Dot and I love watching Kevin McCloud's Grand Designs on ABC TV. So we readily agreed to purchase tickets for his Canberra performance where he reminisced about his childhood and where he then lived, talked about house design principles and issues of urban planning, and other themes relevant to prosperous and convenient urban living. This event was on the Sunday evening, just a day after the events just reported on two blog postings.
The tickets were very expensive - c. A$140 each (or maybe c. 72 GBP). However, the audience was riveted for over 3 hours as he engaged in an illustrated monologue, occasionally interspersed with challenges for the audience in general or selected personnel who went on-stage to wrestle with questions or issues he raised.
As usual, I took occasional pictures of the event, some of which are posted below to provide an better sense of the occasion. Here's our host for the evening.
And, as the screen behind him shows, we could if we were early enough, pose questions for him to answer. So he was definitely interested in stages a kind of public discussion.
As the next few photos show, his architectural interests stretch from the historical to the contemporary and from city to country - both in terms of design and construction methods.
Both Dot and I have notices how his program oscillates from week to week between those dimensions. If anything, Kevin seems to focus more on rural locations than city spaces and perhaps that's because city development options may be constrained somewhat by various urban planning controls and reluctance of some residents to accept new ways of doing things - the famous NIMBY syndrome.
At one point Kevin bought on-stage a team of respondents who wore crash helmets - presumably to give them some kind of safety when they failed answer correctly the various questions he posed.
The tickets were very expensive - c. A$140 each (or maybe c. 72 GBP). However, the audience was riveted for over 3 hours as he engaged in an illustrated monologue, occasionally interspersed with challenges for the audience in general or selected personnel who went on-stage to wrestle with questions or issues he raised.
As usual, I took occasional pictures of the event, some of which are posted below to provide an better sense of the occasion. Here's our host for the evening.
And, as the screen behind him shows, we could if we were early enough, pose questions for him to answer. So he was definitely interested in stages a kind of public discussion.
As the next few photos show, his architectural interests stretch from the historical to the contemporary and from city to country - both in terms of design and construction methods.
Both Dot and I have notices how his program oscillates from week to week between those dimensions. If anything, Kevin seems to focus more on rural locations than city spaces and perhaps that's because city development options may be constrained somewhat by various urban planning controls and reluctance of some residents to accept new ways of doing things - the famous NIMBY syndrome.
All up it was a great occasion from which I retrieved a few good ideas.
AS
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