24 Hours to Save...
24 Hours to Save ...... Winchester!
.... took place on Friday 19th and Saturday 20th March
‘So, planners, architects, and engineers take the initiative. Go to work, and above all co-operate and don’t hold back on one another or try to gain at the expense of another. Any success in such lopsidedness will be increasingly short-lived. These are the synergetic rules that evolution is employing and trying to make clear to us on this spaceship earth of ours.’
Climate change is the single most pressing issue that faces the planet today.
Architects, engineers, planners, artists and design students are well placed to be at the forefront of tackling this challenge not only at the level of single-built projects but also at the city scale. 24 hours to Save... was a design initiative coordinated by the Solent Centre for Architecture + Design, along with architecture plb, that encouraged designers from all these disciplines to give their imaginations free reign and to seek solutions for a sustainable city by the year 2020.
Culminating in a 24 hour design event, 24 Hours to Save... was part competition, part workshop, part action debate, part exhibition, that aimed to bring fresh thinking and challenging ideas into the public debate about how we will need to live in the city of the future if we are to redress the current pressure we place on ‘spaceship earth’.
Beginning at midday on the Friday, multi-disciplinary teams were set the task of discussing, exploring, creating and ultimately presenting their ideas of the sustainable city at midday on the Saturday to a public audience. Each team was given a brief that focused on different areas of the sustainable city and then worked through the night, ready to present their proposals the following day. Talks were also given on topics relevant to sustainable design which members of the public attended. The topics were: 'Designing the sustainable city' by Richard Eastham of Feria Urbanism; 'Transport in the city' by Mike Slinn, Chair WinACC Transport Group; 'Balancing heritage and the needs of a sustainable city' by Paul Bulkeley of Snug Projects, and 'Energy in the sustainable city' by Ed Everton and Stephen Canadine of Gifford UK.
The presentations given by the teams were stimulating, innovative and amazingly detailed for the time allowed. To view the presentation by the Mott MacDonald team, working with Francis Forward and Ed Francis and students from Portsmouth University School of Architecture, click on the link below:
