‘Developing the private sector – how to bring artists into the mix’

CBSO Centre, Birmingham
4 May 2005 

Keynote address by

RICHARD SIMMONS
Chief Executive, CABE

RICHARD SIMMONS: … the site is designed by artists who work in iron. You’ll also notice on the wall in the background there a hosepipe and the hosepipe is significant in this slide because that’s how the pond gets filled up. The point about this is actually, again, this is an artefact which has been placed within somebody else’s design, so it’s a fantastic, wonderful piece of art but actually it doesn’t connect to the architecture or the building in any way. So, when they came to build it, they had to add a hosepipe, which doesn’t particularly add to the principal’s courtyard I don’t think in terms of aesthetics because they hadn’t thought about how they were going to get the water in the pond.

I want to contrast that with a project you’ll hear much more about later on, so I’m not going to say very much about it; this is the new Home Office building in Marsham Street in London and if you haven’t had the chance to go to it yet and if you can get in through the extraordinary security, which is a bit like being transported on the Starship Enterprise, then what you’ll find is a building which has been enormously influenced by Liam Gillick, the artist who worked with Farrells on this project. The reason I’m showing this is because talking to Terry – and you’ll hear more about this, as I say, later on directly from the Farrells horse’s mouth – this is a project where the artist was involved right from a very early stage in the project. In fact, became involved partly because CABE’s Design Review said that the scheme had been so pared down – it’s a PFI project and therefore built by the private sector for the Government – that architecture and good design were losing out and so Liam was brought in. I know from talking to Terry that he made a big difference to how the project has been designed.

In particular, one of the issues that Terry pointed out to me was the use of colour. You’ll see the colour in the glass screens at the top of the building there, which is part of Liam’s contribution, but what Terry told me was that that stimulated thought about the use of colour inside the building as well by the architects. So actually this is a fascinating project because when you go into the building you can see art designed in by working with the artist, by the artist himself, but also the architects taking the cue from that and him taking the cue from the architects. I won’t spoil the rest of the plot because we’ll hear more about it later. The point being, however, that there’s a fundamental difference between commissioning artists who add works and artefacts to a project and engaging artists as part of the design team and I think these two projects contrasted demonstrate that very well. 

So, for those of you who are here from the private sector, why do it this way? Well I think there are several good reasons for doing it this way. The first is a fairly straightforward one really, if you have engaged people to put beauty into your buildings you’re going to find working with people like CABE an awful lot easier, and you should find the planning system easier. I can’t guarantee that in every local authority, but actually it should make your projects more efficient because it will go through the process much more easily.

Secondly, however, it adds intrinsic value to your building, for reasons I shall talk about in a second. It’s not just bolt-ons, which is something you might be able to take away and put somewhere else one day, it actually is an integral part of the project. It creates distinctive and distinguished buildings, and actually in the case of Hackney Community College the buildings were distinctive and distinguished as well as the art and the two did complement each other actually quite well but I think the Home Office is a building – we’ll see how it wears with time but at the moment it’s a building – where you feel ‘I am in quite a special place; this can’t be Government surely’. If you’d ever worked in Marsham Street (as I did for a short period of time), the old building that was there before, you’d be shocked at just how good a working condition for Government can be, when provided by the private sector in this way. 

Better working and living environments, people are more efficient. CABE is about to publish some work on this but we’ve been looking at offices, along with the British Council Offices and actually people are more productive in a more attractive environment, so you get more satisfied customers if you’re a developer and you work in this way. It’s good for your brand, it’s an issue that CABE’s very interested in, the fact that developers don’t necessarily use their brands as well as other businesses do, I don’t think, so your brand is improved. That would be good for your shareholder value and that’s good for investor confidence, and certainly in the development industry investor confidence is one of the keys to getting more money by being able to show a track record.

So, we think there are some very good, sound, economic reasons for doing this, but at the end of the day I’d also like to draw your attention to a piece of graffiti observed in Brighton, because there are lots of very interesting words around projects – some of which you see on the screen – but at the end of the day indulging in acts of senseless beauty can be a fantastically positive thing for people to do for their community, for their business, for their customers, for the people who work with them and so, apart from all the economic advantages, I’d just like to remind you that we are people, we do appreciate beauty and it may actually sometimes be something where it’s very hard to connect exactly what it is about a building that’s better because an artist has been involved in it, and yet actually it’s something which will make it more beautiful. 

Thank you very much. [Applause]

THE CHAIRMAN: Thank you very much Richard. 

Clearly you’re all converted, you all believe that this is right, I’d just like to take a minute to suggest that we need to make efforts to get others to think so also. Many people have seen anyway (you probably did), you came down the wonderfully named ‘Holiday Street’, and on the left hand side there’s a holiday centre or something going up, which is a mixture of A3 and some other commercial units and some residential and it is possibly the ugliest and most depressing piece of structure that I have seen for a while. Obviously it will look different when it’s finished, because what will happen is it will be curtain walled in some way, but if you have a moment to have a look at it you’ll see just how, oh how sad it is that the people who are working on that are forced to work in that way all the time and I would like to suggest to you that simply providing a shelter – which that building will and good drains I’m certain will be there as well and almost equally certainly they will have designed out crime (whatever that means) – but they will also have created, for a period of time, for those construction workers and most people walking past it, an experience which I doubt will be improving their life.  So, if I can, I’d like to persuade you to go out from here and scream and shout and see what we can do, working with things like PROJECT, obviously CABE is a nice light in a ‘naughty world’, leading us in the right direction and so on, but we need much more than that, I think, if we’re going to move on.

We have, as I say, spent much more time designing out crime. On my walk here this morning I walked through the Bullring area and, as I was telling a couple of people earlier, for a surreal period of time, maybe as long as four or five minutes, I was walking alongside an advertising van which was cleaning the advertising signs – or rather the man inside was getting out and cleaning the advertising signs – and every time he approached a bollard a speaker set into one of the other bollards burst into life and really boomed, in a strong Birmingham accent (which was quite clever) that we should beware that there was an automatic bollard in operation. I quickly looked at my diary to see whether I was living in 1984 or 2004, we seem to have moved to a situation where more time and energy is put into that sort of thing than designing in any beauty or joy, and I don’t completely share with Richard the idea that beauty is only on the skin, I think that soul is a bit to do with it and I know you’re likely to say “Fading old hippy, what is he talking about ‘Soul’ when really what we should be talking about concrete or something?”, but I have a feeling that there’s something in there that we need to do.

PROJECT is also very interested, not just in the big projects, of which there are some – you’ll hear about one today where there’s a value of, we’re told, £500m. Now PROJECT is going to put £15,000 to help fund a bit of artistic thought into that, which is, as you would have quickly worked out, less than .003 of a percent so those two artists are going to have to work their socks off if they’re going to manage to create this change.

The other terrible thing that we’re all fighting with is, of course, the rise of ‘me-too-ism’ and consumerism, it’s going to be terribly difficult for a project with its tiny sum of money to withstand the tide of B&Q decking, but that is the world that we’re living in. You know, there it all is, and that’s considered to be ‘the top’ as far as an awful lot of people are concerned and television will be telling them this, so we need (if I can persuade you in a couple of minutes) to make a bit more noise about trying to avoid that or beautify it or make it sound nicer or smell nicer because we’re moving away from it.

I’m not trying to suggest that the world is not as good as it was, because clearly we live in a world which is more capable, richer in every sense and so on than it’s ever been before and yet somehow we have divided ourselves from that. We used to live in a world where arts and crafts were completely embedded in every structure. If you go to any of the great Birmingham buildings – and I’m talking about Victorians. Earlier it was suggested that the Victorians must have been on some sort of drug to create these wonderful, polychromatic interiors and exteriors and so on, but we’ve lost that and what we’re now doing (and we’re satisfied with it sadly) is curtain walling our way over concrete. So the people involved, once upon a time they had it absolutely in their fingers, they could not do it badly because they didn’t have a system to do it badly. We now have a system which allows us to do things badly very fast and PROJECT (and obviously everyone in this room) in this way is trying to change that and the way to change it, ‘a’ way to move towards change is if possible to inject a different light onto the project and that’s what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to inject an artistic light, we’re not talking about direction.

I quite liked your yellow hose actually because I could feel that it was probably soft and pleasant and you could play with it and all those sort of things, but I do take your point, it wasn’t properly involved at the early stage. In fact if they moved one stage further they would have been using rainwater, they wouldn’t have been using the tap at all.
So, over the rest of this morning you’re going to hear about some of the awards. You’re going to hear from Maggie on how the bureaucratic machinery has been wound up to make this all happen, but if I can, I’d like to leave you with the thought (for the moment anyway) that when you move to the end of this morning, before we all have our lunch, we really question this odd situation where we are working, we are told (and I’m not involved in purdah so I can say this), we’re working for ‘the state’ from the 1st January to the end of May, that’s how much we’re putting into funding our state activities. Those are things, by and large, that we feel and see more of than anything else, they’re our streets, our buses, our trains, our aeroplanes, everything – not aeroplanes, most other things anyway – are things which are in some way bought by us and I think we should be quietly saying to ourselves, if we’re actually going to work from January 1st to May 31st with no return to us directly, then we should be petitioning hard for at least two weeks of that, being devoted to beauty in whatever form you like.

After all that, over to Maggie.

PROJECT awards in rounds 1 and 2

MAGGIE BOLT
Director, 
Public Art South West

ALASTAIR SNOW
PROJECT Scheme Manager

MAGGIE BOLT: Thank you Eric. 

Good morning and welcome to the first seminar we’ve organised for PROJECT, engaging artists in the built environment. 

The growing role that artists play in shaping the environment has been recognised nationally by the emergence of PROJECT. It’s funded by the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment and Arts & Business, two highly influential national organisations. The partnership between the two is a new and welcome development on both sides and the desire to collaborate with a public art development agency (Public Art South West) provides an exciting new model of working. The intention behind this scheme – which is a two year pilot and launched in June 2004 – is to involve artists at the earliest possible stage of a development and create collaborative, inter-disciplinary design partnerships across the development sector. Either by getting involved in master plans, urban design frameworks and designs for new housing settlements, or artists working creatively with communities on issues of change and acting as a commentator or provocateur through encouraging a critical discourse in relation to regeneration, its impact and our expectations. 

The scheme aims to influence and create a shared vision for architecture, public space, planning and high quality urban design. It intends to raise the level of debate, change working practices, unlock partnership funding and analyse the benefit of working with artists, the latter through an independent evaluation process that has been undertaken by Comedia. This aspect is particularly exciting, as in a year’s time or so we will be able to discuss not just the place of the artist in the design of the public realm, but also be able to start to discuss the impact. Comedia have supplied us with an interim report, which is in your delegates’ pack, and as you’ll see, even in these very early stages of assessment, some interesting issues are being raised.  Despite the rise of B&Q and decking, I think there is currently a positive political climate in which to promote and push for more creative solutions as to how we develop our environment. 

The reform of the planning system, the emphasis on ensuring that new settlements, housing, and rural and urban regeneration incorporates high quality design and the growing awareness that a good deal of what we’ve created and constructed is simply not good enough, does provide many opportunities for us all to challenge our current ways of working and explore new angles, apply lateral thinking and generally adapt and change. The current campaign’s aimed at involving the professions and the public in debates about open space, the proliferation of highway signs and street furniture and poor housing design are all very positive steps and ones which should be welcomed. 

