Beyond the Page

To paraphrase John Donne, ‘no site is an island, entire of itself’. 

I once worked with urban and landscape designers who approached every site as if its sphere of influence was set 1 kilometre beyond the site boundary.  At the simplest level this meant that their drawings always included the wider context.  

As designers we need to be reminded to go beyond the page when we draw schools: if the school is at the heart of the community, then where is the community?  The work of the Scottish Renaissance Towns Initiative shows the power of breaking free from the site plan to engage with the wider community and explore and create more meaningful places to live.

 

Part of this exploration is a better understanding of the physical grain of our towns.  Our places are complex if you acknowledge their connections, and messy to describe in professional prose.  But these are the places in which we spend our complex, messy lives.

 

‘Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee’ seems more than enough justification to ask difficult questions about what our school designs mean to the communities beyond the page.