I was born in London, but spent the first five years of my life on the edge of a small village in Switzerland. The house was next to the church, (the bells rang loudly on the hour), the garden overlooked vineyards, where every one in the village helped with the harvest. On a clear day Mont Blanc could be seen across the valley in the distance. In summer all the doors were left open, and we were free to wander into the neighbors’ houses.
We returned to London, to a small Victorian terraced house, in a cul-de-sac. The children played in the street, and the older children walked the younger children to school. We spent weekends and holidays with my grandfather, who lived on the edge of a common, which was wild and belonged to everyone, and where we ran free.
I did science A levels at school, then a degree in art history at UCL, and then worked as a photographer’s assistant for several years. Then I worked with textiles, first in London, then in Hong Kong, travelling to India to work with factories.
During the years that I assisted photographers and took my own photographs, I learned to look.
In my part 1 at Londonmet I began to consciously appreciate how spaces and buildings relate to one another, and to look at buildings and the city in terms of public and private, thresholds, and more subtle liminal spaces and journeys.
In my part 1 dissertation I set out to investigate those qualities in architecture that are timeless and universal, (as opposed to that which is cutting edge and of it’s time). I wrote about the meaning and placement of fire in the work of Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright. I would like to research water at the scale of the city in the same way.
After part 1 I worked in a small practice for five months, and since then have been working freelance as a photographer, and have also started making small films for the Internet.
I love London and know it intimately, but see mistakes and lost opportunities. I want to understand why things are as they are, and work out how to improve them. I asked the planning department in Hammersmith & Fulham for a job, but I would need a qualification in planning first. It seems in general that planners have a low opinion of architects and visa versa, which is unhelpful. I like the challenge of bringing disparate strands together, and this is what I want to do, at the same time investigating how architecture can contribute to the city.
T2 Glossary of Terms
(10 words useful to the world of spatial planning and urban design)
Planning - Laying out the different elements that make up a city so that it works
Spatial planning - to bring an understanding of how spaces are used and how they relate to each other
Design - arranging different elements to bring coherence and understanding, so they work both separately and together as a whole
Urban design - understanding and arranging the different elements of a city so they are integrated, and it is coherent, and the city works at different levels
Place - a destination, a space that speaks of a use, with a sense of shelter, somewhere to be
Community - a network of connections between people
History - a sense of the past, an understanding of why things are as they are
Urban fabric - the physical materiality of the city
Point of orientation - a point, or place, or building from which we orientate ourselves
Skyline - the line of the city against the sky, moments that give character and scale