The DCMS recently called for further robust evidence of exactly what it is that the arts bring to regeneration and the response from a wide variety of organisations and professions demonstrates what we all instinctively knew anyway, that creativity does matter, it does bring relevance to our lives. The scheme therefore stresses the need to involve artists at the earliest stage of projects, and encourage new partnerships and ways of working, especially within the education, housing and healthcare sectors.

There are five categories. There’s an Exploration Award for organisations who would like to work with an artist but wish to look at the feasibility of doing so first and the relevant working practices they would need to adapt in order to facilitate team working and realise shared objectives. The Visionary Award is for engagement of artists within the design team responsible for master planning, urban design and development frameworks. The Team Building Award is for artists working within multi-disciplinary teams on the design and construction of spaces. Creative Homes looks at the engagement of artists in the housing market, or housing expansion schemes and Creative Communities assists artists working with those communities and looking at issues of regeneration, planning or urban design. Finally, the Talking Artists Awards where the publication of artists’ views as urban commentators on urban conditions and solutions can be more widely supported.

The scheme has received a very favourable coverage in the mainstream and specialist press and a range of journals within the regeneration, arts and design sector. To date we’ve had over 120 applications to the scheme and have made 15 awards in the first year. The level of interest in the scheme is generating high expectation and it is highly competitive, with the demand for funding being approximately 60% higher than we are able to support. Our stage one for the third round of applications has now passed and we’ll be announcing who’s succeeded in those by July. We then have one round of applications left in this particular pilot and the closing date is the 5th of August. So, as you can see, we’re quite a way on into this first kind of testing of this way of working, but there is still time for you to look at your own practices and decide how you may benefit or work with PROJECT, and so I’m going to hand you over to Alastair (the Scheme Manager) who’s going to talk in more detail about the kind of projects which are being supported and what you would need to think about if you were making an application yourself.

Thank you. [Applause]

ALASTAIR SNOW: Thank you Maggie, good morning everybody. 

Have you heard about the playwright Douglas Maxwell’s latest work? It’s entitled If Destroyed True. The play is about a town that wins a worst place award and they decide to make it worse so they can win it again. [Laughter] This is Paines Plough Theatre working in Dundee Rep, it’s on at the Menier Chocolate Factory in London until the 22nd of May, and I do hope that our evaluation process will confirm that the Project Award Scheme encourages a more positive approach to regeneration.

The key criteria of PROJECT is that the applications that we get in have been assessed very much on the quality of new opportunities being offered to artists, integrated within the design and development process. As you can see and read in our criteria we promote key criteria to advise and assist application, especially from the private sector in year two and from the published criteria I would highlight about half a dozen key objectives of the scheme.

We’re looking for vision, we’re looking for ambition and high quality, outlined to us in a proposed stage one project. We’re looking for the engagement of artists as integral players in a project design process, as opposed to being commissioned to prepare design ideas for artworks. We’re looking for shared priority of a project as a local, regional regeneration initiative and we are looking for clear support and endorsement from all main project partners working together. We’re looking for a very viable planning time frame and a supportive delivery process. And last but not least, we’re looking for professional project management support to advise the selection of artists.

Now by way of example, the forthcoming presentation is from AMEC, Preston City Council with Terry Farrell & Partners and Shape Cambridge in respect of commercial, retail and housing developments in Reading, Preston and South Cambridgeshire. We’ll profile some key insights of partnership working where high quality design and the involvement of artists is a shared priority. 

From other project awards I would draw your attention to the case studies which we’ve included in your seminar information packs and I would highlight in particular the conducive planning timeframe and confirmed capital finance to enable artists Sans Facon to join the design team for environmental regeneration in Peterhead town centre in Aberdeenshire. The sensitivity and knowledge of respective communities in Belfast of Eleanor Wheeler to inform her work with local people, engineers, contractors and landscape architects in the regeneration of key roads into the centre of Belfast. I would like to acknowledge the project support that the artist is receiving from Belfast City Council, the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and PLACE – the built environment centre for Northern Ireland. PLACE (P-L-A-C-E), which stands for Planning, Landscape, Architecture, Community and Environment. If we added B for Business and O for opportunity [Laughter] we would perhaps complete the matrix that PROJECT sets out to promote, but then from PLACE we would get PLACEBO, which may be too medicinal for some sectors.

The PROJECT aims of Learning Spaces, Living Places here in Birmingham sets out to pilot and evaluate the potential of artists as provocateurs to radically challenge and change the working practices of developers, local authority officers and school staff through building schools for the future, and I would ask you to note in particular the PROJECT support from the Learning & Culture Directorate of Birmingham City Council but also Balfour Beatty Capital Project Limited, MADE (Midlands Architecture and the Designed Environment) and the Arts Council of England in their regional office based here in the West Midlands.

Moving to the South West of England the Barnstaple Regeneration Project, in a rural location in North Devon, sets out to demonstrate to other local authorities the value of a strategic, integrated approach to cross-council working, policy and capital development schemes. 

I profile also PROJECT endorsement and recognition by health and housing agencies involved in a PFI (Private Finance Initiative) redevelopment scheme in South London, on the merit and status of a local community association who is the PROJECT applicant, described as a viable vehicle for undertaking the innovative consultation work which will be necessary to break through the widespread sense that people’s views had little impact on the outcome of events.

Now the quality and experience levels of artists selected to work on PROJECT is very, very high. The American artist Laurie Halsey Brown (presently based in Rotterdam) is planning to work with Northern Architecture in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne. Sir Peter Blake will work with Elsie Owusu architects in London. The Artist Nils Norman is working with City Projects in Homerton City Playscape. Denna Jones has recently been appointed to work in Blackburn and Darwen on the Elevate East Lancashire Housing Market Renewal Pathfinder and Nayan Kulkarni here working in Birmingham on Building Schools for the Future. Now in a moment we will hear about the work of Marion Coutts in Reading, Charles Quick and Alfredo Jaar in Preston and Patricia MacKinnon-Day in South Cambridgeshire. 

I’m very grateful for the registration of interest from such a distinguished group of artists, and also the support provided to them by our host project applicants because it enables us to demonstrate the potential of PROJECT. P-R-O-J-E-C-T, which could stand for ‘Please Remove Obstacles Jeopardising Extra-Creative Thinking’.

Thank you very much. [Applause]

THE CHAIRMAN: Rubik cubes will be given out later and you can put all the letters onto those.

Right, so we’re going to move, as has been said, to actually listen to some people who believed in it enough to put themselves forward and are getting on to do it. I’m going to start with AMEC, and of course it’s wonderful that we have such a huge organisation taking notice of this sort of activity.

So, we have AMEC in the shape of Robert Poole, and Jeni Walwin if you’d like to come and wow us.

Presentations by award recipient:

ROBERT POOLE
AMEC Developments Ltd
and
JENI WALWIN
Art at the Centre

ROBERT POOLE: We’re working in partnership here, the cane is merely for assisting [laughter], I don’t wish to intimidate Jeni at all.

Right, good morning. We’re very pleased to be here. Thank you for your kind words. 

Chatham Place, Reading, just to briefly set the context, AMEC Developments are working in partnership with Reading Borough Council. The site, Reading Borough Council are the land owner, the site was formally the Chatham Street car park which was a 1,100 space car park built in the 60s, which sadly was well past its sell by date. We were selected by Reading four years ago to work in partnership with them for the regeneration project, in total of about 1.25 million square feet residential, commercial, swimming pool and a limited amount of retail. We currently have an outline planning consent and we are just embarking now on a detailed planning submission for phase one. 

I think that sets the context; Jeni would you like to tell us a little bit of how we came together?

JENI WALWIN: I’m running a project in Reading, which we’re now calling Artists in the City, formally known as Art at the Centre, Reading, which is briefly a project which looks at any number of ways in which artists can become involved in city centre developments. This can mean working with AMEC in the project (which we’re just about to describe) on the one hand, and on the other it can mean working on very short-term and temporary interventions in a whole range of different sites and contexts around the town, but in 2002 we were introduced to AMEC via the then City Centre Manager in Reading and since that point we’ve discussed with AMEC a number of different ways in which artists might collaborate on the Chatham Place project and two are currently being pursued.

The first is the commissioning of an artist’s film, which celebrates the early stages of this development and marks the changing face of Reading over the last 30 years, and the second is the appointment of Marion Coutts, the artist, who is joining the Chatham Place design team. It’s this project that we’re here to talk about today. 

The impetus for her appointment was greatly helped by the support that we received from PROJECT. Robert. I think you’re going to speak about this next.

ROBERT POOLE: I’ve got a slightly different angle on that because I think that our fate was cast actually 34 years ago, nothing personal to Councillor Herbert Williams, but as this plaque commemorates the opening of the inner distribution ring road in Reading [laughter], which as you can see in its finery, to the left is the town centre, to the right is residential and West Reading and from there one is approximately 150 metres basically from the centre of Reading. So in terms of bringing us together, 34 years ago that was constructed and really is a latter day moat that has inhibited the expansion of Reading and that in part was clearly what brought our good selves and Reading Borough Council together.

JENI WALWIN: Perhaps before we go onto any detailed discussion about our project it might be helpful to hear from you, Robert, about what experience you’d had at AMEC of working with artists previously.

ROBERT POOLE: Yes, it was probably referred to earlier in how we informed our developers. Certainly at AMEC Developments we’d like to consider ourselves to be fairly well informed. For a number of years, over a number of projects we have been specialising in regeneration schemes, the image here, which may be familiar to you – actually out of interest, any people in the audience recognise that? That’s the Blacksmith’s Needle at Newcastle – one person. That’s the Blacksmith’s Needle at Newcastle Quayside, which is a very imaginative, strong piece of art and having been associated up there, I was involved with the scheme for over six years, certainly was very strong at the time and subsequently is very much a centre piece which catches peoples’ imagination and enthusiasm.

I included this shot not so much as specific art, although one can see over here there’s a meeting place with a gold orb above it but really in terms of the aspects of the art sort of setting the character, the place, the feel, the environment so we would certainly like to feel that, you know, art does not have to be about a single piece of artwork, it’s about integrating the area and people appreciating and enjoying the public realm space. 

Okay Jeni, shall we talk about groundwork and framework? 

Oh sorry, I slipped this one in, I always thought the audience like an action shot [laughter] so there’s just a quick shot. The demolition of the former Chatham Street car park, but let’s move on from that perhaps.

JENI WALWIN: That wasn’t quite the one I was expecting. 

I was going to refer to two projects that we’ve been actively working with in Reading over the last couple of years, and just in order to set the agenda for how we then moved on to working with AMEC in the project that we’re currently collaborating on, and both of these projects set about creating in some way a sense of place in Reading. They were commissioned by Artists in the City and they are two of three permanent works that we’ve commissioned over the last three years and during that time we’ve also undertaken a residency with the artist Scanner and we’ve presented 10 temporary projects in different sites around the city, but this particular project is called Return Journeys and it was commissioned to coincide with the launch of three new bus services – Night Track, Day Track and Fast Track – in Reading who still run a local authority bus service, which is unusual in this country to do so. Luke McKeown (a locally based artist) designed 16 collectable artworks for the backs of the bus tickets on these services, so this image is actually a compilation of all 16 images which you would find printed out on the backs of the tickets. Over a three month period during the course of the project, travellers were encouraged to collect all 16 tickets and prizes were announced in the local press. Posters in buses and postcards distributed to all city centres clubs, bars, restaurants and leisure venues explained how to take part in the project, which involved a partnership between the Reading bus services (which I’ve just mentioned), the Reading Borough Council Transport Strategy Department, the bus ticket printers and Vue Cinemas in Reading who sponsored the prizes.

