zeppelin magazine | no #74

Subject to brutal or useless gestures, the public space for the Romanians becomes worthless, confusing, ridiculous. The image of the places that represent us or where we meet, where we should have the chance to create community, must be improved. The quality of the urban space is a fundamental component of our life’s quality. We comment and criticize these operations because the non-public space resulting from indifference creates non-citizens, inhabitants of the non-urbanity.

Something small has appeared opposite the marvellous mass of Granada cathedral -perhaps the most beautiful of all those in Andalusia- as if it were a David opposing a Goliath. Besides challenging it on equal terms, its architecture is based on total respect and admiration for the historic structure.

Kentish Town Health Centre (KTHC) is a new health building in central London, housing a large GP practice and a wide range of health facilities.
The project champion, Dr. Roy Macgregor, initiated an RIBA competition for the building won by AHMM. Dr Macgregor’s vision was to create a wonderful building where not only medicine but health and art came together for the community. Ideas of transparency and connectivity were embraced by the architects and the whole team worked collaboratively to create a building that expresses a new, holistic approach and sets a new standard for modern health care provision.

Recently, MNAC (NMCA-National Museum of Contemporary Art) and the Royal Netherlands Embassy organised a debate about the public space; Justin Baroncea presented the case of public spaces in Barcelona at zeppelin; I talked about this under the Revival of the Fittest conferences organised by Hydrasociety. Briefly, there are many actions dedicated to this topic; some of them not only by our team, in which we talk increasingly often about what and how it should be done and I had the feeling that this is for everybody something quite obvious. Despite that, I realise there are confusions for specialists as well, be they architects or great urban planners. Since the value of the public space and how this should be designed, created, developed is not clear within our own profession either. Perhaps that many of the things to come up in these pages are or will be signed by architects, artists or designers.