Urban Room
Office S&M’s Luxurious Thrift, presented as part of More with Less at the Farrell Centre.
In principle, the newly opened Farrell Centre at Newcastle University has a simple premise. It is a full-throated embodiment of its founder Terry Farrell’s 2014 call for every city to have an urban room – “a place where people can come together to debate [their city’s] future”.
A fine sentiment, but as to what an urban room’s successful operation in practice entails is more challenging to determine. What makes for an egalitarian space in which people (particularly those outside of the architecture industry) want to discuss city planning? Attempting to answer this question is one aim of the Farrell Centre, which opened this April in Newcastle, northeast England. Operating under the directorship of curator Owen Hopkins, the centre is intended as a resource for the city, and one that that can strip architectural planning of its reputation for being “elitist and remote” (“as something that's done to cities or communities,” Hopkins summarises) and instead present the field as something that can be inclusive, participatory, and democratic.
The Farrell Centre is not the first organisation of its kind. There is a network of existing urban rooms in other British cities (and Farrell’s original suggestion of the typology was influenced by his experience of similar spaces in China and Japan), but all of these spaces still grapple with similar issues to those now faced by the new space in Newcastle. Chief amongst these is the difference between public perception of planning as alienating and top-down, and the more-bottom-up framing that the Farrell Centre and its ilk would like to introduce. How do you run a public platform devoted to architecture, urbanism and planning that is critically engaged, but which a broad public actually want to participate in? “We’re using lots of Trojan horses,” Hopkins replies pithily when the question is put to him.
The exterior of the Farrell Centre.
The Farrell Centre is a £4.6m retrofit of a Victorian commercial building, installed in a section of Newcastle that makes clear the competing ideologies, interests and eras that collide within a city. The centre is sat on the corner of the major B1318 road that cuts through Newcastle (a few hundred metres from the Central Motorway that was constructed as part of the 1960s scheme to transform the city into the “Brasilia of the North”), positioned amongst a melange of Georgian terraced housing, university buildings, and busy shopping streets. Positioned at the intersection of these different bolts of urban fabric, the Centre hopes to serve as a point of reflection on its surroundings by “engaging people with the past, present, and future of the city,” Hopkins notes, and “hopefully encouraging them to play an active role in the debates around it, and maybe even its formal processes.” The idea being that an engaged public (and, by proxy, engaged policymakers) are an active public.
There are, Hopkins acknowledges, questions to be asked about what “success would look like for the centre,” particularly given that its ultimate ambition is to “bring about a better, more inclusive, more sustainable built environment.” The building’s immediate strategy for provoking architectural engagement, however, broadly breaks down into two key areas within the building: a gallery on the first floor and dedicated urban rooms installed on the floor above (although, Hopkins notes, the centre itself can also be understood as an urban room in its entirety). The gallery provides the space in which the Farrell Centre can put forward specific ideas around architecture and planning in the form of exhibitions, with the hope that a planned schedule of two shows a year will serve to stimulate debate and provide “visions for architecture that are not what people would expect,” Hopkins notes, and through which they can form “impressions and experiences [of the field] on their own terms.” There is a desire, he adds, for the museum’s exhibitions to avoid didacticism, and to present contemporary discussions within the field in a form that remains palatable to those not already engaged by the discussion.
The space’s inaugural exhibition, More with Less, takes up this challenge with regards to architecture’s relationship to the climate crisis. Hopkins and his colleague Lorna Burns have commissioned four studios to each present an installation that offers a different interpretation of architectural practice in light of global warming. The results are largely conceptual as opposed to directly practical – there is little that addresses the ways in which architecture might more immediately address the challenges presented by climate change (the built environment is responsible for an estimated 39 per cent of global energy related carbon emissions) – but the latter was not Hopkins and Burns’s target. “Our starting point for this exhibition is that decarbonisation is a given – we need to do it and that's fundamental,” says Hopkins. “But just swapping a carbon-intensive material for a less carbon-intensive material is not enough – we need to use this moment to think about how we've got to this position.” The aim, then, is not to rehabilitate architectural practice in its current form (essential though this may be in the short term), but to imagine alternative architectures that might embody different value systems and attitudes towards the environment.
The Living Room by The Hub for Biotechnology in the Built Environment.
In this vein, the exhibition’s installations are linked together by manifesto-esque statements (such as “More with Less shifts architecture’s focus from the new to the existing” and “More with Less values the thermal performance of a building material just as much as its structural or aesthetic qualities”), with each project taking aim at certain assumptions around the ways in which we build. The Hub for Biotechnology in the Built Environment’s The Living Room, for example, is a recyclable and self-repairing coral-esque structure constructed from fungal mycelium grown onto a sawdust and wool structure: less a straightforward suggestion as to a new form of constructing buildings (although the installation is of impressive scale – you can climb inside it), and more of a reflection on “our conventional understandings of buildings as things made of bricks and mortar, steel, concrete and lots of glass”. By presenting a structure grown from mycelium, the Hub for Biotechnology in the Built Environment’s aim is to offer reflection on the values that might be embodied within an approach that prioritised architecture as something impermanent, designed to age and adapt, and whose aesthetic differs wildly from the crisp, clean perfect lines of contemporary forms.
