Ideas man

摘要

'I've been doing a plan for London and the South East,' says Terry Farrell. 'How long is it since anyone did that?' And he draws another one for me, on a notepad. It comes out as a bit like a star with rounded points. Essentially a number of finger-diagrams, joined. Farrell is talking about London's airports and the fact that you cannot just consider them in isolation. You have to consider how each proposal - Gatwick being the one he is associated with - affects everything else. 'I've got in it the Thames Gateway as parkland, not as an airport.' He says. Cards on the table there, then. What might seem to be a form of megalomania in anyone else comes over, in Farrell's soft-voiced delivery, as merely a pragmatic response to a situation. 'I've always had this interest in providing answers if possible,' is how he puts it. This all started when he first got into the alternative-plan business, typically backing local groups and conservationists by drawing up more considered proposals to the big-money comprehensive redevelopments then in vogue. He got chided by the RIBA for this in those more strait-laced days, he recalls, on the grounds that he was setting his schemes against those drawn up by architectural colleagues. My, how things have changed.