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Friday 17 November 2017

Knowle relocation project: PegasusLife proposals >>> Where is the innovative, sympathetic, green design?

The current design for Knowle is not exactly in keeping with its immediate environment, the local streetscape or anything else in the Valley for that matter:



Futures Forum: Knowle Relocation Project: PegausLife's 113 apartment development at Tetbury: "our largest development to date" >>> "low-rise apartment blocks surrounded by green space ... designed to blend easily with the local landscape"



Futures Forum: "Is Sidmouth to become simply a ghetto for the super-rich and a cash-cow for the Council? "

Back in July 2013, this blog showcased the home and office of the architect who has since designed the proposed development at Knowle:
Futures Forum: Self-build

The house in London is indeed a very fine design - which the Architects' Journal was full of praise for:

Is this the most influential house in a generation?

30 JANUARY, 2015 BY HATTIE HARTMAN


Now in its 15th year, how has Sarah Wigglesworth and Jeremy Till’s radical home/office in north London, a test bed for green design, fared?


Architects’ own homes have a formidable lineage. As Charles Jencks has observed, they can be both ‘extreme and obsessive’. Sarah Wigglesworth and Jeremy Till’s straw bale house and associated office at 9-10 Stock Orchard Street in Islington, London, is no exception. When he put the house’s straw bales on the cover of the Architectural Review in January 2002, former editor Peter Davey called it ‘the most sexy and witty building I have seen for years.’ Yet, to this day, Wigglesworth has not built another private house.

Stock Orchard House coincided with the surge of interest in architecture as lifestyle. It was featured in Channel 4’s inaugural Grand Designs series in 1999 and again shortly after completion in early 2001, with frequent repeats, including one earlier this month. Wigglesworth and Till set out to forge not only a new lifestyle but a new aesthetic for sustainability, which would distinguish itself from the worthy but dull tropes too often associated with green design.


Is this the most influential house in a generation? | Building | Architects Journal

Yes, this house in London is the perfect 'green design': and yet, wouldn't the perfect 'green design' for Knowle be renovation and refurbishment?
Futures Forum: "A truly green alternative to EDDC's proposal"
Futures Forum: Knowle: refurbishment vs redevelopment

And whilst the house in London is hardly 'dull', is this the sort of architecture which is appropriate for this corner of Sidmouth?
Futures Forum: Knowle relocation project >>> a far more imposing development than assumed? Part Six: "the new building would be twice as high a the current building"

And why are we not getting the same sort of 'innovative' design at Knowle?
Futures Forum: A solution to our housing problems: 'alternative housing'
Futures Forum: Eco-housing ten years on
Futures Forum: Self-build

Of course, here in Devon, we have the original straw and mud house - called the cob cottage:
Futures Forum: A cob cottage for £150...
Futures Forum: Building Cob Castles in East Devon... on Grand Designs
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