The next project I’m going to talk about is an example of something that will survive (we hope) in a more permanent way in the city centre and this project is called Dwelling and it came about as the result of a collaboration between the artist David Ward and the Reading Borough Council landscape architect David Moore, who worked together on the refurbishment of an entire city centre street (Friar Street) in Reading. The environmental improvements in this street were intended to ensure the free-flow of pedestrians, cyclists and buses along what was an incredibly busy street. They worked together on paving and street furniture and the paving was inspired by the checkerboard brickwork on the city’s 19th century churches but coloured light was a key aspect of the project and along the street there are now 18 buildings which have had inserted into windows at first and second storey level, a series of differently designed coloured panes of backlit glass. The pedestrian gaze is therefore drawn upwards, away from the clutter of the street level of ground level and up to the first and second storey buildings. In this street there’s a real mix of Victorian architecture, Dutch gabling, Georgian facades, all of which are ignored if you just concentrate on the retail elements at ground floor level and so David Ward’s plan was to draw the gaze upwards and to highlight the architecture of the upper levels of the street and its great variety of architecture.

This was very much inspired by Sir John Soane, who was a 19th century architect who was actually born in Reading and who at either ends of the street there are memorials to him, a monument at one end and at the other end the remains of a 19th century rectory which he designed and so it’s particularly fitting that the artist has drawn something of the history of Reading and infused a contemporary feeling into a street which I have to say was enormously shabby and under used and feeling rather down at heel until this project came along. It’s definitely given a new lease of life to it, more retailers have moved in, it’s got a much more active dynamic feel to it.

ROBERT POOLE: We’re now going to say a few words (or more particularly Jeni is) about how we went about identifying artists for the Chatham House scheme.

JENI WALWIN: When we began to talk about what kind of artist we wanted to employ for Chatham Place we decided that if the artist was going to contribute to the early thinking on design concepts for the public realm we particularly wanted to seek out artists whose practice was ideas-led rather than those whose work was driven by a commitment to a particular material. On our short list we considered (amongst others) the work of Graham Gussin, and this is a piece of his. 

Landscape and journeys have always been important in his work, and he creates a heightened sense of expectation and mystery, which can be seen as almost an equivalent of a 21st century artist working in the romantic tradition of 19th century landscape painters. Gussin’s work also refers to popular cinema but never to reflect the world around him, rather to create a parallel world. This particular piece was a commission that he made for the Venice Biennale in 2003 and this bus drove from London to Venice, filming the journey on the road as it went. The bus was then dismantled and reassembled inside a tiny gallery, the new Nouva Icona Gallery on the Giudecca just outside the main area of the Venice town and the floor of the gallery was painted blue, simulating the blue screen used for special effects in film making, inside the bus the film of the journey that it had made from London to Venice was screened and visitors could never work out how the bus had got inside the space, they just couldn’t work it out at all. Why was it floating on this sea of blue in the ridiculously cramped environment? How was this kind of magical effect achieved? And it was really his ideas about landscape, about bringing in other work songs into the environment, about working with light in a filmic way on coastlines that inspired us to put him on this shortlist.

The next work we’re going to look at is the work of Marion Coutts, who actually beat him to the appointment in this shortlist of four artists that we considered at this stage. Her work comments on social interaction, on how we spend our leisure time, on the games we play and on the various rules and regulations associated with them, and this piece is a work from 2001 entitled Some Enchanted Evening and it was made whilst Marion was an artist in residence at Tate Liverpool and she noticed in Liverpool near to where she was living at the time, a preponderance of cheap jewellery shops and pawn brokers and this work uses six feet of the black jewellers shop velvet and it’s studded with 100 gold rings. We were assured that these were very cheap gold rings [laughter], I think she said 99p each was it?

ROBERT POOLE: Ten for 99, we checked with the QS, we were just about okay with that. [Laughter]

JENI WALWIN: And the rings were arranged in the shape of the constellation of the stars in the night sky, hence the reference to the title, Some Enchanted Evening. So, in a way, this work also bought up the issue of romanticism in art and how it can be reinterpreted in a contemporary way, using elements of popular culture and aspects of life around us and bringing them into a new context. 

Marion was the winner, Marion was chosen by our interview panel and in neither case with these works that I’m showing you now, did we expect that this was the kind of work that the artist would be bringing to the public realm in Chatham Place, but we were inspired by their approach, by their kind of attitude to their working practice in their studios and we could see that they would enter into a very innovative dialogue with the design team, with the landscape architects and architects and with the developers themselves. It was really for that reason that they were selected.

The interview panel felt that she would work well with the multi-disciplinary team and they liked her ability to draw on popular culture and to inject a great sense of humour and light heartedness into otherwise very serious and rigorous work. 

But at this point it’s probably useful, Robert, if you could explain something about the scope and scale of the Chatham Place development.

ROBERT POOLE: I’d just like to reinforce what Jeni said there. It was very important for us that the selected artist did integrate into the team, certainly the way forward, we saw the success being of not so much the particular physical contribution, we felt far more confident that the physical contribution would come out having selected the right person and as ever, it takes two to tango, by getting the right people together and letting the process roll. 

This is the master plan for Chatham Place, it shows the entirety of the site. In terms of the mix of the 1¼ million sq.ft, we have a new public car park for 585 vehicles, 96 units of key worker accommodation, 216 units of market sale residential over a landscape podium deck at first floor level. There’s a thin dotted line running down here, which denotes phase 1, so this is the phase 1 aspect of the scheme which is currently being progressed to detailed planning. In respect of phase 2, the purple buildings are commercial buildings, building 7 is a hotel and public swimming pool for the borough and just off the top here is a potential 25 storey tower.

This is a typical floor plan, but in terms of the ground floor uses, we have approximately 1,500 sq.ft, which includes 5,000 sq.ft of community use, with the retail uses centred around here, round there, later coming sort of round there. When we were running through the presentation, Jeni was explaining about the coach. We’ve been having discussions amongst the team about quite how we could get our ground floor uses to work, and Jeni was talking about do we send a coach or the principle of a coach from Italy? We hadn’t actually quite gone that far in our thinking but let’s just say this process is a voyage of discovery for ourselves as much for the other parties and art comes in different forms. I’m not saying we will have a coach but [laughter] our minds are being broadened all the time.

This is a landscape plan, Townsends are our landscape architects. In terms of how we’re looking to use the infrastructure in the public realm, Chatham Place has actually been part of phase 1, whilst the development as a whole is Chatham Place; We felt it’s important that in the initial delivery, people equated that Chatham Place was something that was arriving (so to speak) today rather than the larger public realm square which will be arriving in a few years’ time. So, that was felt important to make that Chatham Place, Trinity Mews here with the public car park at the end, an obvious sort of footfall of traffic coming through here, that’s pedestrian traffic. In terms of phase 2 and the larger public square, this square is actually a deck over the IDR, so if you can cast your mind back to that opening scene of the IDR in a cutting, the road is approximately 5 metres below the deck here, so in fact the IDR is going to go into tunnel for approximately 300 metres, a public square over the top with water fountains and this is the illumination. At the moment this is very much a concept plan but it’s a concept plan that we’ve been discussing with Reading through planning meetings and through their Access Officer etc and events and the intention is that whilst this remains a public realm but under in fact a private estate company which is funded and managed by the development, the public square can be used for events in liaison with the Council.

So, in terms of the input of the artist, these views down here are being considered to be very important, as with up along here and also from the Oxford Road into the scheme that way. The actual town centre, as I say, is 150 metres, there it takes one into Broad Street, which is the main street in Reading with the Oracle Shopping Centre further down. I think probably sets the scene in terms of …

JENI WALWIN: I think that brings us to the point where we need to refer, in some way, to Marion’s thinking. She has only been very recently appointed and she’s probably (what?) six weeks into the job, I guess so it’s really hard for us to say ‘… and here we have the result of a very successful collaboration’ because we are only so early on in the stages of the development but maybe it would be helpful to outline some of the thinking that’s inspiring the development in the early meetings that she’s been having with your design team, Robert.

ROBERT POOLE: We were conscious that in putting our presentation together we were hoping by this point that we’d got you all to a heightened state of excitement and enthusiasm as to what’s been happening. As Jeni said, Marion’s been working now for about six weeks, so she’s been moving very quickly in terms of her proposals, so in that respect I think you were going to talk through the principal points she’s …

JENI WALWIN: She’s begun to think of the various different ways in which she feels the public areas in the development where she could make some intervention and she’s produced a very short paper with headings like ‘water, romanticism, focal points, eye lines, porous-ness and community use, colour, buildings’ and a reference to Fox Talbot, who had a print works on the site in the late 19th century and where he printed in that building The Pencil of Nature, which was one of the very first print publications of photographic books ever produced. She wanted somehow to bring in the history, and again referring perhaps to the romantic aspects of his work in landscape photography.

Her thinking in these areas has been very wide open and over the next couple of weeks she’s going to be homing in on particular aspects of the project and her relationship with both the architects and landscape team and developing out of the conversations she’s been having with them, but under ‘water’ she’s been thinking about the Roman well, the fact that Reading is surpassed by two rivers, which are slightly ignored within the town centre (the Kennet and the Thames); the town has tended to turn their backs on them and she thinks that this project gives an opportunity to think about the rivers and water more generally, expand on that kind of agenda. She’s made some wonderful drawings of drinking fountains, she thinks that one of the ways of involving a public more essentially in the public realm of this development will be to get them to perform a function while they’re actually in these spaces and everyone needs drinks, so the idea was that she’d have an army of little drinking fountains around the space engraved with stories about the history of the site. 

Wishing wells, she’s been talking about linking into the swimming pool, which is an important focus. In ‘romanticism’ she’s talked about carefully managed unmanageability, which I think is going to set [laughter] a challenge for the developers. She’s talked about French squares and Italian squares, and certainly that does ring positive bells with people who are hoping to kind of create something of a sort of European feel here. She’s talked about weeping trees and trailing trees rather than carefully clipped ones, and I mentioned the Fox Talbot link as well.

She’s talked about sight lines and about the idea of keeping everything at a human level in the public areas so that you’re not constantly reminded of the eight stories above you, but you’re more focusing on everything that’s happening around you and your size and your scale and framework.

She’s talked about porous-ness and how to generate an interest from the outside going into the development, using motifs that could be taken from the Oxford Road community, which is adjacent to (hard on the back of) the development and using motifs from the outside, or even bleeding new motifs inwards onto the outside of the scheme, so that there’s some sort of seamless transition architecturally between what’s going on in the 19th century road and what happens here in the 21st century site.

She’s talked about people living in the development and how we can define homeliness in a new way. She’s talked about various aspects of colour, of building – particularly building five which she thinks is a key kind of pivotal point within the development – so I think there’s a lot to work on here but we’ll be able to tell you the rest of the story at a later stage. That’s as far as we can go now.

So I think we just wanted to end with a question about how we will measure the success of the artist’s involvement in this project.

ROBERT POOLE: I’m going to let you down now, Jeni, just the talk of ‘water’ and ‘romanticism’, I’m afraid that’s the best I could do because our picture library, the AMEC Sailing Schooner is out at sea at the moment. 

