Achieving Good Design - Term Paper Example

Running Head: ACHIEVING GOOD DESIGN NAME: COURSE: INSTRUCTOR: DATE: The culture and history of a nation are written in its public spaces, towns, cities and buildings. New spaces and building as an expression of our aspiration and values. How places are perceived after stating about our self-esteem and sense of local and national pride and identity. Urbanism and architecture are arts just as surely as sculpture and painting. The construction environment is a cultural asset. According to Sequin (1983, pp. 70-78), it is quite important to design it well and to maintain and manage it to the highest standard. We always use built environment –streets, buildings, public spaces and parks- every day. After we get management and design we get places to treasure. If we get them wrong, we build in dysfunction and alienation. CABE’s role is to make an improvement on quality of life by advising on how to places that look very important to everyone. Every one must be at the centre of any strategy for the built environment (Bainbridge, 2002). Places that are treasured tend to be cared for and valued. Places that are treasured tend to cost us much in crime, poor health, social exclusion and high maintenance. They are eventually perceived as liabilities. The simple tests are always the best. Is this place so beautiful that people will cherish? Does it lend itself and work well for easy management? Will it be sustainable and last longer? Buildings do not exist for only those who use it or paid for it. Everyone has to live with it. Parks and streets belong to all of us. We deserve every right to desire the best from those who make and care for our public spaces and buildings. The public frequently make payment for a heavy cost of bad design and price – for the upkeep and, ultimately, replacement of the design and mistakes that occur due to mismanagements of the past. Good management, design and maintenance are more important to the public. Sequin (1983, pp. 70-78) suggested that CABE exists to be an advocate for the public interest and to fully defend it when there is a threat. Streets, buildings, and public spaces are not perceived in isolation from one another other. For there to be a success they must combine their efforts. CABE deeply cares about the quality and effectiveness of the architecture of individual buildings but also about the environment of the built as a whole. A very strong campaign is done by CABE for landscape design and excellent urban and high quality management that bind the separated parts of a place together. CABEs value themselves on working across joining the work of professionals with that of non-professionals and boundaries (Bainbridge, 2002). Various different disciplines are part of managing and designing the built environment; yet planning, architecture, urban design and landscape is indivisible. CABE begins from the viewpoint of those who use the built environment. They pride areas comes together to make an enjoyable and desirable experience. CABE assists the professions to work with those who make decisions so that all the built environment components receive similar care, establishing places that people will cherish and enjoy. Design how people decide how they want things to be. Everything they decide is designed by somebody. So the question here is not whether people can or need to afford design. It’s whether design is good enough. Design in the built environment is the major decision-making process. However, at the greater level it makes the vision for places. More detailed level it shows how they need them to work, feel and look (Goossen, 2002). Desirable design is inevitable. It needs to be invested in, championed, and worked at. All those who make decision regarding this understand the importance of good design and how to get the best design out of it. Taste and fashion is always an issue discussion about architecture. Taste keeps changing as fashion also change. New is always appreciation of the beauty and may grow with time and familiarity. The basics of good design have however, been understood for many years. They transcend personal taste and fashion. Style is often an important consideration, perhaps where it is necessary to complement a building that already exists. Also there are more than three important principles however, that creates possibility to recognize good design when we perceive it, irrespective of style. Various descriptions as strength, or durability; efficiency or usefulness; and beauty, or the ability make people happy. Such set of principles is not new but it can be applied to assist all people in recognizing a well-designed place or building. This enables us to build all the confidence to and understand and identify the types of places that work well and that we want to establish. If the three principles below are applied, we will know that public spaces and buildings are well designed if: they are quite useful built to last and easy to care for One can find his/her way and move around easily, irrespective of whether or not you are disabled, in a safe place. They relate nicely to the place where they are built; this also means fitting in quietly or forming new landmarks and new context, basing on circumstances. They are quite flexible and their use can change over time. Therefore, it is possible to design well using various different styles. One most important thing is the fact that 21st century society has the great opportunity to contribute valuable additions to the accumulating pattern that establishes up our cities towns. Spaces and buildings should look good but CABE are not quite demanding that every building should be an icon. Well-contracted Georgian, Edwardian and Victorian terraces aren’t iconic (Goossen, 2002). They are beautifully proportioned, and laid out on a plan that’s easy to move around, with squares and parks to play and stroll in. They are often made up of standard pattern-book homes, but with beautiful room sizes, decent gardens and well proportioned fronts. They can be extended and reconfigured in various ways. They are quite attractive, work and they last. There is no much to be asked for in the current century as well, one might have to think, with a sustainability factor. Attractive background buildings improve most of the places we love. While buildings with new is always a sound beginning point for high place making, several people a mix appreciate contemporary architecture. Poor styles imitations of the past do not do justice to the capacity of our own era for self-expression and creativity (Goossen, 2002). We do perform perfectly to remember that public controversy does not often imply that a building’s design is poor. Several opinions regarding the Gherkin have been highly polarized. Nobody refuses the fact that it is now a symbol of London. Now it can’t be carried away from Londoners. They are all hi-tech structures, instead of traditional London buildings. Yet both have been poses by people’s hearts and to various speak of London’s identity almost as much as St Paul’s Cathedral or Tower Bridge. Everywhere that we see great architecture, urban design and landscape architecture we see communities with a renewed sense of