Monitoring Divison of Space

"Have you ever felt the urge to look inside, when walking down a narrow street and passing in front of a door that is ajar or a window that is half-lit? Have you wondered what lies behind curtains that are drawn, gates that are shut, walls that are high? Have you thought about how objects, signs and symbols may invite you to one place and bar you from another? From inside the buildings, have you spent time standing in front of a window, watching the world go by from detached, safe distance, or wishing to go to the open spaces outside, meeting your friends in public spaces or just joining the crowd of strangers?" (Madanipour 2003)

If we monitor our individual everyday routines, one defining features of these routines is how we live in and pass through private and public spaces, feel and behave accordingly. If we monitor the spaces, we see how they are structured around a separation of public and private. One of the defining features of urban space is the movement divison and control. The way space is subdivided is a mirror of social relations between individuals and groups. In response the divison of space affects indviduals'  mental states, regulates their behaviour. Why do we subdivide the city into public and private? Why to we tend to talk about private and public in binary terms: it is either or? Or are we labelling everything that is not private (privately owned) public...

Collaboration Cafe in use

See the time-schedule to come and meet our team

Transforming Building Centre Cafe to Collaboration Cafe

Last month I was busy designing the exhibition  "Collaboration Cafe" in Building Centre Cafe, London. The exhibition marks the last month of 18-month long R&D program to develop StickyWorld - project review and exhibition platform for creative business and education. The basic idea of StickyWorld is to create virtual rooms where people can pin up work, present, mark-up and comment, all using virtual sticky notes.  

My task as was to transform the daily Building Centre Cafe to Collaboration Cafe with vinyl graphics and user/function-centered table tops.

"Open for business throughout March, the Collaboration Café forms the final component of research and development led by Slider Studio and supported by Edward Cullinan Architects, HTA, Make, Scott Brownrigg and University of East London. The focus of the research, which is part funded by the Technology Strategy Board, has been to develop StickyWorld - a web based project review and exhibition platform for creative business and education. Through the Collaboration Café, the project opens its doors to the public, further enquiring about the nature of collaboration in education, practice, with clients and communities."

StickyWorld featured in:

thepolisblog
extranetevolution 

Creative Regeneration

"A boardwalk is a path made up of timber boards tied together, laid to give access to sensitive environments. They are most often found meandering across sandy beaches or wetlands. The simplest boardwalks, made of boards loosely tied together, are constructed around the existing environment: a run of boards resting gently on the sand, connecting the places along its way. Apollonius’ Theorem is a geometric method to construct a parabola from straight lines. Through a simple series of straight lines, sinuous flowing curves can be constructed.

To inspire and develop the Longest Bench, we worked with Connaught Junior School. The children showed us how they use the promenade, what they think of it, and what it means to them, giving us insights into the site we would never otherwise have. Two important incidents along the length of the site are the two shelters. The children told us they felt these were dirty and unsafe. They are dividing rather than connecting the green and the beach." Studio Weave

The Longest Bench has been granted CABE’s “Sea Change” funding, a capital grants programme for cultural and creative regeneration in seaside resorts.

 

Meaningful Connection in Urban Public Space

"Islands of LA is an expression of the desire for meaningful connection in urban public space.  This ideal is pursued through the seemingly absurd use of traffic islands as terrains for interaction and discussion among friends and strangers that is both creative and critically minded. This use is not unprecedented: a rigorous site analysis reveals a global history of the use of traffic islands for gathering and expression, in spite of the difficulties of the space. Extending this tradition through events, interactive maps, and an archive of stories, Islands of LA invites us to explore the desire, the fear, and the possibility for connection and voice in the urban landscape."

Islands of LA was conceived of as a project to investigate the use and availability of the marginalized yet highly visible public spaces of traffic islands. Islands of LA views the traffic islands as everyday spaces and venues with a complex history and environment. The project explores the dynamics of these spaces through various ways including experimenting with the use of them. The exploration and usage of these spaces examines questions about public land use, law, urbanism, art and other topics specific to traffic islands. The project began on 9/16/07 and was conceived of by artist Ari Kletzky.

Citizens´ Privatisation of Public Space

One of the huge contrasts of the modern era has been between public and private. This contrast has become even greater in as cities grow and are transformed into metropolises. According to Lyn H Lofland, the city is a community made up of strangers, something that was not experienced in villages or towns. The individual therefore is seeking to reconcile the feeling of strangeness.* Privatisation of public space enables citizens to develop a feeling of belonging to a place within which they live.

A lively and constantly growing cities tend to define its parameters shaped by its citizens. Although local authorities attempt to impose legislation on the city, its citizens remain resistant to some regulation, developing their own tactics for taking the power open space. The informal creation of urban spaces, hybrid and continuously changing, are always full of people. 

The way that citizens in these ways take advantage of unprogrammed public spaces and live the city as they want to, raises lot of questions for architects and planners. Can something in-between, which gives the citizens the opportunity to make their own decisions about their city, be designed and applied?

* LH Lofland, A World of Strangers, 1973

Unprogrammed spaces

«When public spaces are successful […] they will increase opportunities to participate in communal activity. This fellowship in the open nurtures the growth of public life, which is stunted by the social isolation of ghettos and suburbs. In the parks, plazas, markets, waterfronts, and natural areas of our cities, people from different cultural groups can come together in a supportive context of mutual enjoyment. As these experiences are repeated, public spaces become vessels to carry positive communal meanings».(Carr, Francis, Rivlin and Stone, 1993)

A continually evolving city is like a living organism - it owes much of its vibrancy and heterogeneity to its unprogrammed spaces. These spaces create a blank canvas for citizens and their activities. If space is unprogrammed it means that a function has not yet been attributed to it, it can be transformed by its users. Unprogrammed space does not require people to come and create; it is just there waiting to be discovered and improvised. It is self-organising, unstable and variable. It is a public space that is open to being privatised by citizens themselves. The metamorphosis of unprogrammed spaces relies on their users. Whether its features are designed or not is a possibility.

Globalisation and advances in communication have all but eradicated the homogeneous metropolises of the past. City is mainly heterogeneous, both socially and economically,  due to its population high rates of immigration from various rural areas of the country. Scaled down to urban space, this heterogeneity causes multiple uses of unprogrammed spaces. It provides citizens with opportunities to meet and interact.

The street life of Havana

"If children playing in the streets is an indicator of the success of a city, then Havana's streets may be some of the most successful in the world." Ethan Kent, 2009

Interactions and Artifacts shape the City?

Sidewalk Series is a series of proposals for New York sidewalk interventions inspired by Antenna´s observations in the city. The interventions, in the form of street furniture and fixtures, resonate with people´s obscure yearnings and facilitate odd actions and temporary relations amongst strangers. The presence of these objects in the particular context invites (inter)action and shifts the perception and experience of various places. They pick up on current habits, give a new spin and encourage encounters: Shrink Bench, Hugging Tree, Exercise Stop, Escape Loft, Gum Sculpture and Sidewalk Exchange.

"We love wandering through the city, sometimes without any particular destination or reason. Streets are usually filled with people busy going about their routine or immersed in their own world. The city consist of psyches as much as materials. From an observer´s point of view, it appears to be kind of continuous theater with everyone being a performer or amongst people mediated by the artifact. The interactions and artifacts shape the impression of the city and become part of the urban experience."

To wonder rather than answer

"The stupidity of people comes from having an answer to everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything... it seems to me that all over the world people nowadays prefer to judge rather than to understand, to answer rather than to ask, so that the voice of the novel can hardly be heard over the noisy foolishness of human certainties." 

Milan Kundera, Interview on the Book of Laughter and Forgetting