But seriously, in terms of how we’re going to measure success, it’s unfortunate that in terms of today we’re two weeks ahead, or it’s two weeks prior to Marion putting more proposals in terms of the images and the points that she’s raised but we’re certainly very encouraged by the points that she’s raised. I think it’s true to say that Marion isn’t local to Reading and her getting to know Reading has been much the same as us (Turners and AMEC Developments) getting to know Reading and her images of how Reading is a place and how it needs to integrate in and clearly with residential aspects of development, we’re clearly looking for people to actually invest money into the residential properties and to feel it as part of their place and home.

So, in terms of measuring success, for our part, certainly it’s important that the occupants are comfortable, they like the environment – they like the environment particularly of the scheme. In terms of ongoing management and maintenance, which I think is a key issue of public realm, it’s not a question of five years or ten years, it’s 50 years going up to 100 years. When we deck over the IDR, that’s going to be there for a 100 years etc. 

In terms of the estate management, that is going to be funded (and in effect run) by the residents, so clearly they need to feel that what has been provided is something they are enthused about and actively support. In terms of the good people of Reading, it is public realm space etc, they in turn need to feel that it is something that they welcome, they can participate in and as with regeneration schemes, to actually make the areas vibrant is a key issue. 

The other point (I think Richard touched on it), is regeneration, as well, is part of integrating it into the surrounding environment, it’s no good for us clearly as a developer just to have, so to speak, the magical red line and say we’re not going beyond that. For us, the added value and the success has got to be in radiating out from there and clearly in terms of partnership we would like to be doing other things with Reading and we are very much taking the long-term view.

JENI WALWIN: Certainly, as far as we’re concerned, I think the success will be measured against all these aims which have been incorporated into the artist’s brief and which in a way set out a desire to create for Chatham Place a unique identity and one which we hope will be achieved by the involvement of a leading contemporary artist.

ROBERT POOLE: And finally, thank you to PROJECT for making Marion’s appointment possible.

Thank you. [Applause]

THE CHAIRMAN: You’ve been successful if she’s managed to get this number of ideas injected.

Right so we’re going to move onto visionary, and the team involved are so visionary that they keep changing their names so they’re going to have to tell you who they are themselves, because I think we’ve already had three changes of cast today.

Presentations by award recipient:

JAMES GREEN
Preston City Council

DARREN CARTLIDGE 
Terry Farrell & Partners

JAMES GREEN: Yes we’re moving around a lot. I’m James Green and I’m a representative of Preston City Council here today, so apologies for Mike Brogan who was going to be here, but unfortunately we’re … well fortunately, actually, we’re approaching the point of signing the development agreement for the Tithebarn Scheme, which is the scheme I’m going to be talking to you about, and so he was needed in Preston to work on that. We do have a representative from Terry Farrells who will speak after I finish.

My presentation is going to be about 10 minutes long. I’m going to talk mainly about strategy and then my colleague from Farrells will give you, well having briefly seen his pictures, the rather more picturesque side of the presentation.

I’m going to begin with an introduction to Preston, and then talk specifically about the Tithebarn development, the bulk of the presentation is going to be looking at the ways in which artists are going to be integrated into the scheme and how we’ve defined a role for artists within the project.

Preston lies 35 miles north of Manchester and Liverpool. It has an official population of about 130,000, though the actual figure is higher. That 130,000 figure is as a result of some slightly strange district boundaries, or the position of district boundaries.

Preston was awarded city status in 2003, and this seems to have coincided with (or maybe influenced) a step change in the city’s levels of ambition, specifically to be recognised as one of the most important centres, or the most important centre in the North West region outside of Manchester and Liverpool. 

There are some interesting buildings, some very significant architectural buildings in the city centre. This is The Harris Museum and Art Gallery where I’m fortunate enough to be based. This is Miller Arcade, which is an Edwardian shopping arcade right in the city centre as well, and Sessions House building but there are also quite a lot of fairly nondescript 20th century buildings. In fact, there really aren’t any very significant 20th century buildings of any sort within the existing city centre.

Now immediately to the east of the Civic Centre is a huge area of land which is currently under-used. Preston City Council and Grosvenor Limited are now finalising a development agreement for the redevelopment of this land, making up almost one third of the existing city centre; this development is the Tithebarn project. 

The project will be a mixed-use redevelopment incorporating retail, leisure, culture, business, residential and health components and will result in an investment of around £500m. The project will also incorporate a new bus station, a new market quarter and will see significant investment, both in quality and extent of the public realm in the city centre. Farrell & Partners are the urban design and architectural master planners working on the project. So it’s clearly a huge scheme, particularly given the size of the development in relation to the existing city.

However, the city has even more ambitious plans and sees the Tithebarn project as being a catalyst for other developments, you’ll see the Tithebarn on the north side, adjacent to the city centre, with a whole range of redevelopment schemes which the city is looking at, either led by the Council or by other partners for example the University and so on.

Okay, so where do I fit into all of this? Well, my involvement in the project is as an advocate for a new role or set of roles for artists within regeneration projects. My background is as a curator of contemporary art projects, mostly but not exclusively based within gallery contexts. Therefore, I come to working with artists from a slightly different starting point than say, a city planner or a public art commissioning agency might. 

My experience of commissioning artists is characterised first and foremost by interest in the artist and the artist’s work and then by working closely with them, I’ll attempt to create an opportunity for them to make new pieces work, according to the central concerns of their practice. This might be an exhibition in a gallery, it might be a commission on-line or it might be a piece of work for a public space. This is quite a different starting point than say the city planner who might for argument’s sake start with a specific gateway site in mind and the idea of commissioning a monumental sculpture, or arguably the commissioning agency, for argument’s sake, might work with an artist with the aim of engaging with a particular community, again to make a permanent piece of work for a pre-determined site.

Clearly artists can create an identity for a city through the creation of monumental sculptural works and community based projects, and I’m sure we can all think of very good examples of these types of works, but for every one exemplary project there are many others which are poorly sited or are responses to overly prescriptive briefs or make very little contribution to a community’s sense of ownership of a town. In fact, rather than instilling a sense of the particular, they very often make a city identical to the next. 

At the heart of the approach of partners in the Tithebarn project is a desire to create or emphasise Preston’s particularity, something we hope to achieve through a sophisticated approach to master planning, high quality design and a new approach to working with artists in the public realm.

So, on to specifics. This cluster of initiatives has been developed with a number of national partners – Arts Council England and PROJECT of course are on the list – however the lead partner has been the University of Central Lancashire, particularly its design departments and its new Fine Art MA ‘Site and Place’, a course encompassing public art, temporary interventions, social engagement and the representation place. Alfredo Jaar and Charles Quick are also two artists who’ve been key in the project, although other artists have influenced the scheme as well. Charles’ influence in particular has been felt right across the developments.

I think we appreciated early on that if we were to convince partners and key decision makers of the benefits of a new approach involving artists, we needed to create a critical mass of activity, and this is the mass of activity that I’m referring to. So, just to run through these.

The first project that we began with, really the starting point, was plans to develop a programme of temporary artists commissions for sites around the city centre. I guess we began with this, as much as anything else, that it was the one that was closest to my existing role as programmer within a contemporary art gallery in the city. Our approach to developing this programme is pragmatic. Above all we wanted to deliver a series of temporary projects which might offer stakeholders a broad range of models to draw upon than they may currently have access to. To this end we envisaged the overall project being international in scope, reflecting the breadth of contemporary practice, the programme is therefore as likely to include short duration performance-based projects as monumental sculptures. Most importantly, projects will embody a spirit of experimentation, something that a temporary nature will allow, and be specific to context. We’re now in conversation with a number of artists to make specific works for the scheme and we anticipate that the first of these projects will roll out towards the end of the year.

Now in order to promote debate around all of these issues we developed a public programme of lectures called Speaking of Art programme. These have to date covered issues such as public art and regeneration, the case for temporary installations, the unenlightened client, new international perspective and new media and architecture. This is a flyer which illustrates the most current of the talks in the programme.

This programme of projects was really built on two earlier lectures that we organised. The first was in November 2003 and was by the artist Alfredo Jaar following an initial invitation to him to make a piece of work as part of the Here & Now programme. This was attended by 200 stakeholders in Preston’s regeneration. Incredibly this single event had a very profound effect on changing the whole, certainly City Council, but also all the stakeholders in the city, changing their perceptions about the role that artists could play in defining the future of the city. The second event took place in July, Sir Terry Farrell delivered a lecture and an accompanying exhibition at The Harris Museum and Art Gallery exploring his approach to master planning for Preston and previous working relationships with artists.

When we began this work, Preston didn’t have a Public Art Officer post, we’d never had a Public Art Officer post so we saw that as being a key appointment, so very early on devoted the time and energy to trying to find funding in order to support that role, so we made an appointment just before Christmas. I think probably the most significant thing to say about that appointment is that we made a decision that the post should be based not within an arts department in the Council but within the planning department and already just in three months he’s had a profound affect on changing approaches to commissioning and just the coordination of commissioning artists to make work for public contexts. 

But probably the most ambitious part of the scheme was the appointment of two lead artists to join the master planning team. The two artists were Charles Quick and Alfredo Jaar. This part of the scheme was funded by a number of different sources, but the main one is PROJECT, and it’s important also to say that this initiative had the full support of Grosvenor Estates and Terry Farrells. Their role is to develop concepts and programmes at all levels throughout the scheme, from identifying opportunities for the integration of artists’ work and to the basic fabric of the Tithebarn project and brokering artist and architect partnerships to informing high level master planning decisions.

Alfredo Jaar’s practice has a clear social and political dimension, each project drawing out a complex engagement with groups and individuals operating within a specific location, whether they be the families of Mexicans who died attempting to illegally cross the border into the United States or communities of a remote town in Sweden deprived of cultural outlets; the two projects illustrated here.

Alfredo Jaar is based in New York, partly to address logistical issues around his involvement, we decided that he should work in partnership with a UK based artist and a very obvious choice, given his involvement in wider discussion around development in Preston, we chose the artist Charles Quick. Charles is actually based in Leeds, although he’s taught in Preston for 15 years or so, so has a very specific understanding of the local context. He also made works for the public realm across the UK and further afield and specifically has a lot of experience of working with architects, developers and master planners.

I wish I had time to talk more about the artists’ work but unfortunately the time doesn’t allow, however, Charles is very well represented on the web so if you just do a general Google search for his work you’ll find out more there and Alfredo Jaar’s main website is alfredojarr.net so do take the time to look at those if you want to find out more about their particular practice.

Finally, an ancillary project. The City Council is working with the Northwest Development Agency and the University to identify ways in which small towns and cities can compete with and offer viable urban alternatives to regional core cities. As with all of the initiatives that I’ve described, a major factor is the embodiment of quality art and design at all levels within the city’s redevelopment process and its integration at the earliest possible stage in each project. With additional funding of £¼m from the NWDA the project will investigate the feasibility of 20 diverse proposals, ranging from new approaches to street signage, shop frontage design to a city credit card, the redesign of the city’s market square, an outdoor museum, city lighting and design projects such as the development of units which can operate as market stalls during the day and then become seating at night.

So that’s really my part of the presentation. It’s still very early days but it seems quite surprising to us really the extent of influence that we’ve already had in terms of both changing the city’s approach to working with artists and also influencing the developers, and also working in partnership with Farrells on the scheme, the extent to which our proposals have been embraced. I think that’s something that’s very positive and bodes very well for the future.

