Talk: Can you code a city?

How Design Codes are transforming the way we shape our cities.

How do you code to ensure good design in perpetuity? Can design codes ensure good design & how do we allow them to flex enough to allow for innovation?

From Kings Cross to Lewes (via Bath North Quays) we look at beautiful developments that have been guided & shaped by design codes.

About our speakers:

Bob Allies is a partner of Allies and Morrison, a visiting professor at the University of Reading, chair of the Faculty of Architecture at the British School at Rome, & chair of Design Review for Design South East.

Allies & Morrison’s work encompasses architecture, urbanism & planning. As well as being responsible for masterplanning many of London’s major regeneration projects including Kings Cross, Greenwich Peninsula & the Olympic Legacy, the practice also works extensively with local authorities, advising on local characterisation & development strategies.

Allies & Morrison prepared the original masterplans for Bath North Quays & for Brabazon, the new urban quarter now being built on Filton airfield.

Cany Ash worked for a dozen architecture practices in London, Berlin & New York before founding Ash Sakula Architects with Robert Sakula in 1994. Ash Sakula has established a reputation for working in unpromising sites & creating strong identities for places with mixed public & private clients. The practice sees an urgent need for more live research and development in the city, allowing neighbourhoods to evolve through temporary projects & inventive reuse while exploiting passive technologies, & innovative construction.

The process of National Design Coding offers a forum for discussion. It can be the means by which the trajectory of a place can be explored collectively and tethered to local aspirations; setting quantifiable targets which impact on the shape of future development. Or such a process, done in haste and forced, risks disempowering future conversations, posing generic solutions to over defined problems.