Wales celebrates everyday delights
For three years now, motorists in Newport have been enjoying a splendid array of wild flowers along its road verges and roundabouts planted by landscape architect Richard Wood. This project, commissioned by Newport City Council, is one of eight examples of commonplace pleasures showcased in Delight in the Everyday at the Ruthin Craft Centre.
This exhibition has been curated by the Design Commission for Wales as an alternative to award-winning ‘event’ architecture.
'There’s not so much opportunity to celebrate everyday design, but that’s what makes the most difference to people’s lives,' says curator Amanda Spence.
Entries were invited from designers working in the built environment in Wales. The result is a mix of the public and the personal and an exploration of different, often unassuming forms of delight. Coombs Jones investigated what makes public space delightful, analysing the unsung contribution of thresholds.
Architect Chris Loyn contributed a visual tribute to the quiet narrow lane in Penarth that his son Jack enjoys using in his wheelchair. For him, the delight is in the independence that the journeys along the lane give him. It is shortly to be officially named Jack’s Lane.
Wayne Forster, a lecturer at the Welsh School of Architecture, explored thermal delight through an analysis of the changing warm spots in his house throughout the day. Pentan Architects studied how care homes it had designed had been made to feel homely by the residents. Homeliness was also a theme of Dow Jones’ design (as yet unbuilt) for a new Maggie’s Centre in Cardiff, where the aim was to create an everyday atmosphere rather than that of a medical institution.
Spence hopes that the exhibition will increase awareness of the role that design, however modest, plays day-to-day.
'We hope it’ll make people stop and think about their surroundings and how design influences their everyday life.'
Delight in the Everyday, until November 28, Ruthin Craft Centre, The Centre for the Applied Arts, Park Road, Ruthin, Denbighshire, Wales www.ruthincraftcentre.org.uk