Summary: Pleiade: Architects and urban designers based in Bristol, United Kingdom. Pleiade: Web Architects, Bristol.
Pleiade are Architects and Masterplanners for the LOX Airport project.
Keywords: Pleiade - Architects Bristol - London Oxford Airport - LOX - Web Architects Bristol - Urban designers Bristol - Pleiades - La Pléiade
Content:
Pleiade Associates are architects and urban designers based in Bristol, United Kingdom.
Rationality v. political expediency…
Pleiade Associates are the Project Masterplanners for the LOX Study.*
Design not style…
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Lost in (cyber)space…?
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The Pleiades…
The expansion of airport capacity in the UK is fraught with the potential for conflict and the debate over it remains in the thrall of discordant irrationality on many sides. Yet it is perverse that any proposed solution should seek to entrench former planning errors, many of which are gravely damaging to both economic and environmental interests: rather they should seek to minimize these adverse effects whilst maximizing the benefits of growth. Some will argue that no such expansion should—or even possibly can—happen, but here we are only concerned with the real prospects which may achieve a resolution.
It is our contention that, after London Heathrow, LOX is demonstrably the optimal location for such an airport (see: White Paper - Review of London Oxford Airport, DfT, 2003 and The Future of Air Transport, DfT, 2003. Section 11.115†). The London Oxford Airport Study (LOX) sets out the "Best Practicable Environmental Option"⁂ for the resolution of the impending crisis in airport capacity in the South East Region of the United Kingdom: it would also yield the greatest economic benefits to the region and the United Kingdom, excepting the problematic proposal for a third runway at London Heathrow. The principal and enduring impediments to the project are political myopia and cowardice, even allowing for the 'environmental' zealotry which is, of course, the proxy ally of the existing airports.
⁂ According to an ancient Greek proverb, the least bad [choice] is the best (μὴ χείρον βέλτιστον). In a consummate display of media-management and PR legerdemain the Department for Transport has ensured that, except for the BAA airports (Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted), the only widely-publicised options for expansion were variants of the revived Thames estuary airport, with their attendant environmental, locational and economic deficiencies (in four re-incarnations: Maplin, Marinair, Cliffe and TCP/London Mayoral). The absurdity of these schemes has been long-demonstrated and clear to departments of state since the 1970's, but their value to government is to deflect attention from those viable, but politically contentious, options which may undermine the established monopoly of BAA. There is no prospect of a quiet life for either politicians or civil servants in the promotion of valuable and rational solutions to this issue: thus both groups tacitly share the interests of BAA—the monopoly supplier and creature of their own making—in further entrenching the ramshackle status quo.
"Yet this government never of itself furthered any enterprise, but by the alacrity with which it got out of its way." Henry David Thoreau (1849). Civil Disobedience.
† An almost-convincing example of British civil-service obfuscation.
❖ The LOX Study: Report documents.
The implications and benefits of the LOX Project are discussed in a reference publication on integrated transport:
Christopher J Blow (2005). Transport Terminals and Modal Interchanges. London. Architectural Press – Elsevier.
ISBN: 978-0-7506-5693-1
ISBN10: 0-7506-5693-X
The LOX project is included in a free sample chapter (pdf) from the book.