I now pass onto my colleague Darren Cartlidge from Farrells. [Applause]

DARREN CARTLIDGE: Well thank you James. 

It’s a pleasure to be here and it’s also a pleasure to be working with Grosvenor at Preston. It’s interesting, this theme of collaborating with artists and what we call a process of architecture. It’s a growing awareness I think and that’s many of the reasons why we’re here today, but for architects this may be an unusual thing to say, because if you think of Charles Rennie Macintosh and how art and architecture has been something that’s been very intrinsic, I mean architecture indeed is based in art in many ways. But maybe it’s fashion, maybe it’s modern materials like curtain walling (which have been talked about earlier) and our response to those processes and trying to find new ways of working with buildings, and indeed artists.

What I’ve brought along today are probably four buildings, four examples of our experiences of working with artists. This one is back in the 80s (81 to 83) when we were working with a graphic designer at TBAM, here the graphics themselves actually ended up becoming a very strong metaphor or logo for the building. It was in fact a refurbishment which used predominately the façade onto the main street as a cladding opportunity but it also gave us other elements like the eggs, which were developed at almost man-size on top of the building, which indeed became a logo and theme for the television programme themselves. So artists collaborating with architects there, in this case a graphic designer.

There’s also a project that we did up on the outskirts of Edinburgh, the Dean Gallery next to the Scottish Museum of Modern Art. There were two main themes to the collaborations there, one of landscaping with the artist Charles Jencks but also with Eduardo Paolozzi in the interior of the building, which basically was predominately his work but his collection that was given to the building. We started with what you can see, an extraordinary building in its own right, a listed building, and the theme of the art and the designs for the art ran inside this particular building but also out in the landscaping. The building over to the left is the Museum of Modern Art and the building that we were working inside of is in the right there, but you can see the pool of water and the landscape work in the park, which was the public walkway if you like between the two buildings. 

But inside the building we were looking at bringing natural light down in to show off the exhibits as best as we could, that involved penetrations through the floor plates, but you can see also probably a riskier approach, but looking at strong colours in which to set the pieces of art in front of. And again, looking at where opportunities of double or triple height spaces for larger sculptural elements could have been incorporated or are incorporated into the building. So, believe it or not, a lot of that is natural light coming in from above but also obviously augmented by artificial lighting, but the strong colour themes give you orientation through the building and each of the floor levels, but also give you different background, if you like, upon which to view the art. Sculptural elements have been incorporated at different view points and indeed in glass plates in the floor where the distortion of the glass, natural light coming down from above shines through these particular pieces so you can see from below or above.

Then the piece of work in the landscaping, Charles Jencks the artist that worked with us here, but obviously very much a sculptural piece of landscaping, along with the pond feature, which is the go-between if you like, the piece that leads you from one building to the other. A few other images. 

Now probably the project I wanted to talk about most is the Home Office, which Richard mentioned earlier. Just to put it into context for you, it’s in Westminster in London, the buildings down the left are some historical photographs of what used to be known as the three ugly sisters or the toast rack or whatever you want to call them, basically all the government offices, the Department of the Environment and what we initially did was a study to prove that the floor area in each of those three high rise blocks could actually be incorporated into a low rise scheme, bringing back the building heights into context with the rest of Westminster, which is actually (to the West side of it) a predominately residential area. We managed to achieve this but the other advantage of that – and we talk about an award for absence of these buildings – is you can see from the image in the top left what is the backdrop to the World Heritage site, the view from the South Bank of the Thames looking across behind Big Ben, that was the view that you did get, and the view on the right which is our artistic rub out of the towers, but you can now go and stand in Jubilee Gardens and see that, albeit that the Hungerford Bridge is now there in front of it as well, and Portcullis House. Here are just a couple of other viewpoints, just to show what the impact of the old buildings was like on the surrounding area. This is Vincent Square for anybody who knows it.

We started on this project (believe it or not) back in 1991 and the building was only finished in January of this year so it’s been a very long process for us. These schemes here actually are some initial designs that we did in 91, other master plans that we did in 94 and 98 (would you believe?) before the Government decided on this fantastic new approach to procuring buildings called PFI and so we had to do a fourth competition and eventually won through with this 2000 scheme, which is part of the model that’s in the bottom left there. 

That then won through and produced a building which you can see with the context on the right here, much lower in height obviously, set in context with the rest of the environment but we actually broke up the podium that the three towers sat on top of, it was a very solid block through the site and we’ve created six different building blocks now instead of a solid podium. With setbacks from the street it created public space, civic spaces in front of the office building where things like art could be incorporated but also humanise the space around about the buildings. So it was the breaking up of the city block in creating these spaces as well as having building façades that opened up if you like opportunities to collaborate with people like artists. 

This was the main entrance elevation that was the winning design of the PFI. Our friends at CABE mentioned the design was possibly bland, we would argue it was possibly part of the PFI process and the restrictive ways that costs reveal themselves on the final design, but it also picked up criticisms from members of the press. Rowan Moore wrote an article in The Evening Standard where he criticised the building for being very bland, it set up a challenge and in hindsight I think probably all were right, but what that meant was that the challenge opened up the door and we were able to find a solution, which turned out to be an art strategy for ways of improving not only the architecture but in the end the public realm as well.

Initially we took the office blocks and broke the architectural elements down, whether it be spandrel panels or windows or more solid elements like the stone columns or pillars and tried to suggest where art might be incorporated onto the façade to enhance it and this is one of the drawings that we produced, just to try and help people to understand where and what we were talking about.

We did a series of studies where the stone clad cantilevered canopy we suggested to be swapped with a glass canopy, like this, looking at other examples and at more human scale, have an interaction with the buildings. So at ground level all the way around the base of the building we have what we call vitrines but they’re effectively glass boxes which when we started down this journey we thought of dried flowers or other sculptural elements that could have been inside the boxes. Indeed when we worked with Liam Gillick he came up with some other ideas.

Basically, the art strategy consolidated into five elements: the canopy along the front of the main building, the text which ran around to the bookend buildings and only reveal themselves on the vertical slots, the vitrines, which I’ve mentioned running, which are the coloured fins around the bottom of the building, two sculptural elements in front in the landscaped area and what we call the entrance screen, which is over the main public entrance – all this Liam Gillick.  

Mock ups, actually producing life-sized bits of the art proved a very important part of the process. It has been very interesting working with Liam, he comes from a background (and you see a couple examples of his work) of working with coloured Perspex or polycarbonate sheeting, which he does very well and that, if you like, brought into the process of working with coloured glass and it was very much a natural step for him, but trying to visualise what that was going to be like on a six or indeed seven storey part of the building at times was a little difficult for him, and so together we had to work very closely to try and help both ourselves and him through that process. Building one to one mock-ups like this also helped us to tell the client what it was going to look like and just how successful we hoped it would be in the end. 

This is a crane lifting a piece of the canopy to the same height as it would have been on the building and standing underneath it for half an hour in different lights just to see which we would choose, but believe it or not we ended up choosing the lighter colours and not the stronger colours for the building.

This is just some construction shots of the pieces being put into place, and that’s the canopy. The advantage of the glass, which I have to admit we didn’t realise at the time, but the glass at the upper storey underneath the canopy there gives the impression that instead of having a five metre glass canopy you end up with a ten metre glass canopy, which is fairly spectacular. You’ll see later as well the sunlight effect comes through these canopy glass sheets and filters all the way across the façade but also the street now has been nicknamed ‘Rainbow Street’ by the local community because literally you get coloured light all the way down, dappling across the trees and also down the road.

There’s just another study of how we created a way of actually structurally holding up the screen in front of the main entrance.

On the right are examples of Liam’s work, the Whitechapel Gallery and on the left was an artist’s impression of what the façade (hopefully) might look like when it got finished. And just a few more construction shots, but also there’s a light effect inside. Now the people have just about finished moving into the building but we’ve yet to hear whether they detest the coloured light on their desks, but nevertheless it’s an interesting play with the colour and light.

And an interesting process was actually the text and how it was applied to the building. We have previously worked with ceramic frits, which are solar shading devices in many ways but they can be used very graphically and the letters, which you can just about make out in the bottom drawing (as I said earlier), reveal themselves only on the vertical slots but the pattern that is the main entrance screen was used at a much smaller scale, printed in two colours onto these vertical strips, to create the actual text. Again we built mock-ups to show the lettering to everybody concerned and to prove to the contractor that he could actually build it also over so many windows and so it was an interesting process. The other thing about it is it doesn’t have to be perfect. One of the concerns we had was when we first saw the two colours of fritting they were overlapping slightly and the message possibly was being blurred but Liam actually said that was a good thing, he thought that was just part of the process, it was an artistic way of resolving the problem of how we were going to print these things and in the end the scale of it, when you stand back from the building, you’re not even aware of it, so more the fool the architect for the detail.

That’s just a rendering, which was the equivalent to the one you saw earlier, which was the one that won the design.

The other thing that’s worth noting is, how do you put a value on these things? You go down to the Planning Department and they say, well you can suggest 1% for art, this is way over 1% for art. The 1% for art actually ended up being spent on the six artists that latterly came in, curated by Liam Gillick, for the landscape art. This ended up with an entirely separate budget, but all of the art that’s on the building is what people now recognise as the Home Office, it’s not necessarily the three office buildings, it’s not necessarily your memory of where you go through the front entrance and come back out again, it’s about each of the different pieces of art that are on the outside and if you like, if you want symbolism (or otherwise), that’s now how people think and remember the Home Office.

Again, these are just other examples. And just some finished photographs of the entrance screen, looking across from the other side of the road. You can see a beautiful day that day, but the colours really start to take on a life of their own running along the top, it really caps off the top of that entrance. Looking down, Liam’s sculptures with the Home Office printed on it in the front there, and the landscaping. Again we’ve got the obligatory flag poles and water features that the planners want to have as part of the art strategy but we have all these other things as well, which just enhances the whole space I think.

We mentioned earlier – I don’t think there’s time to talk about it just now – but there is the interior art strategy as well where this, believe it or not, is super graphics. It’s printed onto wallpaper and wrapped right around what I like to call meeting rooms, but walking down what we call the internal street and seeing these things at different angles offers another effect, another opportunity to bring colour into the grey working environment, which could have been the Home Office. Trying to give them somewhere different from the cellular office spaces into an open plan environment but bringing in colour and bringing in planting, bringing all sorts of things into their working lives. 

And then just lastly I just want to talk about what for us is our next project where we would like to work with artists. We’re looking at a new aquarium in Silver Town Quays in the London Docklands and it represents a lot of challenges really. We’ve talked about materials and the way they can be used with artists to enhance or improve the elevations but here we have a building with virtually no windows. It’s got tanks of water inside and they don’t like natural light because they get all algae on them and then people can’t see the fish inside them, so we have the podium as we call it, which is the black box element, and then we have two glass top conservatories which are going to have live plants inside them. So there’s two external exhibits if you like and two internal but we’ve been looking at this podium and trying to work out what on earth we can do with it and some of the studies that we’ve been looking at have been adding colour. The green elements are actually two storey pieces of elevation enclosing a plant room, which are basically louvre screens and here we’re thinking of using a standard louvre but having an aluminium strip with printing on the front of it which can be interchangeable, it could be an advertising screen, it could have pattern on it, it could have colour on it but viewed across the road or coming up and down in the car, those colours could be different on either side of the louvre and you get a different sort of movement as you go around the building, so that’s one idea.

