Grand Designs Extras Kevin's Column: New Series

Date Published:

06/01/2009

Variety is the spice of life and the essence of making a successful new series of Grand Designs

The fresh, new crop of grand designs is hitting our screens this February. A crop that can best be described as sweet, green and crunchily textured. And just as with winter vegetables, the secret of cooking up a series for transmission in deepest winter is not hoping that a stock cube will create the flavour, but ensuring variety of ingredients; a good mix of people, building types and plenty of greens, of course. A series of Grand Designs wouldn’t be complete without a healthy dose of exemplary and sometimes experimental eco projects. Just as we feel duty-bound to include the occasional white-rendered, glass-walled box.

I think it is the extraordinary variety of projects over the past ten years and hundred or so films that keeps Grand Designs going. We work hard to bring you new ideas and fresh architecture. I don’t think we’ve ever repeated ourselves – which is more than can be said for some green veg at this time of year.

When I say fresh I mean just that. You might think that we simply film eight projects over the course of a year and politely purée them up, before gently baking in Channel 4’s TV-editing machine. But it doesn’t work like that – we don’t make ‘a series’. It takes between 12 and 18 months for projects to finish (sometimes two or three years) meaning that at any one time we have, say, 15 buildings on the go. So we guess which ones might finish in time, and whip them towards the finishing line praying that we can get the things edited, voiced-over and biked to the studio before 9pm the following Tuesday.

This season we have eight new projects, all as intriguing as ever. We follow the construction of what can best be described as a beautiful, giant, wooden Portakabin, clad with sticks to camouflage it in an attempt to blend hillbilly architecture with Miesian Modernism. We also proudly present the world’s first zero-carbon timbrel-vaulted, passive eco home. For this you have to imagine that Ronald McDonald has turned eco-warrior, taken one of his golden arches, covered it in turf and then stuck a jumble of jauntily angled takeaway boxes underneath. Ronald is, in fact, Richard Hawkes, an architect with a taste for combining local materials and timber framing with construction technologies never before seen in the UK.

Conversely, we see Darren Howarth, the man behind the earthships project in Brighton, build an earth-sheltered home in Brittany. This is a truly recycled house using hundreds of tons of soil, a photovoltaic-tile roof and walls made out of 1,000 recycled car tyres, rammed with yet more earth, stacked and earth-plastered. It is possibly the first earthship-inspired design I’ve seen that isn’t ugly.

At the other end of the carbon scale we have a variation on our usual mid-life-crisis house. This normally takes the form of a big, white modernist cube/odd-shaped geometric form with plate glass windows/walls and 4.5km of underfloor hypocaust/category 5 cabling. But this time it’s altogether more inventive and ambitious, with a rooftop pod slung out over the eaves of Brighton. Mad perhaps; but not as crazy as the reproduction American watermill being built on a 30-degree slope in Oxfordshire. On a chalk escarpment. With no water. A design inspired by a tiny picture on a yogurt pot.

As you might predict, this one goes horribly wrong and has allowed me to indulge a long-held ambition to bore you with a film about planning. Not just planning mind you, but the lunacy of neighbourly disputes, planning cock-ups, the planning inspectorate and the appeals procedure. It is, in fact, riveting stuff. I hope you enjoy it.

Like any designer or architect, I now do most of my work in front of a screen. After two decades of post-Darwinian super evolution, computer software is a million years away from its primordial DOS soup, and almost as easy to use as a pencil. No, easier. I can turn a bad stag-night photo into a piece of psychedelic art in Photoshop. Or extrude weird 3D forms from nanopixels and binary code in Autodesk. Or cut my own film in the free software that came on my laptop. None of this was possible in the Eighties. Then, I’d have needed a drawing board plus darkroom, mixed media modelling workshop and editing suite with a computer the size of a bungalow.

The new series of Grand Designs starts on 4 February on Channel 4.

This edition of Kevin's Column is taken from the February issue of Grand Designs magazine. If you would like to subscribe for as little as £9 then head here to find out more.

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