1 post tagged “bath”
From Devon it was on to Bath, the town I was raised in, for my mother's 70th birthday party, a visit that proved very depressing -- architecturally. (The party, reuniting my parents' friends that I'd not seen in years, was surprisingly fun). But why, you might ask? Isn't Bath one of the world's most gracious cities, with perfectly preserved Georgian classical crescents and Roman Baths and parks and elegant clothing stores that make those walking its streets feel like characters in a Jane Austen movie? Yes, it is all of that but it's also so weighed down by its lofty past that it has trouble moving into the future.
One of Bath's longtime residents is James Dyson, the engineer/industrial designer who invented the eponymous vacuum cleaner (and, incidentally, he used to test some of his 5,127 prototypes on the carpet of a clothing store I worked in as a teenager). He's had the brilliant idea of opening a design and engineering school on the banks of the river in Bath for high-schoolers, to be designed by Wilkinson Eyre, a London-based architectural firm known for technologically radical designs like the Wilkinson Eyre. The school was intended to open this year but has faced all sorts of roadblocks largely on the strength of it's -- eek! -- Modern design, and is still pending approval.
Meanwhile, the bulldozers are busy in the South end of the city, where developers had no trouble getting a green light to build an utterly tame, fake classical shopping center, adding to the surfeit of shops already in the city, and reinforcing the impression that Bath is more comfortable as a repository of its heritage than as an incubator of new ideas.
MEMO to LA, as it becomes more respectful of its architectural heritage, and Design Review Boards and HPOZs proliferate: preserve wisely but don't ever become precious, like Bath. It kills vitality.
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