This strand of small projects develops novel strategies for city exploration from a fundamentally architectural perspective. Through collaboration with the Architecture department and later choreographer Willi Dorner Cie. we have a developed a particular view of the city, tying together architectural design and education with choreography and performance. To date this has resulted in four separate projects (the titles link through to the invidiual project pages):
Andorak (2000)
This project involved the combination of national or international architecture with a tour of the buildings of the immediate locality. The system worked by providing a guided walk which 'presents' aspects of the local built environment as illustrations of another, absent set of buildings - whether local but demolished, or simply located elsewhere. This involved a novel combination of both the traditional guidebook and 'picturebook' formats, where the 'visitor' was invited to look at their familiar everyday environment in a completely new way - as a way of understanding an absent and otherwise inaccessible architecture, or as an illustration of more generic architectural ideas.
Moving City (2003)
The project set out to challenge the conventional methods of presenting exhibitions about architecture through photographs and drawings shown inside a gallery. This format often prevents a proper understanding of three-dimensional space due to its reliance on visual communication alone. The project began by literally taking the exhibition outside onto the street, combining the full sensory experience of real spaces with the kind of analytical and interpretive information normally offered by a museum or gallery setting.
Future Garden (2006)
Future Garden allowed individuals to explore Sneinton Market in Nottingham to discover the effects of city planning, alternative futures, lost histories and individual dreams. A handheld computer presented participants with a structured self-guided tour. At nine different physical locations, the screen showed images of the existing market overlaid with new architectural designs. These drawings, collages and animations - inspired by the dreams of current market users - were interspersed with archive photographs, documentary film footage and a short dance film, inviting people to reflect on the urban space that they inhabited and the ways in which it might be transformed.
Anywhere Somewhere Everywhere (2008)
Anywhere aimed to encourage participants to explore hidden places and untold stories, and reflect on the nature of city exploration itself while receiving the benefits of close personal contact with a guiding companion. It involved location-based activities spread across multiple locations in the city exploiting media designed to be displayed on mobile phones, puzzles and challenges, access to a cave and elements of live performance. At its core, the experience relied on human 'doubles': performers whose job it was to follow, observe and communicate with participants in order to choose and schedule appropriate location-based activities, guide the participants to the appropriate locations, and help them trigger those activities, while remaining unseen.
People
Holger Schnädelbach, Ben Bedwell
Partners
Architectural History and Theory Group, University of Nottingham
Publications
Jonathan Hale and Holger Schnädelbach, Moving City: Curating Architecture on Site, in Curating Architecture and the City, edited by Sarah Chaplin and Alexandra Stara, (Vol 4 in the series AHRA Critiques), London: Routledge, 2009, forthcoming
Ben Bedwell, Holger Schnädelbach, Steve Benford, Tom Rodden and Boriana Koleva, In Support of City Collaboration, CHI 2009, Boston, USA, ACM Press, forthcoming
Schnädelbach, H., Hale, J., Dorner, W., Bedwell, B., Benford, S., Mardell, J., Future Garden, in proceedings of TIDSE 2006, Darmstadt, December 2006, pp. 346-351, Springer, short paper