architectural projects in London and the South East.

Can Adding Drama and Interest to a Small Space Help Create a Sense of Place?

Creating drama and interest in a small space design is crucial for establishing a sense of place. Clever use of color, texture, and lighting can elevate the ambiance of a room. Bold patterns and strategic furniture placement are excellent small space design tips to enhance the overall atmosphere.

A sense of place

A sense of place is the ability to create places which are meaningful; as quality and character depends entirely on the ability to define space with buildings. This essentially means to employ the vocabulary, syntaxes, grammar, rhythms and patterns of architecture in order to inform us who we are.

The public realm has two roles: it is the dwelling place of our civilization and our civic life and it is the physical manifestation of the common good.  When the public realm is degraded, its ramification is the degradation of the quality of civic life and the character of all the enactments of both public and communal life which takes place there.

To create places that are worth caring about all comes from the body of culture which we call the culture of civic design. This is a body of knowledge, method, skill and principle that was discarded after WW2 and consequently, we can see the result all around us – the immersive ugliness in our everyday environments is entropy made visible.

Central Coventry is a place that suffered a dismal fate at the hands of post-war planners. Its centre is surrounded by a concrete ring-road together with numerous examples of questionable architectural choices. Subsequently, it was unable to flaunt its three cathedrals to best effect. We cannot over estimate the amount of despair we are generating with places like this – the greatest misallocation of resources.

 

It is paramount to pay heed to the fact that the public realm has to inform us not only where we are geographically but where we are in our culture. Where we have come from, what kind or people we are and by doing that, it needs to afford us a glimpse of where we are going so that we can dwell in a hopeful present.  If there is one great catastrophe about the places that we built in the last 60 years it has deprived us to live in a hopeful present -we need better places.

Covent Garden

An excellent example is Covent Garden; it is a good public space. It is well defined; it is emphatically an outdoor public room. It has something which is incredibly important, it has an active permeable membrane around its edges – it has shops, bars, restaurants, destinations. Things go in and out and that activates the centre of the place – it becomes a place where people want to visit voluntarily because it is pleasurable to be there.

We have to get back this body of methodology, principle and skill in order to relearn and compose meaningful places. Places that are integral, that are living organisms in the sense that they contain all the organs of our civic communal life. We need good urbanism and good buildings. We have to relearn what the building blocks are; the street, the square and how to compose public space which is both large and small; the courtyard, the plaza and how to really make use of properties.

If we are lucky the result will be revivified town centres and neighbourhoods in our existing towns and cities. It is imperative to remember that towns and cities are where they are and they grew because they occupy all the important sites. If we are going to continue the project of civilisation in the UK, we have a lot of work to do.

To read Deborahs bio or ask her a question, please click here.