In Gateshead town centre, huge steel structures are being bolted together like giant Meccano. Their sterile frames loom over and encroach the streets below in a way that demonstrates their designer’s lack of regard for the people who will be using the spaces around them.

This is the new Trinity Square, built on the site of Trinity Shopping Centre and its infamous car park designed by the late Rodney Gordon of Owen Luder Partnership.

The purpose of these buildings is largely the same as the former occupants of the site; it’s a shopping centre, a hub for commercial activity based around the private car. This time however, people will park their cars in a subterranean pit rather than a conspicuous multi story car park. There will also be two large blocks of student accommodation to capitalise on Newcastle’s large student population.

It’s a continued mining of public urban space for commercial interest, and cheap construction methods as well as scant regard for the importance of good urban architecture are creating places that serve commercial interests and not the residents of Gateshead.

Rodney Gordon’s Trinity Centre and multi-story car park divided opinions; as a project to revive Gateshead town centre it was a failure, but as a piece of architecture, of art and design, it was unique. Much like the sculptures found in Gateshead’s public places – the Angel of the North being the most famous example – it was an audacious piece of public art, but with a function that, for a number of economic reasons, was never fully utilised. Whatever you thought of it, it was designed by someone who genuinely thought their work would improve people’s lives through modern design.

There is no such original thinking in this new development; its design is informed by cost and by market research. The associated public relations material is pure tokenism; yes, there will be what they call a public square, but I see it more as a kind of commercial clearing, or maybe a legally required fire assembly point. Try and exercise the rights you’d normally have in a public square, for example: to do street photography, campaign for a particular cause, protest, proselytise etc., and you’d no doubt be moved on by someone with a walkie-talkie line to the CCTV operator.

In thirty years time, will this development gain the notoriety that its predecessor enjoyed before it was demolished? I suspect not. The car park was a radical and brave building the like of which hadn’t been seen before. These buildings will be homogenous with most city-centre retail buildings constructed in the UK during the last twenty years, so their sheer banality will no doubt be met by indifference. With that in mind, maybe we get the buildings we deserve.

When students at South Tyneside Marine and Technical College learned about navigation at sea, they studied astronomy using the College’s planetarium and observatory. Now that navigation is done using the Global Positioning System, these facilities have become sadly unused. The college, now a place for general further education, is being redeveloped, which will see the observatory demolished and the telescope relocated to Stockton-on-Tees.

Last night, a few of us were lucky to get access to the scope and spend a couple of hours observing. It’s a 15″ Newtonian Reflector that’s built like a tank, and probably also weighs as much as a tank. Situated at the top of the main college building, it is supported by a reinforced steel column than runs from the ground floor up through the stair well, so the scope is very much part of the fabric of the building. Compared to the observatory at Kielder – which is architecturally interesting but a simple timber construction – this observatory has a kind of solidity and sense of permanence about it that makes you think that, given today’s need to build cheaply and quickly, its like will never be built again.

living in, around, and with soft spaces – v-2.org

art-of-work.com is an online recruitment agency recognising that “artists are a valuable human resource in the new work paradigms of open office architecture and new management techniques”.

Up here in the grim north, it’s fair to say that us creative types are starved of things to inspire and lift us. So what have we got? Well, there’s the Angel of North and the new Millennium Bridge, but we’re pretty over saturated with large and interesting metal objects dominating the skyline as it is. What’s missing is any kind of new media art/design community, a sense of things happening and moving forward. For the time being, I’m determined not to succumb to the appeal of the big city, the money, the lights, the fumes and try – in some small way – to change a few attitudes up here. Newcastle is a weird but unique place – it’s a city cut off from the urban sprawl of Manchester and Leeds, and the cultural marvels of Edinburgh and Glasgow. Instead, it is surrounded by moorland and coastline and not much else other than Sunderland (which – apart from having some exceedingly bad architecture from 60s urban renewal – tends to have some pretty cool stuff happening). Things are changing though, and I think I’m going to be here for a little while longer before the lure of the capital (and the opportunities within it) wins me over.

Some images of the bridge being put into place. Told you that crane is damned big.

Just used my lunch hour to check out the ‘Millennium Bridge’ currently being installed on the Tyne. They’re floating it up river on a super-massive crane, apparently the largest one of its type in the world. Quite an impressive sight I can tell you.

Download some cool screensavers at the ICA.