Bluewater Shopping Centre
Eric Kuhne, the concept architect of Bluewater and Lisa Strudwick, the store manager of Joseph talk about the shopping centre.
I'm Eric Kuhne. I was the concept architect on Bluewater.
What strikes you first when you look down at the model is the fact that this is a triangular shaped plan and there's only a handful of shopping centres anywhere in the world that actually you can circle completely without retracing your steps.
I think the single biggest shift that Bluewater represents is pitching towards the social group, a family or a group of friends as opposed to the individual. We designed Bluewater to be a place where all the shopper's companions could feel comfortable.
We have seating scattered all over Blue Water, in places where you would normally never find seating the fact that you don't have to walk anymore than sixty paces before you can get a cup of coffee and find a place to sit; there are places for people to stop and window shop, wide enough so that you're not pushed out of the way by the crowds passing by. And that is why the average stay at Blue Water is over three hours per person, versus forty-five minutes for almost every other shopping destination in Europe.
My name is Lisa Strudwick, and I'm the store manager of Joseph in Bluewater.
Bluewater is different because people want to be here. They don't want to come into the centre, buy what they have to buy and go home. Bluewater is much more of a day out. And because they're happy to spend their time in Bluewater, it's easier to sell to people.
There's nothing worse than working in a shopping centre and it's like a big concrete building, y'know especially on a lovely day like this.
But there's an awful of light comes into Bluewater. You just don't feel enclosed. You don't feel that you have to go out and get some air. There's plenty of air and light in the building.
Stockley Park Office Complex
Graham Goymour, at Arup Associates, Project Architect on 3 The Square at Stockley Park and Alf Turner, the Director of Human Resources at British Gas in Stockley Park talk about the building
I'm Graham Goymour, at Arup Associates, Project Architect on 3 The Square at Stockley Park.
What we're looking at here is a building within a building. The office space proper takes the form of an X. That building is wrapped up in a single layer of glass that envelopes the whole building and what that does in the process is to create what we call conservatory spaces - which act as kind of buffers - environmental buffers between the office space and the landscape and environment outside.
Those spaces are designed to be used in all kinds of different ways - it's a place to eat lunch - it's a place to have some time to yourself.
We pay a lot of attention to how people use buildings - how easy it is for them to communicate within the building - how easy it is for them to circulate within the building - the sense of natural light in a building is what contributes to people's wellbeing but also peoples pride in finding themselves in that kind of workplace.
I'm Alf Turner, I'm the Director of Human Resources at British Gas in Stockley Park.
The real natural strength of the building is the fact that it's glass all the way round and, light comes in from a variety of directions, as the sun moves and because of that, when you work in the building, you actually feel in the open.
It's a very friendly, welcoming building. It kind of levelled everyone up in the organisation: much more open, informal more relaxed than, than anything we had before. One thing we have noticed - and it took the Directors some time to get used to it - was that people would leave their workstation and have meetings downstairs in the coffee bar or in the atrium adjacent to it.
We wanted the new building at Stockley Park above all and everything else to be a symbol of the changes that we were making in the brand. We want it to be modern, for it to be a progressive working environment, it to feel the kind of place that gets people feeling, you know, 'yeah, it's good to be at work'.
Traditional Japanese House
Katherine Findlay, an architect who has lived in Japan for almost 20 years and Lesley Downer, who writes about Japanese culture talk about the traditional Japanese house.
My name is Katherine Findlay and I'm an architect and I lived for almost 20 years in Japan.
This structure is an urban dwelling, probably owned by a merchant or a scholar. It has deep eaves, to give shade.
In the summer it's very, very hot and humid in Japan and what you really desperately want is airflow. The Japanese house is very dark, and the shadow creates this temperature differential between the inside and the outside of the house, so that will create natural airflow through the house, and the screens open up and then air wafts through.
This house is modest in its means of expression. It doesn't use expensive materials: it uses timber, it uses paper, it uses mud. The richness of expression of a Japanese person's wealth is to do with the sophisticated way that these modest materials are put together, and not in the intrinsic monetary value of the materials that he uses.
I'm Lesley Downer, and I write about Japanese culture.
This is a classic traditional Japanese building. On the brushwood fence side of the house, you have the veranda outside. The fretted wooden doors - which would be faced with paper - slide open to step out onto the veranda and would slide closed to make the outside wall of the house. At the end of the veranda on both the ground floor and the first floor, you've got these small little boxes in which would be solid wooden doors, which would push out and slide along. So when it's raining or when it's cold that's what you would do to make the house waterproof, or to keep it warmer.
I used to live in a house very much like this. One thing is it's very dark when the rain doors are all in place - extremely dark - so you have to have the lights on, but if you do not have the rain doors in place in the wintertime it's very, very cold.
The house is very somehow penetrable by the elements, in other words it's pretty cold in winter and it's pretty warm in summer. You are basically there with the weather.
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Exploring Architecture: Buildings, Meaning and Making (HB)
Covering ancient and modern architecture from across the world, this book examines its very essence by opening buildings up, to reveal what lies behind their design.
FREE TALK: Take a journey through the 19th and 20th century architecture of railways stations and railway-related designs, featured in both the RIBA and V&A collections.
