createstreets

Design practice, town-builder, think tank. Master-planning, design codes, research, co-creating popular, beautiful, durable Gentle Density. @CreateStreetsFN

[createstreets @createstreets]

The best density is gentle .....

[createstreets @createstreets]

It's time to revive trefoils & quatrefoils, ribs & bosses, chevrons & lancets, tracery & balusters, chevrons & billets, ogees & oriels, transoms & mullions, crockets & finials, finials & friezes, pediments & pilasters, architraves & aprons, domes & urns, quoins & capitols, scrolls & volutes: the whole rich tapestry of joy with which our buildings were once woven, whose very vocabulary is now forgotten and which one generation, uniquely in world history, throw away & shattered like highwaymen in the night.

[Arka Serezh @ArkaSerezh]

Every generation before the 20th century carved ornament into their buildings as a matter of course.

One generation decided to stop: They removed it from schools, from practice, and from the entire profession.

The only generation in history whose buildings nobody wants to live near...

[Nicholas Boys Smith @boys_nicholas]

Every year, I am lucky enough to visit Normandy en route to my French in-laws. Every year my two boys and I, toddlers when they started, teenagers now, visit the tiny British cemetery at Secqueville-en-Bessin, literally a corner of a foreign field that is forever England...

[createstreets @createstreets]

We need better places so that people can settle in the world and feel respected and at home.

[Aaron Bastani @AaronBastani]

I’m in Makerfield. Besides the headline story of a by-election there’s this: an illegal flytipping site with 25,000 tons (!) of rubbish.

When people talk about a state that fails to protect, this is what they mean.

The first house at the end of the road has a Reform placard.

[Nicholas Boys Smith @boys_nicholas]

Quietly, without fuss, Victorian engineers & architects learnt how to create deep and attractive buildings with glass façades to let in the light. The architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner thought that these were the “path” to modernism. He was wrong: they are too playful….

[Nicholas Boys Smith @boys_nicholas]

The thread is gossamer thin now but it is still there. I find something unspeakably moving in this handful of ancient men, mere boys in 1944, still able to return to the Normandy beaches, 82 summers since the Battle of Normandy & the liberation of France. I wrote about...

[createstreets @createstreets]

… read here: https://t.co/9RyeY3KLkZ

[createstreets @createstreets]

Quite right. We studied the importance of beauty in making people better in our award-winning submission to the Wolfson economics prize which you can …

[maneesha @ManeeshaSem]

i’m obsessed with this hospital in barcelona because whoever built it understood that beauty is a form of medicine that can uplift the human spirit and support healing

[Nicholas Boys Smith @boys_nicholas]

Paris has boulevards. Vienna has its Ringstrasse. Rome has piazzas. New York has its avenues slicing down Manhattan. Venice has its fondamente besides canals and its sottoporteghi under buildings. But surely the quintessential London street is the mews?

[createstreets @createstreets]

… so there is scope for many thousands of new homes & a revived town centre. Here’s hoping they will be lovely not loveless.

[createstreets @createstreets]

Croydon. Suburb of modernist megastructures? Well, yes. But scratch behind & there’s a rich array of late Victorian& Edwardian architecture capable of redefining the town. These could …

[createstreets @createstreets]

… they have a tram (one of Britain’s few new ones as it, needlessly, costs 2-3 times as much per mile to build one in Britain as rest of Europe)…