Woburn Square, WC1H.

With a feeling that my time in London is limited, I feel I need to capture as much as I can. A classic Georgian square, designed by Thomas Cubitt.

Interviews with great architects

While studying I seem to find myself constantly trying to get in the mind of an architect. Design is really about process and school teaches you many methods but how do some of the great architects think?

I hunted for a long time to try and find video interviews of architects and discovered the Charlie Rose website to be a goldmine http://www.charlierose.com . Charlie seems to really understand architecture and his questions tease out how well known architects work with concept, how they react to criticism and how they manage their clients.

Here are interviews with people such as Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid, Robert Venturi, Frank Gehry Tadao Ando and many others. His interviews with musicians, actors and politicians are great too.

My favourite so far is this interview with Steven Holl. He speaks with an elegant charisma that doesn’t seem overly arrogant but is still remarkably intelligent. Holl talks about his projects and processes in a way that our education really tries to get us to do. There is poetic sequence, contextualism is always important and the materials and the elements, such as light, he composes with have an almost spiritual dimension to him. More on Holl to follow.

Wayne Hemingway on urban design...

I've always felt that Leeds needs a cultural figure to spearhead its urban design issues. Someone who is media savvy, knowledgeable, influential on people who can make decisions and is not afraid tell people who frankly shouldn't be in positions of power exactly what is happening in no uncertain terms. Well step up to the plate Wayne Hemingway. While considering names such as Damien Hirst (from Leeds) and wondering where the next Tony Wilson is we chanced upon a lecture Wayne was giving at Leeds University to design students. Immediately after this Wayne went to the town hall to tell people from the council why pictures of cheerleaders in the vision for Leeds design manual means "bugger all". Ok so Wayne is from the other side of the Pennines but I'm not sure I care. His observations of Leeds (which agreed is typical of other cities in the UK) were spot on. Wayne cares you see. His ideas are pretty much agreed common ground in design disciplines but are somehow lost to councils and developers. That is, poor design, especially in an urban and housing context, really does affect people’s lives. To see someone talk about it so bluntly with no waffle, I fail to see how anyone can argue that crap housing and degradation in our cities is massive influence on people’s happiness and the creation of social ills.

This is a link to the lecture from another city but with pretty much the same content: