REVIEW AND ANALYSIS 21 The users of places (the people they are designed for) experience the patterns from within, as they move in and through a place. The patterns provide comfort and familiarity. Order does not mean boring, necessarily. To be attractive to us, as humans, there must be complexity and interest², but this can be held within an ordered structure – patterned complexity – providing that desired comfort and reassurance. Retained patterns can inform the logic of structure. Retained individual heritage features can enhance the complexity and interest. A site should be visited, and experienced, before proposing how to change it. The translation of plan to place, developing the ability to recognise these patterns in actuality, is aided by letting the place become the teacher or leader of the design process. There is value in ordinary. The ordinary can mean much more to so many more people than the extraordinary because it is recognised, appreciated and related to more easily, and comfortably. A pattern can be as simple as recognising that there are backcloth and special buildings³. Not all buildings can be special, and the vast majority of buildings form a backcloth to human activity, allowing the special buildings to stand out. When looking at what to keep on site, how heritage features can inform and influence the design of a new place, decisions must be made about when heritage plays the role of backcloth or when it becomes the special feature. Indeed, the act of keeping something can elevate it from being part of a former backcloth to that of special status in its new environment. Either way, a heritage asset can add to the sense of place, immeasurably. Life is, and always has been, based upon movement⁴ and human movement creates and leaves patterns. Brownfield sites that have been left for a while and then come forward for development have often been recolonised by nature. Notwithstanding the biodiversity retention issues this might bring, the significance of the heritage assets may be disguised, buried and long forgotten. Old routeways are important. They show desire lines of the past. They can be considered as portals in time, that can re-establish lost connections and meaning, potentially resurrecting animation, activity and life. They can be used to structure new places and indicate where reconnections can be made, to bind a new development into its surroundings and create a logic as to where the focus of a redevelopment should be. Frequently allied to patterns of movement is the seemingly often disproportionate visual and physical importance and significance of boundaries. Humans are ‘thigmotactic’;² we are a wallhugging species. We quite literally rub up against boundary features on occasion. We prefer not to walk across wide, open spaces, instead staying closer to the edges. Retained boundaries can reinforce structure and lessen the impact of new developments by helping to assimilate the change and provide a degree of continuity, comfort and familiarity⁵. If all this sounds familiar, it should be. Paths, nodes and edges, with landmarks and districts, make places imaginable. These five elements form the basis of Kevin Lynch’s analysis of places⁶. Nothing is ever entirely new it seems nor, in this case, bettered, as a method of understanding. The whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts. These elements combine to imbue character. A sense of place is important to most people, who prefer buildings and the places they make up to look distinctive and reflect Repurposed gas holders at Coal Drops Yard
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