Village Life

A new school in a village can be the most important civic building that will ever be built there. It carries the hopes not just of the designated stakeholders but of the whole community, and can change the nature of a place as somewhere that you would want to live in.

It is easy to overstate ‘placemaking’ at the expense of the delivery of services. But in the real world these two agendas need to be reunited and recognised as facets of the same issue - how to design our built environment to improve our lives.

It takes a whole village to raise a child: and it takes a well designed school to nurture a whole village.

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A Perfect Storm

Context is everything. But to understand the consequences of this, it is first necessary to recognise that what is generic for one expert is unique for another: it all depends on how much you know.

One patch of sea looks pretty much like another, unless you’re on a fishing boat or a North Sea oil platform: see ‘The Perfect Storm’. How we describe where we are, and how much we understand about how this impacts on our lives, will determine how we create places that fit well.

So, by all means be wary of unnecessary complexity. Don’t frame every challenge as if it has never been encountered before. But be afraid of thinking that we can ever reduce our lives, our landscape, and our values into watercolour assumptions of how we’d like the world to be.

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