Dress for the Weather’s Liberate/Insulate, meanwhile, assembles a pleasingly ramshackle space out of partitions made from insulation materials (part of an effort to present thermal performance and energy efficiency as being primary characteristic by which we might begin to determine the functions of spaces), and a similar DIY aesthetic is on display in Office S&M’s Luxurious Thrift, which utilises everyday materials as a means of hacking and adapting existing spaces (fluoro pink fake fur used as a means of covering cracks in walls and providing thermal and acoustic insulation; dichroic film applied to windows to improve the performance of thermal glazing). “It's reconsidering the role of the architect from the creator of finished resolved buildings to applying what [Office S&M] describes as a veneer onto existing buildings, or adding layers to them,” Hopkins explains. The last installation, McCloy + Muchemwa’s A place at the table, is a visual gag – a boardroom table with a garden sown in its centre – whose own play with the divisions between architecture and environment makes hay with the idea that architecture’s function as a form of shelter has served to unduly separate the built environment from its surrounding ecosystems. “It’s a fundamental question that underpins all of the show,” says Hopkins. “The distinction between the human and natural worlds, and what architecture does to enforce or mediate that division.”
Liberate/Insulate by Dress for the Weather.
The four installations are witty and visually arresting, which appears to be part of the centre’s mission to engage the public. More with Less is intended, Hopkins notes, to “contribute meaningfully to the debate that’s internal to the debate or research context”, but also aspires to make that debate legible to those who sit outside of it. “Whether it's feasible or not,” Hopkins notes, “exhibitions have to be conceived of as having something of interest and relevance to everyone.” In this respect, the unconventional architecture of the gallery space may play into the centre’s aims. Its large floor-to-ceiling windows betray its origins as a retrofit of a commercial space, which presents considerable challenges for the curatorial team, but also serves to clearly display elements of the exhibition within to the street outside – a storefront arrangement that seems well suited to the centre’s ambitions. Hopkins notes that the design of the space was guided by a desire to “neither make it feel too institutional, nor too much like a university building” and the visible displays are one means of expressing its content as being in active dialogue with the city outside.
The centre’s urban rooms are more loosely structured, and intended to play host to an assortment of workshops, talks and events throughout the year – in comparison to the gallery, they have not been tightly curated with a specific aim, even if a number of exhibits that deal with the history of development within Newcastle are present in the space. As opposed to a linear exhibition, the urban rooms seek to provide a home for more spontaneous, non-programmed interactions between visitors, which is undoubtedly the trickier element of the equation that the Farrell Centre is seeking to resolve. Early initiatives such as “Tea at Three”(a scheme by which the centre offers free tea and biscuits at 3pm each Friday) are simple and non-flashy, but hold considerable promise for driving engagement, especially when it is considered that the demographics who might particularly welcome such initiatives may be those who are not typically represented within architectural debate (at the time of Disegno's visit, the centre was being predominantly used by young parents with children).
The urban rooms on the second floor of the Farrell Centre.
The rooms’ participatory, community-focused vision of urban planning will need to negotiate with the formal, more top-down processes that drive development in cities, and this relationship will likely change over time. At present, visitors to these spaces are initially met by a large-scale model of Farrell’s own, partially executed, 2004 masterplan of Newcastle city centre, whose relevance to both community engagement and present-day planning issues is not entirely clear (although given that Farrell donated both the founding idea and £1m in funding to the centre’s construction, it seems reasonable that his own work in the field should be present), but Hopkins is keen to stress that the spaces are intentionally a “work in progress” that will adapt over time as the centre identifies and (hopefully) maintains a mixture of perspectives upon urbanism that can serve to engage audiences. The key, Hopkins notes, is less the specific nature of the exhibits contained in the urban rooms, and more the behaviours that they enable. The impression he would like to set within the space is of planning’s ability to “envision urgent urban change” and of “architecture and planning’s ability to play a fundamental role in remaking cities”.
A sense of flexibility around the centre’s functioning, and a willingness to adapt over time, is central to Hopkins’s ambitions for the centre. In operating an urban room, he observes, “there's no single way of doing it, and there's no recipe for how you do it”: instead, it is the more laborious work of observing which of the Farrell Centre’s projects and initiatives succeed, which do not, and adjusting course accordingly. In this respect, the centre itself maps closely to the vagaries, complexities and contradictions of the city and publics that it aims to represent – there is no single route towards driving participation, but rather a tangled mixture of interests and points of engagements that it will have to navigate on a case-by-case basis. “The city is something that is ultimately experienced by everyone and, therefore, we believe that everyone has should have a voice in the conversation about its future,” Hopkins explains. “As such, we have to try to make ourselves appeal to an audience that is representative of the public at large, which is extremely difficult and challenging to do. But that has to be fundamental to all of our programmes.”
Words Oli Stratford
Photographs Jill Tate, courtesy of The Farrell Centre