10 December 2015

Paolo Vimercati joined the Grimshaw London office in 2006 after completing a Master of Advance Studies in Sustainable Urban Planning at the Accademia di Mendrisio in Switzerland and he is now an experienced member of the senior team. He has worked extensively in the infrastructure, commercial and education sectors, gaining skills on a range of projects. He has been involved in a number of highly complex city and infrastructure master plan projects at Grimshaw, including the Birmingham Market City Centre Master Plan, the New Covent Garden Market regeneration project, the Tirana Master Plan and the Venice Marghera Master Plan.

The New Covent Garden Market project, which provides a fruit, vegetable and flower market within a 57-acre site, seeks to condense the market activities to free up as much surplus land as possible for commercial development. This involved multiple consultations with various stakeholders and statutory bodies. In addition to a review with the client body, Grimshaw carried out detailed consultation with the Greater London Authority, Wandsworth planning department, adjoining owners and developers, market traders, local pressure groups and various other interested parties.

"The lecture was focused on how GRIMSHAW develops its architecture and presented 2 project examples to demonstrate our through process and our design philosophy focused on innovation, experience and sustainability.'

Jacob Voorthuis (1960) teaches philosophy of the built environment at the TU Eindhoven. With a special interest in the relationship between spatial practice and design, his research is concerned with the possibility of judging designs and design decisions from the perspective of a developing ontology of use, the attempt to remodel our conception of use and the useful in design thinking.

"It is not just a useless exercise to attempt to make architecture into an objective discipline, it is criminal, unscientific and counterproductive. It does not pay to objectify architecture, just as it does not pay to objectify human beings. And the reason is this: the object of architecture -the building- interacts with human beings; in fact that is its primary purpose. Design decisions affecting human beings should take account of the complexity of being human or risk objectifying not just architecture but human being itself.

A design decision should therefore never rely on objective criteria to be judged good or bad as such an approach has a good chance of neglecting what is most essential to us, namely our humanity, whatever that is. If this reasoning is sound and rigorous, and I believe it is, then how should we arrive at sensible decisions concerning design? The answer I would like to explore in this talk is the close parallel between the philosophy of design and political philosophy, and more particularly the idea of justice and justification."