The podium itself could have a huge graphic, like a world map which reflects the places in the world the aquarium are exhibiting.

Thank you. [Applause]

THE CHAIRMAN: 	There are some very good stories in there, but we do have to hurry along.

It’s wonderful to see that Preston is doing such an amazing job, not a city that a few years ago one would have expected that of. And a slightly reverse thought there, thank goodness the critics got at that wonderful Home Office before we got it.

Let’s move on; Ben.

Presentations by award recipient:

BEN KORALEK
Shape 

and

PATRICIA MACKINNON-DAY
Artist

BEN KORALEK:  My name is Ben Koralek, I’m the Director of one of the architecture centres in the UK, or in England, based in Cambridge as you can see, but working in fact all over the East of England region. I’ll shortly introduce the artist that we’re working with, which is Patricia MacKinnon-Day, and a lot of the themes that have come in the first two presentations I’ve anticipated that they might come up that are common to our project, so I’m not actually going to reiterate an awful lot, but I’m going to focus on two aspects. One is what I believe to be the sort of strategic role that the PROJECT Awards has allowed us to play in our region and the other is the particular flavour of the role that Patricia will play in our partnership – I’ll just alert you to the logos. This is a partnership with Gallagher Estates as our lead developer and working with the local authority, which rather misleadingly is called South Cambridgeshire District Council. But, just to say, the South Cambridgeshire district area surrounds the city of Cambridge rather like a ringed doughnut it’s often referred to, and it’s doubly confusing because our project is on the northern fringe of Cambridge but within the South Cambridgeshire district area. Our other partner on this project is Commissions East, which is our regional public art commissioning body as well. 

The objective of this project is to try out – it’s an experiment in simple terms – just to see what happens from a developer’s perspective when you place a lead artist in the urban design team that have been working already together. 

There is this ambition to try and establish a framework within which to work, within which the artists will work with other consultants, landscape architects, designers, the planners and local authorities as well and this second point really, which is the strategic role that I hope our project will have in the region. I’ll just remind you, if you can cast your minds back to February 2003 and the advent of the Sustainable Communities Plan, in the East of England region three of the four main sustainable communities growth areas fall inside or within or across the boundaries of the East of England region, so I’ll just say a bit more about that in a moment.

Just very quickly, that pink circle doesn’t exactly represent the South Cambridgeshire district area but the map on the right from The Guardian about a year ago (it needs to be updated) just flags up this phrase, I think for the first time more or less, of an M11 region. So, in the East of England, we’re looking at enormous housing growth as you can see, and upwards it’s gone beyond the half a million mark already now at the latest iteration of the plans from the Regional Assembly. But suffice to say this project (I hope) will become a reference point for other developers and house builders coming to the East of England or already in the East of England, planning to build houses and new communities of a higher quality to that which we would all want to see.

This is a more formal interpretation of that growth, I’m not going to go into it in a lot of detail, but if I just flag up those red blobs at the heart of the map. The north side of the Cambridge there are two large urban extension proposals currently in the Local Plan, one of which is the project that we are going to engage with, the other is the reinvention or the regeneration of an area which currently has the city’s main sewage works on, so we’re not tackling that one this time round – Patricia you’ll be glad to know we’re not doing that one – but another large site. And needless to say in the region which has a huge rural population – that’s the six counties of Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire and Cambridgeshire – at least 40% live outside urban centres in villages in the countryside.

The level of antipathy to new growth in new housing is expressed, I just picked this up yesterday, it’s not a comment on fast Italian sports cars but there are as you know an awful lot of luxury apartments, you think of Cambridge I’m sure (as I said that’s where we’re based) and you probably have images of this in your mind’s eye. The heritage environment, and of course Cambridge, like wonderful market towns all over the country, has on the left there fantastic historic built environment fabric from centuries back, as a medieval university town as you know. Our project isn’t tackling this, it doesn’t engage with this, it tries to engage with another Cambridge, the Cambridge which the tourists don’t see. Plenty of rather clapped out Victoriana in terms of housing, I used to live in one of those; too cramped, terrible for your fuel bills as most of the heating goes through the roof. There’s an awful lot of this in Cambridge as well and obviously we all want to set our targets for quality way, way higher than this in new housing for these urban extensions on the edge of Cambridge.

I’m just going to rattle through this so bear with me. There’s a lot of this, post-war kind of housing, again this is for the returning war heroes after the war. Lots of late 60’s, early 70’s flats, an awful lot of this and a lot of this, one of which I just moved into which my brother-in-law referred to on the phone the other day, “Ah yeah, you’ve just moved into rur-urbia”. Our project is tackling ‘rur-urbia’ to a certain extent and yet we still build like this, we’re still in the Cambridge area, we’re still building a template from a sort of Victorian by-gone age. We occasionally get the award winning stuff, so this is Brooklyn’s Avenue, slap bang in the middle of Cambridge near the train station, Fielden Clegg Bradley Architects winning one of the Housing Design Awards from a couple of years back. 

This is the biggest project in the Cambridge sub-region. This is in its master planning stage, this is Northstowe, a new town, again, in the hands of I was going to say, is a project being led by Gallagher Estates again. It’s a new town proposal for between 8-10,000 dwellings, so by my basic reckoning at this stage, before lunch, that’s about 20,000 people and it’s just about ten miles north west of the Cambridge city area. Again strategically our ambition for the project that Patricia and I will be working on is that we may have some impact on the thinking that goes into this at this very early stage, so this is the most recent iteration of the outline master plan. It’s a huge site, it’s on a former RAF airbase.

This is the site our project, which is called Shared Vision, on the north edge of Cambridge with the A14 road running across the top of the map there. Immediately alongside the A14 to the north and wrapping around a road that takes you into a residential area, which is an early 80s, mid-80s housing estate and this is Cambridge Regional College (one of the main regional colleges) and then the very big Cambridge Science Park, with all those hi-tech industries that Cambridge is so famous for throughout the world.

This is a better view of the site, this is what it currently looks like. This has been cleared now, it used to be an old petrol station, but it’s this area here and just on the other side of the A14 is a rural parish, the parish of Impington and Histon, which sees itself not really as part of the Cambridge city area and indeed that A14 does cut the city off from the rural area. 

A lot of work has already been done by some very good urban designers and master planners, in this case John Thompson and Partners going back from about 2003. Since then, Gallagher’s and their team of landscape architects and urban designers have developed the thinking and some of the infrastructure to this scheme, which the idea is that they prepare the site for a number of other house builders and developers to come into and develop a number of other parcels of land for a development the size of 900 dwellings, with a primary school and retail and there’s still some talk of some kind of cultural centre to the west end of the site where there’s some important iron age archaeology on that part of the site. 

By way of introduction, just to introduce you to Patricia McKinnon-Day who we are delighted to have just very recently appointed, so again like one of the other projects that we’ve heard about today, Patricia’s not going to talk about the work that she’s doing on this project – because she hasn’t started yet – but let me just pass on a message really from Andrew McLaren, who’s the Head of Design at Gallagher Estate and who’s a real passionate, enthusiastic advocate for this process that we’re about to embark on. I won’t read the whole thing because it’s quite long, but just suffice to say, this is just reading directly from an email from Andrew who had a Board meeting today otherwise he would have been here today, but he says that, ‘Just as part of the approach of the project it was agreed that a lead artist should be appointed to promote, explore and exploit the opportunities for art, in whatever form, so that is an integral part of the design process. Patricia McKinnon-Day was selected unanimously to be the lead artist and we are delighted to support Patricia in this key role, as her enthusiasm and original approach to the inclusion of art into the fabric of Arbury Park …’ (that’s the name of the development) ‘… will be invaluable in the delivery of the vision that is truly locally appropriate and inclusive’.

That’s some feedback from the developers on this scheme, and certainly the level of their commitment to it. I’ll just mention briefly a comment also going back to the quote about luxury flats, the protest against more luxury flats. Just a comment that’s in some of the paperwork around the project from the local authority involved, our other key partner, which as I’ve mentioned already is South Cambridgeshire District Council. They simply say that ‘Arbury Park is not intended to be an island of affluence’ and what I mean by that is that to the south of the site there is a part of Cambridge which people refer to as The Arbury, like ‘The Arsenal’ and it’s a part of Cambridge which has built up over the last ten years or so a reputation for anti-social behaviour and the like. 

One of the things that’s a personal interest of mine to see come to life in this project is that the intervention of Patricia and her work and her process might help forge meaningful links between this new neighbourhood of 900 dwellings on one side of the road and literally on the other side of the road, and a part of Cambridge which has had a difficult time in the recent last decade or so, and so that the new development does not become an island of affluence, where its neighbours across the street certainly is not an island or any other kind of affluence necessarily.

I’m going to stop there and invite Patricia to come and join us. To summarise our interests in working with Patricia, something that came through very clear from her interview, which was an interest in people and an ability to engage different parts of the community in her work and something that really struck me personally very strongly, is a real sensitivity to space and to our perception of space. This comes back to this idea for me about the project that we have a real challenge not to create two different ghettoes, one on one side of the road and one on the other side of the road and I think it’s those two elements that I’m going to look forward to see coming to life in the project. 

Thank you.

PATRICIA MACKINNON-DAY: As Ben has just said, I’ve only just got the job so I’m not going to attempt to offer any ideas for Arbury Park or any sort of answers or solutions, what I’m going to talk about is a bit about my process and where I come from as a visual artist.

I look and seek out different contexts. Places that I’ve worked in previously have been like a shipyard, a Luxembourg psychiatric hospital, a pig farm working with a scientist and a textile factory, so the contexts are very diverse and each context, for me, offers different problems, different materials and different structures that I can really explore and get to grips with.

Arbury Park offers, for me, like most other concepts, a complete blank canvas to really explore and hopefully produce artwork that will be unique and distinctive from that particular context. I think I approach a context as like a forensic scientist really, trying to connect with people and place. I really try to find out what makes people tick and get into the subtext of a situation and sometimes that can be very scary, because if you go without any preconceived ideas you’re gathering information and you don’t know what you’re going to come up with. If you’re going into a community and there’s different people involved then it is a case of acceptance and trying to build up confidence and trust in what you’re about as a visual artist. It’s like trying to take away preconceived ideas from within a known art context, within a known art community.

I feel that trust comes about eventually because if the work is based on truth, and someone mentioned about soul earlier on, then I feel that that actually encompasses and people eventually do believe in what you’re doing. Even if they are not involved in contemporary art, if the work is evolved from their own stance or standpoint then they do actually believe in the art.

The growth of ideas from exciting new concepts, what I’m going to do is just give you little snippets of a few places that I’ve worked with. The first one is a shipyard, Cammell Laird, I spent a year there working as an artist, I did a series of installations throughout the year and the one thing that’s obvious is the scale of the place, it was very challenging because I’d never worked in a site which was so huge and how do you make a piece of artwork that registers anything, to compete with the amazing strength of the structures already existing there?

