The Blue Carpet, Newcastle upon Tyne
make it within the limits set by considerations of
durability and safety.
In the professional press, the Blue Carpet has had a
mixed reception. In Landscape Design, the profes-
sional magazine for British landscape architects,
Michael Downing complained about the poor quality
of the paving that surrounded the Blue Carpet, par-
ticularly the detailing of the circular tree-pits, which
were ‘completely out of keeping with the crisp
modern treatment of the carpet itself’.^5 Heatherwick
thinks that he missed the point. Without this con-
trast between ordinary materials and the extra-spe-
cial quality of the Carpet and its fittings, the whole
concept would lose its power.
There were also objections to the cost and to the
time taken to complete. The final budget amounted
to £1.4 million, considerably more than the pro-
jected £300,000 that had been in the initial brief.
Some £500,000 of the final total came from Lottery
Funding obtained on the strength of the project’s
artistic aspirations. While £1.4 million is a significant
figure, it does not seem wildly inappropriate for a
new square in a city which is determined to raise its
international standing through cultural endeavour. To
put the expenditure into perspective, Gateshead’s
Millennium Bridge cost £22 million. The Laing
Square scheme was initially scheduled for comple-
tion in December 1999, but was not completed until
early in 2002. In all, it took five years from competi-
tion briefing to completion. This is much longer than
most conventional hard-landscaping projects, but it
is not so unusual for a public art project. What no
one foresaw at the outset was the time that would
be needed for research and development of the
new paving material.Hugh Pearman, the architecture critic for the Sunday
Times summed up the Blue Carpet when he
described it as ‘an intelligent, quirky, upmarket little
regional pedestrianisation scheme’.^6 Apart from the
unnecessarily Londo-centric swipe at things region-
al, this assessment seems fair. The Blue Carpet
was over-hyped during construction. As a one-off,
it does not have the scale or the impact to become
iconic, yet it is, without doubt, an ingenious and
witty piece of design. It is also genuinely innovatory
in terms of the materials used. It is easy to forget
the doggedness that a designer must demonstrate
if he is to push through an inventive idea in the
face of technical problems, indifference or disbelief.
What a city like Newcastle needs is not just one
example of design of this quality, but a civic culture
that demands this standard of originality and flair in
all its public projects.