Design Yearbook 2017

Locations
Activities
Byker Community Gardens
Residents Ouseburn Farm YMCA Byker Storehouse Horticulturalist
Byker Community Trust
Education Productive Growing Horticultural Training
Community Orchard Tending Public Spaces Community Meals Cooking Lessons
Engaging with the two
Growing fruit and
Training and teaching
The south facing terraces
Residents employed to
Shared meals between
Utilising fruit and veg grown
primary schools to educate
vegetables in the Byker
new horticultural skills to
of Avondale Rise lend
plant and maintain the
residents developing
around the redevelopment
children on growing
Gardens and around the
residents to help people
themselves to a small
public spaces around
relationships and providing
to teach residents about
plants and care for the
estate. Food grown can be
improve their gardens or
community orchard,
Byker, including planters,
the opportunity for new
healthy eating and cooking.
environment.
used for shared meals.
pursue employment.
growing a range of fruit.
beds and hedges.
social connections.
St Lawrence’s
Primary School
PLANT NURSERY
HORTICULTURAL
TRAINING
EDUCATION
Ouseburn
Farm
PRODUCTIVE
GROWING
YMCA Byker
Byker Aspire
COMMUNITY
ORCHARD
Horticulturalist
Residents
Storehouse
COOKING
LESSONS
Byker Community
Trust
TENDING PUBLIC
SPACES
COMMUNITY
MEALS
BCT Rapid
Response Team
Residents
Recent PhD by Creative Practice Completion
Making Byker: The Situated Amateur Practices of a Citizen Architect
James Longfield
Positioned on the margins of the architectural profession as an informal and amateur practice, my thesis explored connections between
‘expert’ practice and the city as a fluid socio-spatial construct of (re)production and consumption, freed from professional preoccupations with
buildings as formal, static and aesthetic objects.
In 1969, Anglo-Swedish architect Ralph Erskine was commissioned to masterplan and design the Byker redevelopment project in Newcastle
upon Tyne. With colleagues, he established an office on site, and a number of the architects moved to the area to deliver the project. As a result
of this direct engagement with the area, a situated mode of practice emerged in the overlap between their professional personas as practitioners
and their social concerns as residents.
Having moved into a house in Byker in 2011, my work onsite through the PhD drew on the approach of Erskine’s team as a touchstone,
inspiring a mode of relational practice that draws on situated and everyday ways of knowing to inform acts of adaption, (mis)use and
intervention, and that investigated the unique condition of the hobby rooms which Erskine’s team included in the design of the redevelopment.
The investigation of the thesis developed a creative practice methodology to inform and trace a series of tactical and reflective operations that
emerged out of my engagement with the social ecologies and political structures of Byker, as both a resident and an active citizen. Through
the overlapping of my professional and personal identities I pursued a series of architectural projects and practices that sought to traverse
the boundary between the professionally distinct configurations of architect and user to question new possible relations between these two
identities and associated perceptions of the built environment. Through ongoing reflection on these operations, the thesis established four
distinct themes: situated practice, everyday practice, amateur practice and citizen practice, that situate contemporary theoretical positions on
architecture in the context of Byker. A situated drawing, inscribed onto my dining table at home, provides a site to explore each theme and
their intersections.
The work on site explored the historical and contemporary background of the underused and vacant hobby rooms in Byker as spaces of
collectivity and leisure interest. Limited by the inaccessibility of many of these spaces, my investigations explored the spaces of hobby practice
more broadly across the redevelopment in collaboration with Byker residents, identifying hobby space as that which is temporally inhabited
framed by key equipment formed through the ‘everyday design’ of these users. The development of this altered understanding of the nature
and use of hobby space informed the design and construction of a series of pieces of ‘hobby furniture’ for different hobbyists around the Byker
area that explored the possibility for hobby space as deployed across a range of spaces. Reflection on the use of these elements paid closer
attention to the forms of social infrastructure that supports and underpins the use and viability of collective hobby spaces, culminating in
the proposal of a set of ‘hobby agencies’ that speculated on the social relationships that might enable spatial alterations across public spaces
in the area.
The situated actions through which the hobby rooms were addressed also confront the illegitimacy of amateur practice, revealing the creative
and empowering potential of the informal social engagement of the practitioner with the conditions of use and appropriation, alongside other
citizens, embedding practice within a local network of individuals, agencies, local organisations and political bodies.
By deploying professional tools and methods within the context of citizenship, the thesis contributes toward ongoing discussions concerning
the role of participatory practice in architecture, exploring these questions from the perspective of the practitioner’s involvement in the rituals
and rhythms of everyday life. In doing so, it frames an approach to architectural practice that is spatially situated, yet temporally boundless,
a cyclical operation that weaves together spatial, social, and political activity, making a claim for a new mode of situated, amateur, citizen
practice.
Main Supervisor: Adam Sharr, Second Supervisor: Katie Lloyd Thomas, Internal Examiner: Prue Chiles, , External Examiner: Katja Grillner - KTH
School of Architecture - Stockholm, Sweden
BYKER COMMUNITY GARDENS
BYKER COMMUNITY GARDENS
MAKING BYKER
Hobby Agencies: Byker Community Gardens
Hobby Agencies: Byker Community Gardens
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