Throughout the year I’ve created very sound pieces, the first piece that I did was using the existing tracks that went through the whole of the shipyard and that was the first piece that I did, where I inserted ragwort for a mile throughout the shipyard and I was quite apprehensive about doing that piece of work because the shipwrights, it was like them becoming aware of the fact that I was not going to be producing bronze sculptures of burly shipwrights and that they were soon going to recognise the language of my work. The other thing about the shipyard, which is quite different from Arbury Park, is that I set up a steering group. I set up a group of people who would support me through the project, so to try and get people onboard with Arbury Park there’s already people in place who I can work with and bounce off ideas, which is a fantastic thing for visual artists to have. I brought together directors, shipwrights, local historians, arts officer to work throughout the project and just set up three meetings with them, at the beginning, middle and the end. 

I try to tap into and understand what their language was about, what happens at a shipyard and the reason why I chose a shipyard was because I was brought up near the docks in Glasgow so I always wanted to get into a shipyard and I got a lift from someone from one part of the shipyard to another and he had in the back of the van coils of this plastic tubing and it’s just very ordinary things like that, you know conversations of trying to understand the language of other people’s worlds and all it was really is to use it as a spirit level to fill it with water and they’d put it right along the length of the dry dock for the ships to come in to sit on the blocks. They use it as a measure, so I played around with this tool and eventually formed another piece of work called Phosphorescent Levels, which was filled with the phosphorus liquid and also lights. The men actually responded, they actually helped me because it’s a very physical piece of work to install and I think that gradually it came onboard the notion of art because the artwork was kind of picking up on their language and on things that they knew, so without really expecting it, there was this fusion between non-artworld and contemporary art, so that there were certain milestones throughout the process that were quite exciting for me as an artist.

The next piece of work that I’m going to talk about is I was commissioned by the Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow to work with asylum seekers in Sitehill in Glasgow and at the time in the high rise flats there was quite a lot of bad feeling towards asylum seekers and someone was murdered in the flats. They wanted me to really basically work within that environment and then evolve work from being artist in residence there, so I set up links with Amnesty International and I was introduced to key members of the community of asylum seekers and again by having cups of tea and talking to different people and not knowing actually what I would produce in the end. I kept a notebook with me and I just asked them to write down in their own language where they were from and what they did and as we are all aware now, but at the time there’s such a broad and diverse range of skills and qualifications, professions amongst asylum seekers. 

I transferred their handwriting onto panels, which I then illuminated in the gallery using ultra violet light and why I used ultra violet light was that another part of the process was while I was in the flats all the houses, all of the asylum seekers, all the furniture and fittings were identical, which then led me to the factory where this stuff was produced and then back again to when the furniture was installed. The Council marked on all the furniture with indelible pen which you could obviously see with ultra violet light, so for me it was like in some ways, it was a metaphor, these panels with the handwriting about their invisibility as a community.

There’s lots of other work relating to these projects, but I’m just giving you bits. There’s a current project that I’m working on in Exeter and the commissioners are Land Security and I’m working with a team of landscape architects and architects and various designers (lighting engineers) and there’s a whole team and for me it’s been a very positive experience because you can really solve problems and you can spark, so one idea can lead to another and take you down different routes. I also quite enjoy tapping into other peoples’ expertise and skills that you can then take in and re-work in different ways.

One practical thing, for the almshouses I’m creating these glass doors in this like bombed out site, so the glass doors, there’s no walls so the glass doors take you through a journey through the almshouses, but the design team are there at the factory with me and usually as an artist you’re having to face the fabricator yourself and on a very practical level, having like ten people all telling the fabricator “No sorry we have to move it over a bit”, it does take the pressure off a bit. That’s quite good really.

This is just where the doors are going in the almshouses and that’s the almshouse. There’s other pieces that are going in the almshouse to do with this project, the stuff now is being fabricated so it will be installed quite soon.

This is a project in the Wetlands in Newport and commissioned by the RSPB and the Council for Wales and this is just the proposals for the designs and working with landscape architects, and that was a real collaborative process where the ideas is just very simple, the RSPB wanted shelters for the bird watchers and there also had to be some interactive idea with the environment. The Wetland is amazing, you’re surrounded by steelworks, sewage and also power stations.

It’s about collaboration and how one idea spins and reinforces another. As lead artist at Arbury I would hope that it fosters ownership of the art being produced by the people who are going to live there, that the work produced will be specific and unique to the community and that the art becomes an integral part of the overall vision, that the language of contemporary art is embraced and demystified; that developers feel that maybe it’s been a worthwhile encounter and process.

Thank you. [Applause]

THE CHAIRMAN: Thank you very much. 

Can we have Richard and Colin?

Now this is for you to ask these two august funders what they think and what they do. In one of the earlier bits where we saw TV AM it’s quite clear that it isn’t just the inventiveness that matters, it’s also the perceived quality because sadly the TV AM building, which as some of you may know was a Land Rover building before (with all that that might bring), is not being respected because that courtyard is actually used to house the rubbish compactor now.

Over to you guys, because we want to gather from these gentlemen what they need to tell us.

Panel discussion:

COLIN TWEEDY
Chief Executive, A & B

and

RICHARD SIMMONS	
Chief Executive, CABE

THE CHAIRMAN: Is there a question out there? No? I’ll start then. Why don’t you put more money in?

COLIN TWEEDY: That’s for both of us isn’t it? Arts & Business public funding is from Arts Council England – and I know there are Arts Council people here and this is not an Arts Council bash. The Arts Council of England was given by the DCMS a reduction in its core grant by an extraordinary judgement, which seems to be totally counter productive and I hope that whoever is in power in 24 hours time will realise that culture is far more important to them than they think. I know our Chancellor’s view is, ‘Well the issue is value for money’, but I think what we’ve heard today is profoundly about value for money, it’s about value in a way that money can be transformed by artists and the challenge is that our core public funder is therefore frozen and in reality reduced our grant. So, our ability to interact with the business community to bring more resources to the arts have been challenged but obviously we are a grown up organisation of 29 years of age and we’ll be looking for other funders to work in partnership to I hope ensure that PROJECT runs and runs. This is a marvellous project, it shows how artists are working in fascinating ways, and actually I would say in ways that artists have always done. 

Perhaps since 1945 and the creation of the Arts Council under the chairmanship of Maynard Keynes, artists were in some ways, whether it’s to do with public funding, were encouraged to work as artists alone, which is absolutely marvellous that the artists should be able to work without a commission but I actually think if you look at the Renaissance for example, where actually artists were always working with a patron, with a commissioning agent and this commissioning of art, this working with the public realm and the private realm is to me absolutely fascinating, where artists are equal partners, they are not just being put in a museum. There’s nothing wrong with museums or art galleries, but to see artists working in the living environment, where we all live and breathe both in our leisure activities and in our work activities, is so, so important, so there’s no way in which Arts & Business with the name Arts & Business doesn’t want to continue. For us, it’s been fantastic working with a new body, CABE, because to us CABE is a very different animal to the other public animals we’ve worked with and it’s a rather fascinating one and we’re only just starting our journey, so it’d be rather depressing to finish it. We need to find more money and I’m not sure where it’s coming from, but I’m here to say we’re looking.

RICHARD SIMMONS: I have a slightly different answer from CABE’s perspective because we’re not a hugely rich organisation as Quangos (or non-departmental public bodies as I’m supposed to call them) go and with the exception of core programmes like our Design Review Programme and the enabling work we do where we sit down and work with people who are developing projects, we don’t see ourselves as a long-term funder of many things, we are really here more to poke sticks and to see whether or not new ways of working work, so from our perspective what we’d like to see is a recognition by those who commission and fund buildings that the role of the artist is an integral part of the design team, as I said at the start. In fact that their role goes right through the project, even to the breeze blocks, so for us this is at the moment a pilot programme and we’ll be doing some evaluation, along with our partners, to see how it works and that may lead us to contribute more in the future or it may lead us to take a different approach to try and make sure that at the end of the day it’s the people who provide the buildings who are actually engaging the artists really as an essential part of the design team.

One of the interesting analogies here is with landscape architecture I think because lots of people design buildings and then poke a bit of landscape in afterwards and quite often that includes some public art. We would take the view that actually, as with artists, the landscape designer needs to be an integral part of the team, because the context of the project is as important as the building that goes in there. We are seeing much better recognition of how to make multi-disciplinary schemes really influence the design of the process now, so for us this is really part of a way of trying to make sure that philosophy, of looking at a project as a whole, and looking at a place as a whole is accepted as part of the design process and people just do it really.

THE CHAIRMAN: 	I’d go slightly further than that and say it would be a good idea if we could involve artists in the people who control the people who do the design, by which I mean the people who fund it and the insurance companies who own them in the end and so on.

QUESTION FROM THE FLOOR: It’s really just to flag something up. Obviously I think most of us here would know the value of using artists in this sort of way, but we’re working really to advocate projects with people who don’t have that sort of understanding so it would be really useful to be able to draw their attention to and have a toolkit to promote the value of art in ways that are perhaps in languages that they could understand, especially with people like AWM and regional development agencies. So how to develop a toolkit that we can easily draw attention to, to say look this is the value in your economic sense perhaps, but more sort of ways that we can communicate. 

THE CHAIRMAN: I detected a statement rather than a question there, but a very good idea I think. 

COLIN TWEEDY: I think actually also the point about language is terribly important because we all use jargon, and even artists use jargon and it’s about two things really therefore, the language you use but actually also about what are the most convincing arguments you can put forward. One of the difficulties we face as a nation is how we fund development because most, not all, but most development is funded by people who don’t then go onto actually look after what they built, so the process is in many cases, you get your short-term funding, you build it and you sell it onto somebody who’s going buy it for the long-term. That person who’s buying it for the long-term, be they a house owner or an investor in property often isn’t involved in the conceptual development of the project at all, but actually what we’re talking about is building in long-term value into projects. Environmental Sustainability has the same problem, it’s about how you communicate to people that although you’re engaged in a short-term part of a process you’ve got a duty to look after the long-term. To be absolutely frank that’s quite a tough argument to put forward to developers and others because actually it’s not necessarily in their short-term financial interests to make these long-term investments. In a sense, we’ve got to get to the funders and people like that as well and find a language for them too, so I completely agree with your point, but I think there’s probably a number of target audiences we have to work with.

THE CHAIRMAN: A kit is obviously a valuable thing but actually having the key to the safe is even more valuable I think. Right, who’s next?

QUESTION FROM THE FLOOR: Maybe this is also partly a question for some of the developers who spoke this morning but it seems it’s very inspiring to hear the projects being talked about and the potential for them, but then the potential grows within the collaboration and there are financial consequences for the developer within that, and how do developers, while taking onboard everything else, actually deal with the financial consequences of some of the ambition growing beyond the original scope?

THE CHAIRMAN: As you say, we have AMEC sitting here, do you want respond quickly to how you find more money if it’s needed?

ROBERT POOLE (AMEC DEVELOPMENTS LTD): I think the point you raise there is a really important point, because I think the success of what is created, I look at it in terms of 20 years, 50 years etc and I hope this is an AMEC Developments’ view, it’s certainly a personal view, that it’s not about us creating public realm that is great for the first couple of years but then is tired, people get disillusioned and then it’s cast as a failure and I think in part the point was being made about how do we get more funding? Well I think part of the problem at times is that the public don’t view it very encouragingly because people look round and say “Well look at that and look how it looks now, that’s public money and frankly let’s go and put it into something else”. Certainly our view is on schemes at Reading, Newcastle Quayside and various schemes are that those schemes are specifically funded by in effect the occupiers. Okay there are big schemes now coming out which is government levering money in that way, but by having the occupiers funding it and therefore it’s not just a question of money, it’s also a question of energy and enthusiasm of people wanting to fund maintain it because they’re getting the benefit of it. 

