Lille

What an amazing week!

A group of Landscape Architects and Garden Design students from University of Greenwich joined a team of Landscape Architects from Ecole Nationale Superieure d'Architecture et de Paysage de Lille for a Charette to put forward design ideas for Lille Porte d'Ypres.

We arrived on Sunday in the snow, dumped our bags and then set off to walk around the site. A large area cut in half by the River Deule which is a working canal. Very useful in advance of Monday's presentation about Lille's intentions of how they would like to use the space in the future which formed the brief for our design ideas. After another site visit on the Monday we were put into groups of 4/5 made up of Lille and Greenwich students.

At this stage it was anything goes, however radical, which was exciting and fun - everyone contributed and  our theme was FlowTime which referred to the flow of time, the flow of water and the flow of new people into the area. We had the evening and Tuesday morning to get our ideas on paper in the way of an outline plan, sketches and sections ready for the first presentation on Tuesday afternoon. This deadline meant decisions had to be made so work could be progressed. No time for faffing around. It was a pace that was maintained throughout the whole week.

After presentations time for a beer while the tutors decided which groups to pair up. We paired up with 'Un-lock the City' which was about unlocking the historical values - the old city wall, the waterways and the marshes and thus bringing the area back to life with new housing and leisure activity. The ideas of the 2 teams generally knitted together really well, although there were moments of disagreement which is hard, I guess none of us like too much compromise, but in a group and on a short deadline it has to happen, otherwise we can't move forward. We managed to iron out the differences, and thankfully there was no major falling out.

Team E from left to right back row: me, Zannah, Gaedon, Jean-Charles, Christina, Scheherazade, Maudez
front row Laura, Lissy, Pierre
Picture taken on the final day at the presentation

Wednesday was spent developing the plan for another presentation where we were given feedback on ideas and which areas we should look at in more detail so we could resolve and refine the proposals. We then progressed onto work on the final presentation which included conceptual diagrams, sections, sketches, a plan at 1:1000 and a consolidation of all this into an A3 document, oh - and a model at 1:1000. We split the tasks among the group, having worked together for 3 days we had a feel for where peoples strengths were and this was the basis for task allocation. 

Thursday was getting on with it. I was assigned team leader and there were moments on thursday e.g. after asking 10 times for an area plan to be printed so we could lay out the context for the model and being told no, we had to wait for the 1:1000 design plan to be finished, that my diplomacy went out the window and it wasn't 'please will you' but 'you will'. Not a style I like but we had a project to finish and a model to make.

Our model, Unlock the City was the final theme as it was easily understood in both languages.

Don't do them like this - they take hours and when time is short a ridiculous waste!

View into the marshlands and the recycling factory, check it out in Copenhagen, Pierre's idea and one that received a lot of interest

Thursday evening a buffet was laid on for us all, cheese, meats, salad, fresh bread and free drinks at the bar, a great atmosphere and at just the right moment, we were getting tired and for some there was an all-nighter ahead! I left just before midnight as I was presenting the next day with Gaedon - but he's way younger than me and can survive and look reasonable after only 3 hours sleep.

Back in at 7am to let the night shift go home. the structure of the model was in place but not the visual impact - a lot to do - so we got stuck in and ended up with a model that could be displayed - thank goodness. Lissy and Pierre  worked on the 1:1000 plan all night and it looked really good. They have a very good scanner in the french school, so it was rendered on trace and copied, put into photoshop for the annotation and then printed out on paper at A0 size.

Just about to start the presentation with the model on the table and the work pinned up on the wall behind

In full flow 

Pierre giving the detail on the recycling plant

A real sense of satisfaction and achievement, what we achieved as a group was really worthwhile and a lot learnt along the way. For me I've realised that I want to do Landscape Architecture, work in a practice on big projects as part of a team, I don't want to work on my own on small scale projects. Is it too late for me to realise this? I need to think about what I do next, more education or get a job for experience, I'm in an Education mode so part of me thinks I should carry on. I will take advice.

Next blog will be a bit about the social side, it was hard work but we also played quite hard too!