Breaking the Rules . . . .

 . . . but with good reason.

One of our requirements is to produce a 1:1250 location. Which I did. But really struggled when trying to make it Wright-ish. I poured through all the books I had borrowed from the library trying to find an example of his site plans. There are lots of them but they are all very small sites so don't really help me. From what I can find, he didn't actually produce large scale site plans. The closest I got was his model of Broadacre City.

One image did keep appearing though.

Wright's Plan for Greater Baghdad is a large perspective drawing showing all of the projects in the area at the time. It's so detailed and shows his design for the university campus in the context of the surrounding city.

Which sounds like what the location plan on my brief should aim to do: show my designs in the context of Cheetham Hill. Bearing this in mind, that the drawing is more about what it is showing rather than my tutors knowing that I can draw at 1:1250, I have chosen to break the rules slightly.

So using a very similar scale (obviously, an aerial perspective can't really have a scale) to my original plan, I am in the process of creating my own Plan for Cheetham Hill.

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

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!

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.

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. 

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.

Site Visit: Exploring Our Area

Monday saw us back on site, this time to take a closer look at the area we were assigned and to take our street panoramic.

The area we were assigned was to the very south of Cheetham Hill, around the prison. Wandering around, it had a very different feel to that of the rest of Cheetham Hill. There was a distinct lack of activity, whether pedestrian or vehicular. The majority of the area is made up of wholesalers and warehouses, mainly in the textile industry. Any activity that was going on was between proprietor and business owner; selling on goods. It seemed to be an area that excluded the public and there was very little, if any, sense of community.

The only 'community' orientated area was to the north, closer to what was more considered to be Cheetham Hill. It seemed to become more residential although the only residences in the area was a gated community that was shut off from its immediate surroundings. The park, while being adjacent to a primary school was empty and there were very few people just walking thought the area.

It was entirely different to the hustle and bustle of what I want to call the 'town centre' and it made us question whether our area was actually considered to be part of Cheetham Hill. 

Site Visit: First Impressions

I went to site for the first time the day after studio to get a feel for the area and maybe gather some ideas. 

I started by taking the bus to Victoria Station and then I planned to walk the remainder of the way up to Cheetham Hill. I briefly looked at the map before I left and saw that Cheetham Hill Road started near the train station so it was pretty straightforward to get there. However, so does Great Ducie Street and this was the one I started up in an attempt to get to Cheetham Hill. Luckily I realised my mistake before I had gone too far and found a route to Cheetham Hill Road with as fewer turns as possible. 

My route took me straight around the Strangeways Prison perimeter. I had already walked past the prison en route but it was one thing to walk past along a main road and another to walk past along quiet back roads. There were no cars, except those parked outside the brick warehouses and I passed only a couple of people. The high walls of the prison were unsurprisingly intimidating and the quietness of the surrounding streets really made me want to move on as quickly as possible to Cheetham Hill Road. There was very little activity along the surrounding roads and there was not much sign that they buildings were inhabited, particularly on the side facing the prison.

Despite being late morning, when I reached Cheetham Hill Road, there was very little pedestrian activity on the street although there was plenty of traffic in the way of buses, cars and lorries. The activity seemed to increase as I approached The Manchester Fort and headed further into Cheetham Hill. The section of the road I walked along before I reached The Fort seemed to be more of a transitory space rather than part of the Cheetham Hill territory, a bit of a no-man's land between the city centre and Cheetham Hill. 

The amount of activity increased further as I headed up the road. Along with houses, there were more shops, restaurants and community buildings such as mosques and job centres. There were more people out and about in the streets, many of them shopping. There were lots of small supermarkets that spilled out onto the pavement creating small markets. 

Once I reached the library, I turned around and headed back to the city. This time I managed to stay on the right road!

Studio 1: MSAP Intoduction

First studio day of year 3. Not sure I'm ready to get thrown in at the deep end but not sure I've got much say in the matter!

We started the day with discussing what the atelier, MSA Praxis was about and we split into small groups to discuss 'participative techniques' that are used in architectural practise to engage with the clients. We were given a list and we talked about which ones we knew about, what we thought others were and whether we thought they were actually used in practise. They were all things that we can use in our own projects as well.

Over lunch, we were tasked with making a cognitive map of a familiar route. These were then compared when we restarted. Most people did their route to university although not all were the half hour or so commute; some were from home to Manchester. It was also interesting to see the differences in the maps. Some were really literal (like mine) and easy to read while others were more abstract and only clear if you knew the route.

Then the REAL map came out. Of Cheetham Hill.

As I hadn't had the chance to visit the site before studio, the area was completely unknown to me and reading an unfamilar street map upside down doesn't really reveal much. As it is such a large area, we split it up into 6 areas, one for each of the groups. The task was to survey our area and to make a panoramic street view of a section of Cheetham Hill Road. The following week, we would then present our findings and collectively, we would all have a better understanding of Cheetham Hill