Stay at Home Mothers

Over the last couple of days, I have been reading - mainly newspaper articles - about stay at home mothers (SAHM). There is a lot of controversy about mothers in general but especially about mothers who stay at home to raise their children. While for some it is a choice, for lots (and I expect for the majority in Cheetham Hill) it is a necessity, mainly due to the costs of childcare and lack of support for mothers. In most cases, as one article said, the wages a mother would be paid at a job would mostly be spend on the childcare needed to enable her to work, thus making it slightly pointless to work instead of raising her children herself.
There are also cultural traditions at play in Cheetham Hill, where it is assumed that the woman of the house stays at home to raise the children and keep house while her husband goes out to earn money for the family.

This doesn't stop women who stay at home from feeling isolated and lonely.

From what I have read, I think that some of the loneliness comes from the lack of understanding of the hard work involved unless you are a SAHM. One article I found was written by a husband who's wife didn't work in order to look after their young twins. He talked about encounters with women who worked and asked '"What does she DO all day?"' Reading this article, and ones like it, has given me a better understanding of stay at home mothers and I am going to be able to develop a more specific programme for my building. 

To get some first hand responses, I contacted one of the many SAHM support page on Facebook and asked about some pros and cons of being a SAHM. I had a great response, and although the page I think is mainly American, the replies were mainly what I was expecting to hear from the reading I had been doing. 

The general response was that it was great to stay at home and raise their children and not working meant that they wouldn't miss a moment of their child growing up, they wouldn't have to take time off work for doctor's appointments etc, but the lack of adult conversation would drive them crazy and there was a lot of negativity towards mothers who didn't work. One woman's response was that depending how long you remained at home, moving back into the world of work could be intimidating. 

Knowing more about what it's like to be a stay at home mother means that I can now start to really work on my programme and start making marks on the site. 

https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=691603147538321&id=351823208182985

MSAP Christmas Market

This morning we had our MSAP Christmas Market. The idea was that we would be selling our projects to our tutors, 5th years and anyone else who was visiting. There was lots of food and mulled wine to go along with the projects and I think I went really overboard with the gingerbread!

We did it in the form of speed dating in which we spent 5 minutes talking about our project and trying to communicate it as clearly as possible. It was good to have to summarise my project as I then had to focus on the most important ideas.

Afterwards when the 5th years had passed on their feedback to our tutors, we had short tutorials. The general feedback was that I need to focus more on what I am going to do rather than what I have done. I do however really need to make links between everything I have done and tie it all together, making sure that it is relevant and everyone reading through my project knows that it's relevant and why.

The other thing that I need focus on is backing up my argument: Why am I focusing on the stay at home women of Cheetham Hill? This was what I wanted to achieve with an event but I also need to start reading into it and I will be able to really focus my programme and take it forward. It might be worth talking to friends back at home with reference to staying at home.

Onwards

I am still in need of developing my programme and while I have been discussing events with others who are also focusing their projects on women, with the drawing having taken over the last couple of weeks, we haven't had the chance to get much further than discussions.

It was suggested that I look at Matrix's book Making Space: Women and the Man-made Environment. The introduction started talking about 'a woman's place' and comparing home and work. Essentially, there is a distinct boundary between home and work for employed men while, whether employed or unemployed, this boundary isn't there for women as work continues at home in the form of housework or child care. In a way this links back to my main theme of blurred boundaries although instead of the physical boundary between public and private, it is a mental one between leisure and work.

It also talked about women outside of the home and the potential dangers in the streets, especially after dark. This has made me look again at the sites and the accessibility to each other and to Cheetham Hill Road. Pedestrian access to the graveyard site is via a couple of short but quiet roads that could be quiet intimidating during the day, let alone at night. While there is only one entrance to the Library site, there is a potential for a second in the cut through from Cheetham Hill Road to the World Wide supermarket and this again isn't the most welcoming. Humphey Street, running perpendicular to Cheetham Hill Road and one of the links between the sites, is more of a major road that the others but it's tall brick walls with very few windows again make for an intimidating route.

If I am to design mainly for the women of Cheetham Hill, I am going to have to look at the accessibility between the sites and to improve these routes of transit. Site analysis to look at the light levels will be beneficial, if not necessary in order to develop this part of my design.

