Let’s celebrate one of the profession’s best qualities

At the AJ we know that architects can bring a clarity of thinking to complex issues, coupled with an ability to see the big picture. You are connectors, enablers and instigators of positive change.

That’s why we’re delighted to be launching a new platform, ‘Blueprints for Change’, to discover and publish what architects and others in the built environment sector are proposing to tackle the most pressing social and environmental challenges. As Will Hurst explains in his introduction, we want to highlight ‘your ability to solve problems, to think laterally and to question the status quo’.

First up is 5th Studio director Tom Holbrook’s bold proposition for The Arc – a 100-mile public landscape with water at its heart. Taking in a water-challenged and nature-depleted crescent of land lying between Oxford and Cambridge, the ambitious proposal envisions ‘a multipurpose landscape: a place for leisure that also collects water; an impenetrable landscape and a landscape for human occupation; a landscape to broaden natural diversity and one to provision the settlements within it’.

The approach rethinks our relationship with nature, through an architectural lens. It recognises the real need for human development, but proposes the very opposite of what usually happens, when an ‘infrastructure project is built to solve a particular problem and landscape is thought of as an even overlay to ameliorate and disguise the solution’.

‘Big’ doesn’t need to mean imposed from the top down. ‘Visionary’ doesn’t need to be overlaid and enforced. And, of course, big, visionary thinking can have good, as well as negative, outcomes.

But with generous, open-minded civic interventions, so much can be improved. Cristina Monteiro’s inspiring column explores the social value in architecture, and how that value, by any measure, is multiplied because of its longevity, localness and commitment.

Whatever your political persuasion, it’s obvious that the parlous state of England’s school buildings needs a drastic, visionary (and financial) intervention – and fast. While bold budgetary changes are made with a sweep of a pen at the macro level, each crumbling classroom is a local, micro tragedy. Check out Anna Highfield’s deep dive into how we got here, and where we’re going.

Good, careful school design can change children’s lives. Schools (like water) are critical elements of our infrastructure, not a mere overlay to disguise a problem. Starting with the individual child in mind, and each child’s need for nurture and growth, can help solve seemingly insurmountable problems. That could mean creating a vibrant civic building in a cramped urban site (see Rivington Street Studio’s Oasis Academy in Silvertown); or supporting those whose lives have been impacted by trauma through access to nature (Loader Monteith’s new woodland hub for Harmeny Education Trust near Edinburgh).

The best ideas, like children, will grow and – hopefully – thrive. We look forward to your Blueprints for Change.

Subscribers can read the January issue here, or it can be purchased from the AJ Shop