DEN AITKEN
INTERVIEW
Where or what is your first memory of place?
My first
sense of place, like most kiwis, is my hometown. Leigh is a small fishing
village a little over an hour north east of Auckland’s CBD and though different
today, growing up in the early eighties it was a great playground.
What do you
think of the term ‘placemaking’?
I think
successful placemaking is more closely related to an atmosphere rather than
specifically design. For example a large group of people gathered for a similar
interest such as a sporting or music event can together contribute to a very
strong sense of place for a specified period of time. Once those people evacuate that space it
might be left feeling isolated or exposed or a number of other emotions that
have considerable implications to individual users. With that thought in mind, my
interpretation of placemaking is one that relies as heavily on human engagement
than it does spatial configuration or design intervention.
In saying this,
strong design interventions can set the scene for social engagement and become
paramount for the longevity of successful placemaking, particularly when
referencing more intimate scales. There are numerous great examples of this
typology in play, such as a summer evening spent on the Spanish steps in Rome,
where groups of people descend to socialise, interact or simply sit on the
stairs, still warm from the day’s sun, and share a meal. More often than not
the best public spaces around the world operate by way of very simple
interventions that key into the existing culture
of the city.
When
thinking of place, how do you approach the process of design?
Every place has a certain unique
characteristic that I believe needs to be engaged with,
in order to develop specific design responses. As we head toward an
increasingly urban environment these characteristics can be difficult to
capture, particularly in placeless situations such as parking lots or super
centres, but for the most part there is almost always some potential that can
be exploited in a positive way. Tapping in to this potential in a manner that
is relevant to contemporary design ideals is a difficult task but for my
thinking is always going to be necessary for creating something that is as
engaging and aesthetically pleasing in 100 years as it is today.
What do
landscape architects need to understand about New Zealand to practice here?
Scale. By
nature our urban environments are developed around mechanical systems;
vehicles, infrastructure, shopping malls, etc. Balancing the human scale within
these systems, and providing intimacy when required, is paramount to creating
successful spaces.
Population.
Designers have developed a habit in recent years of producing imagery where
proposed designs are densely populated by a large and
diverse selection of people, but as a small nation we do not yet have
the population to continuously activate our public spaces 24/7. Although we have passion and belief in the
designs we produce, if we are to capture the human scale in our public spaces
then we need to be realistic about the numbers and types of people that will consistently
use the given spaces we are tasked with designing.
Place is
not always urban or within a cityscape. At what scale does placemaking begin?
Successful
placemaking begins at the human scale, regardless of whether or not the context
is an urban or rural environment. When starting a business you think first about
who your specific customer is and then build your product around that
clientele. Successful placemaking relies
on the same methodology; designing places for specific user groups of people.
Does
community consultation fit into your design process and where does the weight
sit… client, user, design process or intuition. Pie chart perhaps?
The
consultancy team I work amongst has considerable history with community and iwi
consultation and this forms a considerable chunk of the design process. The
weight of this is project dependant but working with community groups is a
skill set that contributes heavily to the success of any design process.
Do you need
consensus to make design decisions?
Need is a
big word, but personally I favour peer driven design. Critique is not always
the easiest pill to swallow, particularly as I am yet to meet a designer who is
not passionate about their work, but in my mind it is intrinsic to a robust
output.
It’s simple
to focus on supporting or easy to sway stakeholders to generate input to
satisfy a client’s desired outcome. How do you target consultation?
As
landscape architects we are tasked with certain social and ecological
responsibilities and as designers we are always looking to progress the
projects that we are engaged in. How you tackle these ideals is a personal endeavour
but part of our professional responsibility is to empower clients through
information. More often than not the best opportunity for this is early within
the consultation process and can really help influence the quality and
legibility of the final outputs.
Do you
analyse or critique past projects as to how well they function for people and
create a sense of place or identity? Is this objective or subjective?
The success
of anything in life is dependent on understanding your own strengths and
weaknesses so critique does form a considerable component of my own
methodology. I also think there is
considerable value in situating your own work beside local and global exemplars
as a means of challenging your own skills and imagination.
How do we
make a contemporary sense of place?
Jan Ghel is
well known in architectural and landscape circles for his musings on urban
development with the human scale in mind. Cities are under constant
transformation and development, operating under multiple scales and systems at
any given moment, but at the heart of it all, cities are for people. The
success of placemaking, historically and well in to the future, will always be
pivotal on design that captures the culture of a given environment and an
engagement with the human form.