Curve ball

We were warned but it still crept up on us (well, me at least). Thursday's IDR seminar also came with a sub brief for our projects. A 1:1 isometric drawing at least 2m in one direction to explain our concept. I've never done a 1:1 drawing. Ever. I'm still struggling to get my head around the whole scale of it. I start to come up with an idea and then remember it has to be iso or 1:1 and then the idea's gone. When we were first handed the brief, I'm not going to lie, it was terrifying and just another thing to add to my list of things to get stressed about but now that I have sat down and broken it up into bits, annotating and labelling and linking each part to my project, it's not as daunting. I think it's something that just needs to sit in the back of my mind for a few days and it'll start to work itself out.

I began brainstorming yesterday, starting with the idea of domestic items on the street; looking at breaking down the inside/outside, public/private boundaries.This then led onto the idea of books and their link with learning and the old library as well as the domestic. I like the way that this is going although I may be in danger of starting to change my project and rather than focusing on women, designing a library. Which I'm not sure I necessarily want to do.

Final Crit 1

Yesterday was the final crit for this first part of the project. As it was cross atelier, we were split up and grouped with one of the other ateliers, Altering Architecture for Climate Change. It was interesting to see what the other groups were doing (if only to remember that there were other projects outside of ours!)

Overall, (despite technology messing around as per usual) I think it went as I expected. I felt that I had done a lot in the past week and actually sorted my ideas out into some form of programme ready to take to the next level. I did feel that I had one gap in my argument which was about my target audience and who exactly I was designing for and what exactly they needed and why. This was pointed out and is something that I am going to be addressing in the next couple of weeks. I need to start talking to the community and the actual people that would be using my building. At the moment this sounds like a lot of work to do and really quite daunting but I know there are a couple of other people in my atelier focusing on women so maybe we can organise something together and help each other out. 

Once I know who and what and why, I can then begin to start designing and arranging my design spatially. I feel like it my project is beginning to come together but once I work on those three questions, it really will come together. Looking forward to it.

I also need to start to look at housing. I keep forgetting about it!

Programme

After creating an outline of my programme, I began to look at the different spaces in relation to each other and to the community. While some of the spaces would be outward facing and accessible to users within Cheetham Hill, there would also be spaces only for the demographic of my building. 

I also looked closer at how a room would be used at different times of the day for different activities. I created plans using muf as an example from their book, This Is What We Do. I ended up focusing on the layouts of a coffee group in the morning, an after school club in the afternoon and a handicraft group in the evening. It was interesting when I overlapped them and was able to see how much of the room is used and which areas are used more than others. However, I feel that I will benefit more from the study when I develop my programme further and have a clear idea of exactly what goes on in each room. I think that using these plans (and sections) will be able to help me design the spaces within my buildings.

Precedents

After looking at Kevin Lynch and the elements of the [community], began looking at stats for employment. It was interesting (but not that surprising) to see the difference in gender for employment. One thing that did stand out to me was the percentage of 'Look after home/family'. For women, this was over 17% but for men in Cheetham Hill, it was less than 2%. I expanded my study and looked at the same stats for the whole of Manchester and while the male figure as slightly smaller (1.2%) the female figure halved. The rest of Manchester had similar figures to the rest of the North-West area and the UK.

I started asking questions: who/what/why/when/how? and trying to answer them to give me my programme however, some of them were vague so I need to start to look into these further to develop my programme.

When working through these, I remembered going past the West End Women and Girl's Centre in Newcastle every morning/evening on my way to and from the city. It's slightly frustrating now that I don't even have a photo of the place as I only walked past it twice, on my first day and my last. I managed to find their website though and it has a very similar programme and serves a very similar community that my project would. I've now begun to look into this as a precedent.

Sites

I have decided that I am going to use both the library site and the graveyard site. 

I began to look at the two sites in relation to each other and to the surrounding area, especially Cheetham Hill Road. I noticed that both sites, although not in direct view of the high street, were well connected to it and therefore to each other. I was able to trace routes between the sites, one of them being a straight path, perpendicular to Cheetham Hill Road. I found this really interesting and I want to use this in my programme as it fits in with my manifesto and re-connecting through using the streets and creating street life. 

