by Leaves we Live

Today how many people think twice about a leaf?
Yet the leaf is the chief product and phenomenon of life.

Dear Friends,

Concrete Designs to Thrive: we're delighted to introduce our new programme with an online Concrete Walk by Design in Edinburgh starting next week.

Concrete Designs to Thrive takes the world's most ubiquitous product as material focus. Through our rolling programme across Scotland's seven cities, we explore the good and bad of concrete, drawing on the nation's heritage and platforming the contemporary design of spaces and places for living well.

Fitting that we introduce our Concrete Designs to Thrive programme within Archifringe21. This impressive initiative has run since 2016 and the latest iteration  launches tonight. Tune in to check out more here.

Fitting too that our new programme and next week's introductory Walk by Design takes Patrick Geddes as inspiration, a Scottish design legacy with global reach all about locality, co-design, and systems thinking with nature in mind. In the months to come we reach out from Scotland to key European cities and further in a path as plotted by the internationalist Patrick Geddes himself.

Edinburgh can of course claim a special relationship and we begin our Concrete Walk by Design at Riddle's Court, remodelled and offered to all by the Scottish Historic Buildings Trust.

We invite your contributions as we walk and talk in a live online series of visits: please follow Journeys in Design and book via Eventbrite here.

#concreteScotland

Photography forms a core of Concrete Designs to Thrive and we invite you to contribute your own smart phone pics using the #concreteScotland hashtag, helping us build a photobank of images for our touring Photo Booth Gallery.

Our new programme and in particular our new Concrete Walk by Design, acknowledges those who have also been inspired by Patrick Geddes, from those who diligently archive to those who apply his wisdom to their own work today. Please do join us to hear and see more from next week.

As is our opening quote, the last word for now is given to Patrick Geddes, from his Summer Farewell Lecture to University College Dundee

This is a green world, with animals comparatively few and small, and all dependent upon the leaves. 
By leaves we live... not by the jingling of our coins, but by the fullness of our harvests.

With best wishes from all the team,
John
John Ennis, Curator Producer, 
Journeys in Design