THE CHAIRMAN: Anyone else?

NICK CRAWBURKE (DERBY CITYSCAPE): One thing that we haven’t covered I don’t think in detail is the procurement of the artists themselves, the best way of selecting the artists and actually appointing them. I’m just thinking that local authorities procure public spaces, they procure streets and bridges and buildings and does the panel have a view, perhaps Richard in particular, on local authority procurement procedures and are they appropriate for appointing artists and when should the artists come in; what’s the best way of getting them involved in the procurement of local authority capital projects?

THE CHAIRMAN: 	Just before you do, a very quick commercial for PROJECT, of course PROJECT is very proud of the fact that it puts a great deal of effort into supporting the process of recruiting and supporting artists throughout a project, because it’s not entirely useful just to put even a very brilliant artist into a group of people who may not be particularly interested in listening, they need to support them through the process. Anyway, Richard …

RICHARD SIMMONS: I was actually going to defer to Maggie to explain this, but while the microphone is coming to her, from long experience in a variety of different sectors, I think the point about local government procurement is that you’ve got to be pretty cunning and actually when we’ve got vehicles like urban regeneration companies and private sector partners who don’t necessarily fall in the same procurement rules you’ve got to look at who is actually best placed to procure somebody into a project. I have actually, in a brief period in local government, procured through actually one of the people who helps run PROJECT, Pauline Scott-Garrett, an artist who took over a church in Chatham to grow vines in it so that wine could be pressed in order to celebrate the history of the church as a place where communion was celebrated, which is a pretty extraordinary arts project for Chatham I can assure you, because it’s probably the most radical arts project that’s ever happened in that area, or certainly recently. Actually there have been one or two, but the point about that was we procured it as a local authority really by looking for an artist who could achieve our objective, which was to put some light into the building and bring some life back to the area, so it also depends how you define your brief. Having said that, I think Maggie’s probably better placed to explain how PROJECT does it.

MAGGIE BOLT (DIRECTOR, PUBLIC ART SOUTH WEST): Well what PROJECT aims to do is to ensure that new partnerships can be made as well, in terms of the schemes, so we might be in a position where we put people in contact with others than can help them, or we do talk to them about the needs of bringing on a specialist consultant. I mean there are basic selection procedures which a lot of local authorities may have adopted through their own public art strategy. There’s a range of devices which we can point people to and supply about it and sometimes the developers come with artists who they’ve worked with before or sometimes they come with a public art consultant, like Land Securities who they worked with before, who then carries out a procurement process for them. Normally it’s competitive but not all local authorities find that they have to have that, so there are models in place and it just depends, as Richard said, on the context. 

THE CHAIRMAN: And there are some people like John Riplap the Chairman of British Land who feels comfortable enough to choose the artists himself. I mean he’s perhaps an unusual developer but I mean I think that what Arts & Business has tried to do through the years is to create bilingualism, that the business, the developer as well as the artist can actually communicate, because most of the time, most of the problem is they don’t communicate and I think beginning to be articulate in both forms of activities is incredibly important, and that’s what PROJECT’s been trying to do, is make people feel comfortable in working together so that they can challenge each other. 

RICHARD SIMMONS: I think also, although I can extend the timescale for the project, I’ve worked in the past on a couple of projects where local communities have been involved in selecting artists to work with them, and that involves a process for sort of identifying with the local community what it is that they want out of the project and perhaps taking them to some places so that some of the barriers they might have in mind are removed, but that’s also a very effective way at the end of the day of making a choice, which is a right choice for the area and where the local authority can effectively be a partner in making that choice, but has good reasons for picking a particular artist because local communities have said that’s the person who they believe can do most to express their aspirations or how they feel about their neighbourhood.

THE CHAIRMAN: It’s becoming more and more important and difficult of course as we are now in places like Reading and so on taking huge lumps of the middle of towns and effectively privatising them, so the need for keeping that bridge you were talking about between what the community may want and so on is very important.

QUESTION FROM THE FLOOR: Slightly connected with that discussion, mine is a bit more a comment really rather than a question, but I’m looking for a bit more excitement besides cash from this kind of collaboration, because it strikes me from the examples that we’ve seen this morning that the most exciting projects seem to be where the artist is given the brief and the lead. Where we’ve got collaborations on architecture, they’re interesting but they’re verging very much towards ‘tasteful’ and I don’t want to be rude or I don’t intend to be rude about the Home Office project, I go past that building everyday and I was very intrigued to see the lighting at the ground floor level and I thought, ‘oh good, that’s different,’ but it didn’t thrill me. When you commented, Eric, right at the beginning about the Victorians, how they didn’t have the wherewithal to do things badly but I look back to I think the 12th century, the people that built Chartres Cathedral, I mean they knew about light and coloured glass and we find ourselves sort of being delighted by a bit of coloured glass on a building in the 21st century and I feel that in our buildings that we should have been able to achieve a bit more excitement by now. 

THE CHAIRMAN: I’m so glad that someone else said that, well done. 

QUESTION FROM THE FLOOR: I really agree with that, I would have thought that especially in a building, there is more intervention with the building and that to a certain extent, let’s take some street furniture, you can have X, Y and Z street furniture or just do something with it, designed by an artist. I would dare to argue that to a certain extent this mustn’t really raise the budget enormously but you end up with a really exciting product that people actually want to sit on and it’s beautiful and it looks nice. In big projects like a building site, I would have hoped that this could be the case as well, that the post or the supporting wall is changed and it’s still a supporting wall but it won’t look like a supporting wall anymore and this is where it gets exciting. This came out when the artist beforehand talked about actually talking to the men who are working in the shipyard doing X, Y and Z everyday, and they get excited about it and suddenly they do their same task with complete other new enthusiasm and this brings exciting results.

THE CHAIRMAN: You’re absolutely right and unfortunately it takes a lot of work and effort. I imagine that if the time and effort that goes into making sure people are wearing their hard hats went into making sure they thought about what they were doing we’d have a happier place, but anyone else?

QUESTION FROM THE FLOOR: I just wanted to make a little comment really, just a plea to CABE and A&B. I sit on the Advisory Panel for PROJECT on behalf of IXIA and I’m delighted to do so and it’s great to be here today to hear from some of the projects that we’ve looked at over the past eight months or so. I hear the messages that you have about the funding or lack of or worries about future funding but I think one of the things that you do have are two large organisations whose names have been behind this and whose logos have been on this and I think that’s incredibly valuable for the sector in terms of us being able to promote the work of artists in projects where PROJECT funding isn’t able to be put in. So a plea really for once the evaluation is done that the kind of history and the lessons of this aren’t lost and they become more embedded in the work that you do and are added to the work that you’ve already done in order to support this scheme. A plea for something that you can do that might not be directly related to more cash.

COLIN TWEEDY: I think they talk about politics being the art of the possible but I actually think PROJECT is the art of the possible because it is about stories. Okay it’s not Chartres Cathedral and it’s something where, yes, I was re-reading Kenneth Clark’s book Civilisation and it is incredible to think what we have achieved, but I still think the Home Office project is amazing because actually so little has been done. We seem to have lost that concept of civic renewal which when we launched PROJECT with Estelle Morris (who is in her last days as an MP before she stands down in this area of town), we talked about it with Tristram Hunt and he said look what happened in Victorian England, where developers and city politicians and philanthropists as well as business leaders all decided there was a new Jerusalem to be built and I think that vision, which is actually about those stories, is about what we can do. With the evaluation as Richard said, and actually yes it is a project that this is a pilot project but the fact is it just can’t be something that goes away. Of course we’ve got to re-engage with developers to actually create that civic renewal that Tristram Hunt has said seems to have got lost and it is about creating those wonderful stories because every business talks about shareholder value, but the real issue is we’ve got to be able to explain to the shareholder, whoever they are, that actually this is absolutely essential to rebuild our city and rural scapes for the rest of the 21st century otherwise there will be no Chartres for the 21st century. 

RICHARD SIMMONS: There’s a very, very interesting underlying entire three day conference raised by what you’ve just said – and this is one interpretation of history but it’s one that I hold to – if you take Chartres Cathedral, Chartres Cathedral is both a reflection of a view about how the glory of God should be displayed and represents a value system from that period, it’s actually also (as most British cathedrals are) a reflection of how the Normans dominated a community; it’s both a symbol of temporal and spiritual power. If you look at a lot of Victorian architecture it reflects how the Victorians saw themselves as an imperial power so it’s again a reflection of commercial and political and military power. The question for us, I guess, is architecture exciting because of that and if so, what is the power that is driving architecture and design today? There’s a view that Bluewater is the greatest cathedral built in the 21st century, which I’ve heard expressed, and suggesting that actually it’s commercial, retail and consumer power that now drives a lot of what we do. That has, in my view tended (if that is true and I’m not sure if it is true or not), but if it is true it has led to a degree of blandness, which is possibly a smoothing out by democracy and brand of things like local distinctiveness and excitement in architecture and so on. But there are other things as well that work like modernism, which is about a very different way of looking at design and architecture and sculpture in a different form, so actually there are a lot of very deep, underlying questions in what you say because I don’t think anyone’s terribly clear at the moment about exactly what excitement people are prepared to pay for in buildings and the environment and what actually people are prepared to respect. If you look at the attempts to create new environments and the modernism, Simon Thurley on television recently condemning most of it out of hand for example from the English Heritage perspective, I think that’s a rather sweeping generalisation because a lot of what’s built by the modernists is brilliant. But actually I don’t think at the moment there’s really a consensus in the community as to what makes exciting architecture and what is acceptable to be funded, one of the interesting things for me about PROJECT actually is it’s exploring that territory to some extent so one hopes that things that are really exciting will emerge. I actually do find the Home Office exciting having worked in the previous building as I said right at the start, because it’s a fantastic space when you go inside it and is really a radical way of thinking about how civil servants might actually work together rather than working in compartments. There is some symbolism in that, but I think actually at the moment we’re probably groping in the 21st century for what really is going to drive the next 20-30 years of architectural expression, and I would like to see excitement in that, but what excitement will be valued by people I think is still to be seen.

THE CHAIRMAN: 	Quite interestingly an awful lot of the big and expensive and good and exciting structures are to do with government, whether we’re talking about parliament buildings in the north or in the west or wherever, so perhaps we’ll all be led by having more and more government buildings.

QUESTION FROM THE FLOOR: I just wanted to say that the question you asked ‘how do you reach the commissioning bodies of developers?’ I think as well as education, reward is a valuable point to put across and creating a sense of pride, in putting pride on the same base as profit, I know they don’t really compete that well but for instance we run the Art and Work Awards as part of the Working Arts Trust and that has got bigger and bigger and bigger every 15-20 years we’ve run it and more and more high profile and people, it’s just seen an improvement of art and art profusion of art and architecture and people taking a pride over their buildings rather than putting profit and cheaper materials first.

THE CHAIRMAN: I think that’s right, if we could get pride back it would be great. Unfortunately, as both these gentlemen said, we have now so many buildings which are not created for the people. On my way up I passed the Ovaltine building which you all see as you come up on the mainline and that was obviously created with great pride and they stuck Ovaltine into it firmly everywhere and it’s a great looking building and the Hoover building was great and the Gillett building was great and so on and that we have lost. But, with PROJECT and all your help we’ll get it back.

Lunch I think is served. [Applause]

~ Seminar ends ~