Tying Everything Together . . .

Buckling down to work this evening, one of the things I really needed to work out was how to tie Lynch's 5 elements theory into my work. I have already made the connection between his 5 elements making up the city and our 5 elements making up the community but I felt that I needed to go deeper than then to enable me to use it in my project.

While Lynch uses them to critique the city and its imageability, as I am in the process of doing with Newcastle, I've realised that I can reverse engineer his method and use it to create a space that allows a community to either begin or grow.

I can turn the theory into a formula:

Paths + Landmarks + Nodes + Edges + Districts = City

People + Employment + Markets + Street + Housing = Community

With the quality of each of these elements making up the quality of the total (City or Community). In Lynch's text, he works out the quality of each of them to find the quality of the city. In my project, I know what I want the end result to be and can work backwards by looking at what the current state of each of the elements is to then create what is lacking or improve what is in poor condition in my project.

In order to do this, another trip up north (that is, to Cheetham Hill, not Newcastle) may be needed and a closer look at the other groups' findings is definitely needed. However, just from looking at the area and listening to presentations etc, I can already make a start piecing together what is required:

People: Cheetham Hill has such a diverse population that I would be willing to say that the richness of the community in this sense doesn't need to be altered.

Employment: As with much of the country in the current climate, the state of employment in Cheetham Hill is not good, although I think it was suggested that this area is one of the worst. Something that needs looking into.

Markets: I've looked at markets in Cheetham Hill enough to know that this isn't an issue within the community and doesn't need faffing with by architecture students.

Street: This varies throughout the area but while the sites are in the centre, there is a good sense of street life although the street is something that is the main focus of my work anyway.

Housing: I already know there is a lot of housing around Cheetham Hill, much of it off the main high street through the sites though. Housing does however form part of our brief.

After quickly listing what the state of each of the elements is, I can see that my project will mainly be focusing on Employment, Street and Housing although I will still keep People and Markets in mind throughout the project.

Now to choose my site!

A Dilemma . . .

Today I was working though my personal manifesto and how I am going to approach this project.

I have made links between Lynch's 5 elements of the city and our manifesto's 5 elements of the community although I am yet to tie it into my project completely (it's too good a link not to use!).
I also spent some time looking at the sections from yesterday and making comparing the empty spaces within them: the demolition site, the car park and the park. With this being a strong idea that I want to carry forward. I am now left with a bit of a dilemma. 

The site that interested me the most, the one adjacent to the old library, wouldn't necessarily be the best site for my project, considering my manifesto. The third site, the cemetery seems to be a better fit as it is completely an empty space.
It was also commented on that I might be taking on too much if I wanted to have retrofit as part of my project alongside the brief.

Decisions, decisions . . . . 

Market Studies and Sections

As part of our manifesto, as we were looking at street life and the elements that make up the community, I did some market studies around Manchester. I did have a list of markets that I could visit but unfortunately didn't get to see all of them. The two I did visit though, Castlefield Market and Church Street Market were interesting to study and I particular found studying Church Street Market useful. I also got back into contact with Victoria Baths where I recently did a craft fair, asking for the layout as another case study. While I did hear back from them, I was unable to really use them as I wanted to look at what was where in relation to other stalls and how this might affect sales etc but there was no information as to which tables sold what. The key thing was the circulation around the fair. There was an order to the tables, creating a single 'street' through the fair. This was the same on the first floor.

Castlefield Market was different. From ground view, there didn't seem to be much order to the stalls but after I sketch out the plan, while there was still a sense of lack of order to the market, there was a clear route through. There was an order to the tables; food items were gathered together around the edges of the room while other items such as art work and home decorations were in the centre of the hall.

Church Street Market, just outside the Arndale Centre is a small row of what are essentially permanent pop-up shops. I only found it as I went past on the tram one day. It was very reminiscent of the markets in Cheetham Hill. The shops displayed their good on the street, creating a blurred boundary between public and semi public, what was street and what was shop. The canopy over the front of the shops also added to this sense of uncertainty.

I also saw this when I was working on my sections of Cheetham Hill Road. My first section through the industrial estate showed very clear boundaries between public/private, street/building etc but the further into Cheetham Hill I went, there were more overlaps and more public spaces that weren't just the street or the pavement. I began to wonder if this was a correlation with the sense community in the areas. 

