no2self.net

“Stunning new look for Birmingham’s New Street station…”

Wait a minute, that looks rather familiar…

Gare de Lyon by Santiago Calatrava

Times are hard. Your credit is being crunched and there’s nothing you can do about it. Your value is being chamfered.

Open the door and run. Run like the wind. Jump. Jump up. Jump up, jump up and get down. Nobody can take that from us, it’ll always be ours. Everything else has gone to hell in a handbasket. Run, run free…. free run.

Dan Mathieson, Head of Sponsorship at Barclaycard, the title sponsor of the World Freerun Championships said: “Freerunning is an amazing sport and some of the moves executed by the top performers are truly breathtaking. For Barclaycard, the fluidity of movement that is at the very heart of free running has a clear parallel with the freedom that we give our customers through such innovations as contactless payments and travel with the Barclaycard OnePulse card. We’re proud to support the first of what we are sure will become major annual events”

Oh dear.

This month saw the first Freerun World Championships in London and they were sponsored by Barclaycard. There’s little point dwelling on the obvious, soul crushing irony here; it’s just too depressing. Anyway, who am I to begrudge these guys the chance to go legit and pay the rent doing what they love most? Every form of human endeavour becomes a potential franchise in the end, right? Might as well embrace it before your sponsor goes belly up in the coming economic event horizon.

However, there’s no escaping the emptiness of the black boxes and railings in the video above. Surely free running has meaning and sense of purpose defined in part by the reinterpretation of the urban landscape? Or put another way, it looks a lot cooler with a good piece of architecture in the background.

So, come on Barclaycard, how about next year you employ some architects to design the course? Or perhaps rebuild seminal spaces from urban topographies around the world. Take a vote from freerunners everywhere and then construct their favourite places on the other side of the world, allowing the locals to reap the benefits of your global reach without all that tedious mucking about with carbon spewing plane jouneys. See how the London boys take on the spaces of Manhattan, or let the New York team tackle urban Russia. You could even employ Richard O’Brian to present it.

Buy the Birmingham Library and turn it into the world centre for freerunning.

Because let’s face it, enlarged photos of shuttered concrete just doesn’t cut it.

More notes from Architecture, You and Me by Siegfried Giedion (found in a second hand bookshop in 2005). This time it’s the recounting of a delightful list of important urban design developments since 1850 - books and building - according to Mr Giedion.

The New Urbanists amongst you may find the regular appearance of Corb a little upsetting. Nevertheless it’s a useful reference with many projects that deserve further investigation. I’ll be adding notes and links in the coming months to a wiki page: no2self.net/wiki. Feel free to edit it as well.

• 1856-1867 The Public Squares of Paris - Alphonse Alphand
• 1857-1860 Central Park, New York - Frederick Law Olmsted
• 1882 The Linear City - Arturo Soria y Mata
• 1889 The Art of Building Cities - Camillo Sitte
• 1898 Garden Cities of Tomorrow - Ebenezer Howard
• 1901 The Industrial City - Tony Garnier
• 1901 Housing Legislation in Holland
• 1915 Cities in Evolution - Patrick Geddes
• 1920 Welwyn Garden City, England - Raymond Unwin
• 1922 Plan Voisin, Paris - Le Corbusier
• 1927 Weissenhof Housing Project, Stuttgart
• 1927 Roemerstadt, Frankfort - Ernst May
• 1928 Dammerstock Housing Project, Karlsruhe - Walter Gropius
• 1929 Siemenstadt, Berlin - Walter Gropius
• 1929 Radburn, New Jersey - Henry Wright and Clarence Stein
• 1929 The Neighbourhood Unit - Clarence Perry
• 1933 The “Charte D’Athenes” - CIAM 4
• 1934 Broadacre City - Frank Lloyd Wright
• 1935 La Ville Radieuse - Le Corbusier
• 1938 Culture of Cities - Lewis Mumford
• 1944 The Greater London Plan - Patrick Abercrombie
• 1945 Saint-Die, Vosges, France - Le Corbusier
• 1948 Harlow New Town, England - Frederick Gibberd
• 1948 Chimbote, Peru - P.L.Wiener and J.L.Sert
• 1951 Chandigargh, Punjab, India - Le Corbusier
• 1951 The Core of the City - CIAM 8
• 1952 Vallingby, Sweden - Sven Markelius
• 1953 Back Bay Center, Boston, Massachusetts - Walter Gropius and others
• 1956 Alexander Polder, Holland - R.Bakema and Group OPBOUW
• 1956 Southdale Shopping Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota - Victor Gruen
• 1956 Lafayette Park, Detroit, Michigan - Mies van der Rohe
• 1957 Brazilia, Brazil

And then the book was published in 1958. So where do we go from there? Answers on a postcard please, I’m off to compile a list from 1958 onwards.