Newcastle’s Farrell Centre, an enaction of Terry Farrell’s theories of city-making, uses its first show to address the climate emergency, explains director Owen Hopkins
There is surely no more exhilarating arrival into any British city than approaching Newcastle by train from the south. After trundling through Gateshead, one suddenly emerges high above the Tyne looking out over a dramatic cascade of bridges. Just visible, peering out high above the city, is the Geordie Cathedral, otherwise known as St James’ Park football stadium.
Newcastle’s – or rather Tyneside’s – urbanism is defined by its stark, at times arresting contrasts: the way the railway punches its way through the city; 19th century industrial buildings next to 21st century icons; the elegant neoclassical city of John Dobson et al abutted by the modernistic visions of T Dan Smith, the charismatic impresario who transformed the city in the 1960s and early 70s.
Smith, it’s fair to say, remains a highly controversial figure, with his legacy forever tainted by his fall and eventual imprisonment for corruption. Yet he, more than anyone else, is responsible for the Newcastle of today. And as one walks round the city and sees what he realised – from the US-style central motorway, and numerous modern housing estates, to his crowning achievement, the Civic Centre – the energy, ambition and sheer radical zeal that drove his project to reimagine Newcastle as a great city-state of the north is still palpable.
T Dan Smith was riding high when Terry Farrell, Britain’s most important architect-planner of the last 40 years, was growing up in Newcastle. It’s fair to say that Farrell’s approach to city-making, manifest in projects around the world, as well as his home city where he led the 1990s regeneration of the derelict quayside, is almost diametrically opposed to Smith’s. Yet the share a fundamental belief that cities are more than just bricks and mortar, steel and concrete, but are central to defining who we are – and who we want to be – as individuals and as society. In contrast to Smith’s top-down, paternalistic approach, Farrell sees this as meaning that everyone should have a voice in the conversation about a city’s future.
This simple yet quietly radical contention is the starting point for the Farrell Centre – a new public forum for architecture and cities, established by Newcastle University, which opens on 22 April. Combining a gallery, research hub and community space, the Farrell Centre aims to be a new type of public institution, a place where ideas are generated, tested and debated, and where everyone – from professionals to school kids – has a seat at the table.
Farrell has been the instigator of the project that bears his name in several ways. In 2018 he gave his practice archive to the university as a resource for research and engaging the public in architecture and planning. At the same time he pledged £1 million towards the refurbishment and transformation of a four-storey Victorian building on the edge of the university campus into an ‘urban room’ for Newcastle and Tyneside.
This followed the recommendation he had made in the Farrell Review, a report commissioned by the government into the UK’s built environment published in 2014, that every city should have an ‘urban room’ where local people can go to learn about the past, present and future of where they live. And following that model, a key part of the Farrell Centre will be a rolling programme of public talks, meetings, roundtables, workshops of school, families and young people all geared to encouraging participation in the debate about what kind of city we want to live in.
Cities, of course, have never existed in isolation. Local situations are felt (and often repeated) regionally, nationally and globally – and vice versa. And this no more true with the climate emergency and the seismic changes it imposes on how we live and understand our place in the world.
This provides the focus for the centre’s inaugural exhibition – More with Less: Reimagining Architecture for a Changing World – for which we have commissioned four architects to create installations that explore how we can dramatically reduce the built environment’s carbon footprint, but without compromising architecture’s potential to bring about social, cultural, and technological transformation.
This followed the recommendation he had made in the Farrell Review, a report commissioned by the government into the UK’s built environment published in 2014, that every city should have an ‘urban room’ where local people can go to learn about the past, present and future of where they live. And following that model, a key part of the Farrell Centre will be a rolling programme of public talks, meetings, roundtables, workshops for schools, families and young people all geared to encouraging participation in the debate about what kind of city we want to live in.
Cities, of course, have never existed in isolation. Local situations are felt (and often repeated) regionally, nationally and globally – and vice versa. And this no more true than with the climate emergency and the seismic changes it imposes on how we live and understand our place in the world.
This provides the focus for the centre’s inaugural exhibition – More with Less: Reimagining Architecture for a Changing World – for which we have commissioned four architects to create installations that explore how we can dramatically reduce the built environment’s carbon footprint, but without compromising architecture’s potential to bring about social, cultural, and technological transformation.
At the heart of the show is the belief that while architecture and planning have often been part of the problem – the built environment is, after all, a significant contributor to global carbon emissions – they must be also part of the solution. And for the Farrell Centre as a whole, we are driven by the conviction that architecture and planning can offer the tools to help us not only navigate an ever more complex and fragmented world, but perhaps set it on another course.
As for Newcastle, it’s easy to be critical of the hubris – and at times excess – of T Dan Smith and that era. And for sure, the challenges we face today require fundamentally different approaches. Yet for all that, at this critical moment it’s vital we recapture that moment’s radical, transformative spirit and harness it now in creating more open, more inclusive and more sustainable cities. The Farrell Centre’s mission is to help make that happen.
Owen Hopkins is a writer, curator and director of the Farrell Centre