 Civic
societies in Wales are invited to take part in our new Local Design
Awards scheme. Its aim is to encourage the recognition and celebration
of good design in communities throughout Wales.
We are asking civic societies to identify development
and conservation projects that successfully respond to local sense
of place and which meet the needs of their intended users.
The successful schemes will be announced at an
all-Wales ceremony in the summer of 2003, alongside the Civic Trust
Awards for Wales.
Projects nominated will be validated by a panel
drawn from professional and civic society representatives on the
Trust Board. The panel will seek to identify projects which show
special creativity or imagination in the fulfilment of their brief.
The criteria are based on the factors identified
as making for good design in the Assembly’s Technical Advice
Note on Design, the recently issued TAN 12.
All types and scales of projects can be considered,
for example:
- Conservation/re-use of buildings/spaces/parks/gardens
- Shopfront design
- New build business, retail, social, educational,
industrial, or residential schemes – large or small scale
- Landscape or floorscape schemes, including the
successful introduction of new street furniture, planting or lighting.
Nominated projects should have been completed within
the last five years. Amongst the issues on which we are suggesting
societies focus are:
- Response to local character and context –
you may want to consider both the immediate setting and the wider
context of the community/landscape setting of the project.
- How far does the project fit successfully into
the site and its wider topographic/landscape setting?
- Response to opportunities to offer an innovative
design solution to the brief. As TAN 12 states, “a contextual
approach should not necessarily prohibit design in a contemporary
idiom”.
- Response to opportunities to clarify or improve
the relationship between private and public space.
- Response to the need to ensure accessibility
to all – the needs of the those with restricted mobility
or other disabilities or circumstances
- The extent to which the layout of the project
contributes to a local environment which local people enjoy, and
feel safe and secure using and moving through it on foot.
- Projects' responses to the needs or aspirations
of its intended users?
- Sustainability and biodiversity
TAN 12: Design can be obtained free from
the Assembly’s Publications Centre, Pierhead Street, Cardiff
CF99 1NA, and downloaded from the planning section of the Assembly
web site www.wales.gov.uk
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