Why we’re launching a new AJ series for big ideas

In the noughties, Terry Farrell would tell an anecdote about his time as Edinburgh’s design champion. Working with then city design leader Riccardo Marini, Farrell recounted how Marini would exhort him not to limit the scope of his vision, saying: ‘Thunk bug, Terry!’ Try saying it in a Glaswegian accent and you’ll get the joke.

Whether or not Farrell achieved his ambitions in Edinburgh – to raise awareness of good planning and design, improve walkability and give it some of the regenerative spirit of Bilbao – there is something precious about visionary architectural thinking.

And, alongside the disappearance of bold political ideas, it seems to be getting rarer by the day. Look back to that period and the charismatic Will Alsop was proposing the partial flooding of Bradford to distinguish it from Leeds and suggesting Barnsley could be remade as a Tuscan hill town.

Look further back still and the young Kate Macintosh, inspired chiefly by Scandinavian design, was creating a project reminiscent of a Tuscan hill town in the unlikely setting of East Dulwich. Dawson’s Heights, completed in 1972, is a thrillingly bold social housing scheme that manages to avoid some of the mistakes of other post-war estate designs by ensuring the needs of the individual are not overridden by the grand vision.

As Macintosh told the AJ a few years back, her architecture sought to balance conviviality with privacy, and she noted that many people ‘reproached modern architecture for suppressing the individual and making them feel of no consequence’.

The consequences of visionary thinking can, of course, be good or bad. But Farrell, Alsop and Macintosh all sought to balance their eye-catching civic interventions with a sense of collaboration and humility.

It is with this generous, open-minded spirit that the AJ is launching a new platform for big ideas. We’re calling it Blueprints for Change and through it we want to discover and publish what today’s architects and others in the built environment sector are proposing to tackle the most pressing social and environmental challenges. We want to highlight your ability to solve problems, to think laterally and to question the status quo. Thunk bug!

The first of our Blueprints for Change is 5th Studio’s proposal for the Arc – a 100-mile landscape from Oxford to The Wash with water at its heart