ART & URBANISM STUDIO 1995

Fachhochschule Köln, FB Architektur

The Urban Box

 

Program:

to design and build a 1.25m x 50cm x 50 cm box which explores the relationship between the art object and the city; between the individual and the collective; which investigates the urban phenomena:  space, time, weathering, decay, technology, social structures, history, and personal expression.

 

 

 

Project:

 

To introduce an in/excluded space into the urban fabric, namely a box-like construction which is at once object and space.  The overlay of the interpretation of one city, Cologne, onto another will provide the opportunity for a deeper understanding of both specific urban conditions and contemporary urbanity in general.

 

The project investigates the nature of inner, mental space;  urban space; and the relationships between the two.  The project investigates not only the nature of these two spaces but the fabrication of the wall-object-space itself, the materiality of enclosure, and the spatial and phenomenological consequences of material choice.

 

The project postulates the physical loss of horizon in the urban landscape as a metaphor for contemporary society’s loss of orientation, loss of self; for the corroded urban environments which have no center and no periphery.  In a society where computer and television screens are the prime interactive media, space is collapsed into a form no longer physically comprehensible; into a series of points in a field, or layers which overlap and intersect one another.  Insides  and outsides  are more and more difficult to discern as spaces; they are more often understood as layers, surfaces, or positions.    Students will propose a complex of meanings; link the collective with the personal; the public with the intimate; secrets with the revealed; the immediate with the subliminal, the superficial with the sublime.  As a production, the project should redefine thinking within the architectural and urban disciplines and reveal itself as a unique social experience.

 

 

Assignments:

 

Mapping & Systems:  using drawings of some kind (not necessarily architectural) analyze your site by overlaying interpretations of different urban conditions:  history,           present, architecture, population movement, transportation networks,         telecommunications networks, art networks, etc.

Photography, Wax and the Section -- subject:   Köln; urban quadrant

Construct a diary -- subject:  a metropolitan emotion                        

Invent a new (composite) material

Find a metropolitan in/exclusion which could be used as a pretext/program for the project

Transcribe the above into a scenario/program for the urban box

Build the urban box