Room in the city
Interior Design 3+4 year, Semester 1 2007, weeks 2 - 8, Kathy Waghorn + Jacqui Chan
The City
This project asks the question;
“what constitutes the interior in terms of the space and culture of the city”?
The form of the urban is relatively new in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Tamaki Makaurau Auckland, like many New Zealand cities, was designed on the other side of the world in response to the pressures of British industrialisation. Consequently, in some respects, the design of our cities reflects a desire to escape the congested and polluted city, giving us the sprawling sub-urban rather than the truly urban.
In Tamaki Makaurau/Auckland this imported city design became unsettled and disrupted when inscribed on the land. The volcanic field of the isthmus and the tidal pressures of the two harbours collapsed the neat and ordered planning bought from Britain. These geographical features have given Auckland a unique urban condition.
Maori occupation and subsequent and immigration patterns have also shaped the form of this city. Current regional policy aims to increase the density of occupation in the city center, rather than continuing sub-urban sprawl. Through this densification truly urban patterns are emerging in Auckland – for the first time since the middle of last century people are living in the city.
The city is not just the “bit outside the buildings” holding the buildings together. The city is made up of both exteriors and interiors, and states in-between. The city is a fluid space, a space of exchange and flow. People, traffic, data, goods and money circulate through the space of the city creating temporal changes. The city is not singular, that is we all have our own versions of the city, based on our experiences and memories of it. The writer Italo Calvino suggests that the city is less a space of objects and more the set of relations formed by these experience and memories:
“The city does not consist of this, but of relationships between the measurement of its spaces and the events of its past: the height of the lamppost and the distance from the ground of the usurper’s swaying feet; the line strung from the lamppost to the railing opposite and the festoons that decorate the course of the queen’s nuptial procession; the height of that railing and the leap of the adulterer who climbed over it at dawn; the tilt of a guttering and a cat’s progress along it as he slips into the same window; the firing range of a gunboat which has suddenly appeared beyond the cape and the bomb that destroys the guttering . . .”
Italo Calvino “Invisible Cities” p10
Cache too describes the city as “ . . .mobile and fluid . . . given to the continual distortions of memory”.
Bernard Cache, Earth Moves, The Furnishing of Territories, p11
The Room
For this project you will design a room in the city. Through the project we are interested in you individually pursuing your own investigation of spatial and cultural issues, which test conventional interpretations of the interior as simply defined by surfaces housed within architectural structure.
This project does not assume that “the room” or interior space is confined to the inside of buildings, but rather we are interested in the qualities, conditions and effects of the interior
Your research, investigations and analysis, might lead you to revise your current understanding of what a human being needs, expects, desires in terms of the internal. Rooms often contain objects and are “dressed’ with linings, fixtures and furnishings, how might these aspects of a room be addressed in the space of the city? Combined with this will be an understanding of the relationship of interior space to exteriority, encompassing issues of enclosure, framing, limit, shelter, movement, environmental control and regulation.
Research: Who are you making room for?
In this project you will open your mind to the wide range of references and research concerning aspects of human activity and occupation in the city. In broad terms this might be habitation, transportation (of things, of people, of information), sport, recreation and play, the production of culture, entertainment, education, ablution, ritual or many others.
Consider who engages in these activities and how these activities are currently controlled and directed. What are the spatial and temporal forms that currently contain these activities and why is this so? How could the relationship between the activity, those performing the activity and the spatial form be re-addressed? This consideration forms the kernel of this project.
Project Sequence
Week 2: The site, beginning with the “dérive” – (drifting)
Pin Up Week 3, Tuesday 6th March 10:30am
In philosophy, dérive is a French concept meaning an aimless walk through city streets, that follows the whim of the moment. It is sometimes translated as a drift.
French philosopher and Situationist Guy Debord used this idea to try and convince readers to revisit the way they looked at urban spaces. Rather than being prisoners to their daily route and routine, living in a complex city but treading the same path every day, he urged people to follow their emotions and to look at urban situations in a radical new way. The basic premise of the idea is for people to explore their environment without preconceptions, to understand their location, and therefore their existence. (Another term associated with this is psychogeography).
You might usefully adopt Debord’s ideas to locate a site. The site might be readily identifiable, such as the alleyway between Fort and Shortland Streets or Khartoum Place. However it is possible to choose a sequence of places, a strip, path, or route through the city as your site. (After all a corridor is also a room). Your first task is to observe and record this site producing a document of it.
Pin up for documents: Tuesday 6th March 10:30am, followed by introduction to the following -
Week 3: The Room, analysis
This week we will focus on the elements that make up or configure a room, these ideas will then be translated into the space of the city.
Week 4+5 : The inhabitants
Pin up in week 5: 20 March
Week 6+7: Finishing and Furnishing
Investigation of material and detail
Crit: Tuesday 3 April
9:30-10:30 – briefing for second quarter studio
10:30 – Crit invited critics
(mid-semester break)
Pin up of complete project Monday 23rd April by 10:30. (no crit)
Resources: Reading
The 100 Mile City. Sudjic, Deyan. Harcourt Brace, 1992
The City Reader. LeGates, Richard T., Routledge, 1996
The City Cultures Reader. Miles, Malcolm. Routledge, 2000
“Thick Edge, Architectural Boundaries in the Postmodern Metropolis”. Iain Borden, in, Intersections: Architectural Histories and Critical Theory, Routledge, 2000.
The Body and the City, Psychoanalysis, Space, and Subjectivity. Pile, Steve. Routledge, 1996.
“Bodies-Cities”. Grosz, E. (1992). In Colomina, B., (ed). Sexuality and Space, Princeton Architectural Press, New York, pg 241-252
The Activist Drawing : Retracing Situationist Architectures from Constant's New Babylon to Beyond. Drawing Center, 2001.
The Situationist City. Sadler, Simon. MIT Press, c1998.
** all of the above books would make excellent texts for the third year Annotated Bibliography theory assignment
The New York Trilogy, Auster, Paul. Penguin, New York, 1990
Invisible Cities, Calvino, Italo. Vintage, 2002
London Orbital : a walk around the M25, Sinclair, Iain. Penguin, London, 2003.
Websites: psychogeography
http://psychogeography.ca/
http://urbanrepair.blogspot.com/
http://www.glowlab.com/lab2/
http://timdevin.com/publicart.html
http://sanjose.murmur.info/
Auckland City
Auckland Archive, Auckland Public Library
Auckland Regional Council website and documents
Auckland City Council website http://www.aucklandcity.govt.nz/
What the council say!
“People's experience of Auckland's CBD will reflect the energy of Auckland as one of the most cosmopolitan cities of the Pacific. The CBD's character will be distinctively 'Auckland'. This will be evident in the ethnic and cultural diversity of the people in the CBD, the kinds of events, the artworks and the architecture.
The council plans to protect and promote the city's heritage and to ensure that all new developments look and feel distinctively 'Auckland'. Artworks, events and street activity will be actively encouraged in a bid to bring life back to the streets.
From “Auckland's CBD Into the future” http://www.aucklandcity.govt.nz
Possible ongoing projects:
work produced for this brief may be useful for entries in the following;
Auckland City Living Rooms projects 2007
(see http://www.aucklandcity.govt.nz/whatson/events/livingroom/default.asp)
AAA Urban Gaze competition entry (keep an eye out for this on aaa.org.nz)