Studio 5: Going Solo

Yesterday, we had our individual tutorials in studio. 
As well as discussing our study tours, we've also began to think about our personal manifestos for our individual projects. 

I haven't really given much though to my project since Newcastle but after re-reading though our manifesto (in an attempt to edit it) I began to make links between the manifesto and my trip.

The major link was the five aspects that we wanted to focus on and the five elements in Lynch's text. While the first makes up a community, the other makes up the city. I think that this is a strong idea that can be used in my manifesto and I want to look further into it.
I also want to look closer at my visit to Byker estate in an attempt to see what makes a community project work and what doesn't. When it was first proposed and built, the project was ground breaking but further down the line and it seems to have fallen into disrepair and I can't help but feel that it doesn't function as well as it did when first built.

As a group, we still have a little bit of editing to do on our manifesto and this is something that we were working on today. We identified what needed sorting and improving and after much discussion, we assigned ourself tasks and are aiming to finish it by Sunday (Monday at the very latest if rearranging is needed). This evening, as well as working on the group blog, I am going to look at market typology. The idea is that I will map out different markets and similar arrangements and we will then be able to compare them. This is something I am going to continue tomorrow when I go to the Arndale Market and Church Street Market. Tonight though, I am going to map out the Victoria Baths Craft Fair that I attended at the weekend as a slightly different type of market.

The Sites

Today I decided to go and take a closer look at the sites and maybe start having a think about which one I would choose for my project. 

The first site include the old library, the shops adjacent to it and the car park behind it. One of the interesting features of the site was the cut through from the main road to the car park and the World Wide supermarket behind it. While creating a link between the two, there were very few people around to actually use it. 
In order to get to the remainder of the site, I had to rejoin the high street and walk up the side road adjacent to it; the fence barely let me see into the other car park, let alone let me though.
I found the variety of element on this site really interesting and my interest in historic buildings is drawing me to choose this site. The library is something that I would really like to include in my designs and something that I would look into is precedents of sensitive retrofits of listed buildings. 



The second site was the one of the old police station. This was much more connected to Cheetham Hill Road and in a way, acted as a barrier between the road and the housing behind it.

The third site lay in the midst of all the housing behind the second site. It was a cemetery that has now fallen into disrepair and has been consequently closed to the public. Having said this, while there was no entry through the main gates, someone had made a gap in the fence and left some of the large stones on the pavement as a step to provide access to the site. The height of the site above the rest of the area works as a vantage point but also separates it further from the surrounding area. 

Study Tour: Adventures in Northumberland

'To become completely lost is perhaps a rather rare experience for most people in the modern city'

Lynch

My trip to Newcastle mainly focused on my essay and gathering research for it. I want to use Kevin Lynch's text, The Image of the City. In it he talks about navigating the city and the imageability of the city as determined by 5 elements: paths, nodes, landmarks, districts and edges. As I hiker, I have developed my sense of navigation and since coming to Manchester, I enjoyed immersing myself in the city. The first thing I do when visiting a new city is to pick up a map. This time however I didn't. 
I wanted to map my way around Newcastle and use Lynch's methods to find my own way and to eventually be able to create my own map of the city. I want to then compare it to the actually city and see what the results are. 
After spending 4 days wandering around the city, I began to not only connect parts of the city together but I was also able to consider the geography of the city when doing it.

I visit Byker and the housing estate designed by Ralph Erskine. On arrival, I didn't actually realise how big it was and although I didn't see the whole estate, I wandered around to get a feel for the place. The Wall was built as a barrier against the noise from the metro and the busy road adjacent to it and while it achieves this, it also creates an intimidating façade. 
I felt that while there may be a strong sense of community within the estate, there didn't seem to be much connection to the surrounding town, despite having good connections by foot, bus and metro to not just Byker but the city as well.
I think I will be able to use Byker Estate as a comparison for my project.



