INTERVIEW: SPACE SYNTAX
We don’t want to be the only consultancy doing this, we want to embed our thinking into general practice
Tim Stonor Managing Director
How would you sum up what you do? Science-based, human-focused architecture.
And what is the process that you go through? We bring together data on how people behave with data on how places perform (including land value, rental value, crime and pedestrian movement) and we show how the layout or architecture of places influences patterns of human behaviour and economic performance. We show how architecture really matters
because when you design a building or lay out a city you design its human behaviour pattern. That has profound social, economic and environmental consequences. It’s organ- ising relationships between people, and those relationships have economic conse- quences. Environmentally, generating more walking, cycling and public transport will have a massive carbon impact.
What do you offer your clients? There’s nothing like having a baseline that tells you how your site is working, who’s around it, what’s beyond you that you can connect to and what’s between your building and the buildings across the road. We found clients really love it; being evidence-based seems to go down really well with investors, owners and occupiers.
How can we improve the way this is done as an industry ? By not having to rely on Space Syntax to do it. Our company mission is about disseminating this knowledge directly into architecture and planning, to put the technology onto the tables of designers and planners. We don’t want to be the only consultancy in the world that does this. We want to embed our thinking, our technology and our learning, into general practice.
CLAD mag 2015 ISSUE 2
the park could connect with the communities and businesses around it. We wanted a place that was common to all of them; not just a special place that you might visit once or twice in your lifetime, but an everyday place embedded in local communities. In Woolwich, we have helped to create a
central public space. Footpaths run through the middle of it, which are aligned with the streets that feed into it, making it more likely that people will walk through the square and engage with other people sat in it.
How are you doing that? Through an academy. We offer face-to-face classroom-based training – with the support of UCL (University College London) – aimed at training professionals. We had planners from Sweden in recently from a local authority, we have designers, architects and urban planners coming in, and we have an internship pro- gramme. But we need to scale up, so we are building the Space Syntax Academy to offer classroom training. We have also built a soon- to-launch website to give people access to the information for free. We are confident that our reputation and commercial essence will continue into the future, because we will be the leader in a field that we have generated. At this stage we are looking for significant investment, so that we can do this at scale.
Can you give some examples of your work? We worked for the Olympic Development Authority with the Queen Elizabeth Park, helping develop the masterplan for Stratford City in the first instance. That then became the Olympic site and the Olympic masterplan. We were asked to look at the legacy and how
What are the challenges facing leisure architects? I think it’s being categorised as a leisure architect or a commercial architect or a retail architect. The problem we have in our profes- sion is that we silo our disciplines.
So all architects are leisure architects? Leisure has to integrate itself into the every- day activities of all architects. Very few buildings don’t incorporate this, don’t have elements of the informal, the serendipitous. To me that’s leisure.
Are public spaces more of a challenge in densely populated cities? Density is a big issue. If you spread people too far apart you have the problem of low-density sprawling suburbs, where nobody ever gets to meet anybody else, and everybody has to drive. If you can bring people closer together they will meet more often and you can make a public space work.
In densely populated cities like Hong Kong and Singapore, you always find places to be quiet. There are parks, so although there is the vibrancy of a multi-level city environment, you just have to turn a corner to find a moment of quiet. Offering a spectrum of opportunities is something every great city does. l
CLADGLOBAL.COM 117
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116 |
Page 117 |
Page 118 |
Page 119 |
Page 120 |
Page 121 |
Page 122 |
Page 123 |
Page 124 |
Page 125 |
Page 126 |
Page 127 |
Page 128 |
Page 129 |
Page 130 |
Page 131 |
Page 132