self-belief and civic confidence. CABE has a very serious challenge to architect. The three most and greatest damaging to the built environment are: good design is directly proportional to its cost, so we have to settle for poor quality places and buildings good design is purely subjective; a matter of individual taste, so it cannot be considered nationally; anything goes If someone is ready to pay for it, the design should be good enough. There are myths that are used to justify badly designed public buildings, poor quality housing, and the worst commercial developments (Goossen, 2002). None of them is true. It is not always more expensive to design well. For example, a good housing layout can be more efficient and profitable than a bad one. Sometimes the initial cost of a good building, street or space may be higher, but CABE supports the government’s policy that the cost and value of building should be measured over its whole life. The fact that the principles of better design have endured, confirms that it is more than a matter of personal taste. There is a lot of research to indicate that places that work well and are more durable are what most people desire. While most people’s desires and tastes is something to be celebrated we all need to live with design decision in the build environment, therefore personal taste alone cannot be a true test of what makes a design more desirable and acceptable. Goossen (2002, pp.66) confirmed that there land supply is not sufficient and cannot meet demand in a usual market. However, it is meaningless to say that “selling it, it should be good enough”. The property market may fail to place a financial value on various things that contain value to the broader community. Where people have no much or no market power or no choice, their elected personnel have to insist on quality, using the skills that they acquire through the planning system, procurement, public funding and the land ownership. Being a creative process, design comes from a good client that has sound brief working in the realistic program with a creative design group and a proper budget. If some of these components are missing, the risk of having poor design goes up. CABE’s much activity is aimed at trying to assist customers/clients to make the correct conditions for a good design to prosper (Bainbridge, 2002). They are aware of it whenever they see it. Many people who are not good in designing, however, make decisions about design. They are always less certain about the quality of what they perceive. CABE has often struggle to know ways that can enable them to more easily with designers to know whether they are getting good design. It is not impossible to assess the quality if design using ways that are always preferred by most people. People who are not trained as designers can recognize a perfect design and, identify poor design, just as importantly. Sequin (1983, pp. 70-78) suggested that in the current world excellent design would be desired by everyone, valued accordingly and produced by every market occasion. However, this does not happen always. CABE believes that the most important way to get good design, the more it will become the norm. Property market is however, not profit adding value through perfect and may not often work in favor of good design. Some developers tell CABE that, in normal circumstances, because land supply is restricted, purchasers have little choice, so there in profit addition value through good design. Roads are adopted and homes are sold by the local council. So the developer has no temporary stake and no incentive to invest in the quality and quantity of space for long term. Bainbridge (2002, pp.16-23) said that the market requires assistance to overcome its failure to avoid the cost of worst design from being passed on. The community has to intervene, often through their elected representatives, to offer incentives or regulate of what is built. Goossen (2002, pp.66) said that the government already set out peculiar design policies in the planning system and through national procurement guidance and rules. These policies required to be acted on by local authorities and public sector customers. The private sector requires adapting perfection to meet them. The moment we do this we can establish a culture that will fully deliver good design. People desire the best for their communities. For more than 10 years there is a perception of the appetite for good design grow. Bainbridge (2002, pp.16-23) said that there are many excellent public and buildings spaces emerge in response to this demand. There is no community that deserves second best. People should build on the successes of the last decade which is a well managed, built and maintained built environment is a right that everyone are required to enjoy. In conclusion, it is important to acknowledge the fact good design cannot to a formula. However, this might not be the key purpose of the tool developed by CABE and its partners (Bainbridge, 2002). More often, especially in complex situations or where there is innovation, it is quite important to seek quality judgments from the designers with experiences. Most importantly, CABE’s design reviews are there to support the decision makers. References LaRoche, P., Milne, M., Automatic Sunshades, an Experimental Study, Proceedings of ASES 2004, American Solar Energy Society, 2004. Milne, M., LaRoche, Energy Innovations Small Grant Program, Final Report: Developing a Microprocessor Controller for Automatic Residential Sunshades, July 2004 Title 24: Energy Efficiency Standards for Residential and Nonresidential Buildings, 2001, California ACM: AB970 Low .Rise Residential Alternative Calculation Method Approval Manual, January 3, 2001 California Pierre Guerrier, Alain Greiner,”A generic architecture for on-chip packet-switched interconnections”, Design, Automation and Test in Europe Conference and Exhibition 2000. Proceedings, 2000 Page(s): 250 –256 E.Rijpkema, K. Goosens and P.Wielage, “A Router Architecture for Networks on Silicon”, Proceedings of Progress 2001, 2nd workshop on embedded systems K. Goossens, J. Van Meerbergen, A. Peeters, and P. Wielage, “Networks on Silicon: Combining Best-Effort and Guaranteed Services", DATE 2002, Design automation and test conference, March, 2002. Andrei Radulescu and Kees Goossens. In Shuvra Bhattacharyya and Ed Deprettere and Juergen Teich, editors, "Communication Services for Networks on Silicon", Domain-Specific Processors: Systems, Architectures, Modeling, and Simulation. Marcel Dekker, 2003. Paul Wielage and Kees Goossens, "Networks on Silicon: Blessing or Nightmare?", Euromicro Symposium On Digital System Design (DSD 2002), Dortmund, Germany, September 2002. W.J. Bainbridge, S.B. Furber,” Chain: A Delay Insensitive Chip Area” Micro, IEEE, Volume: 22 Issue: 5, Sep/Oct 2002 Page(s): 16 –23 Drew Wingard,” Micro Network-based integration of SOCs”, In Proceedings of the 38th Design Automation Conference, June 2001. C.H.Sequin and R.M.Fujimoto:”X-Tree and Y-Components”, VLSI architecture, prentice hall international, 1983 pp. 70-78 Simon, H. A. 1996. The sciences of the artificial, 3rd ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bainbridge (2002, pp.16-23) Read More