Another thing I found on my travels were the street markets. These weren't markets in the traditional sense of a collection of stalls in a square either every day or one day a week, they were seemingly random stalls dotted about the city. The first I saw was on Northumberland Street, the main shopping road in Newcastle. The road itself was pedestrian only and this fruit and veg stall was sat in the middle of the street outside Superdrug. It was an unexpected sight. 
The second I saw was near the large shopping mall. Eldon Square is surrounded on three sides by the mall and next to one of the exits was another fruit and veg table. I would have walked straight past it had it not been for the owner shouting to passers by in an attempt to bring customers to the stall. 

Studio 4: Manifestos

Today, we were presenting our manifestos to out tutors and studio group. After the last 3 or so weeks of gathering and analysing and reading, we finally seemed to have a good idea of which direction we wanted to go with the project and how we were going to approach it individually.

The poster I made to represent our approach and the manifesto also represented the approach I wanted to take. When tracing over the map, I realised how many empty spaces there were, including a large empty block. My approach would involve creating an intervention of some sort that would encourage people to visit and interact with, bringing them together and form the start of a community.

Out presentation overall went better than I expected. Time management was a major problem in the group although when we did get together and knuckle down to work, we functioned well and came up with some great ideas for discussion. Personally, I felt that I didn't put in as much as I should have; with 21st birthdays and hospital visits the previous week.

Some of the feedback we received included the idea of getting obsessed with the street life and making really intense studies of it rather just skimming the surface and remaining distant. If the street is something that we wanted to look at, and it is, we really needed to start to understand it on a new level. We also need to just tidy up our manifesto; replacing some of the text for diagrams and generally finalising it.

To finish the day (and almost this part of the project) we were introduced to our site. There is a choice of three:

1 (Green): is the old library and the adjacent building and car parks.

2 (Blue): is the old police station and possibly the adjacent building.

3 (Red): is an old church site which is now just open land.

Due to my interest in historic architecture, I am already drawn towards the first site. However, I think all three sites have the potential for a good project so at some point over the next couple of weeks, I am going to go up to the site to explore them thoroughly before making my decision.

For now though, I'm off to Newcastle for my study tour, with additional flying visits to Durham and York.

Manifesto Developement

Site Visit: Boundaries

Today, we went up to the site again to find out what the general consensus of where the Cheetham Hill boundary was. We had printed maps and we were going to ask people to mark on where they thought the Cheetham Hill boundary was.

We started at The Fort and tried asking people if they had a couple of minutes to answer out questions. While we did get a couple of answers, the majority of people we asked clearly didn't want to talk to us.

We had to try a different approach. 

Rather than asking people, pen and paper in hand, if they had a couple of minutes. I suggested we went for the 'lost person' approach. We began asking people if we were in Cheetham Hill and if not, where it was. People were more open to helping us and extended the conversation by asking us where we were trying to get to exactly. 

Once we had the information we needed, we then simply marked it on the maps ourselves. It was interesting to see that people in the industrial estate considered themselves to be part of Cheetham Hill although they acknowledged that the main town was further north. 

As we approached Strangeways and the Prison, people did begin to seem unsure as to whether they were in Cheetham Hill or not.

Some people didn't seem to understand our question and pointed us in the direction of Cheetham Hill Road. 

Reading

After studio this week, we were given some readings to have a look at within our groups. These were to get us thinking about how we would approach our manifesto and look at the areas within Cheetham Hill.

We agreed to spend the evening reading and then meet up on Friday to discuss and swap ideas. This didn't exactly go to plan but we also met up on Saturday to continue discussions and make a plan for the week ahead.

My reading was the introduction from Altering Practices, a collection of essays by female architects. One particular sentence caught my eye and led me to then go on to read the rest of that essay:

"Urban designers could act as 'curators', as creators of meaning through unusual and unexpected connections, rather than 'planners' who impose their patronising meaning on space"

I think that this is something that I am going to try and take forward in my project.

Studio 2: Site Analysis

In studio today, listening to the other groups' site analyses reinforced the idea that our site was separated from the rest of Cheetham Hill. 

Many of the groups realised the sense of community in their respective areas and were able to act on it to develop their research whereas we weren't able to do the same.

A lot of interesting points were made and there were some really interesting observations but I felt that none of it was relatable to our area. 

We finished the day with a better idea of Cheetham Hill in general and some ideas of where to take our project next.

We also had some readings to make our way though to help with our manifesto development. My group's plan is to read our reading tonight ready for discussion tomorrow.