volume
02
a social ex•change
volume
02
_ further exploration
[PERFORMANCE IN ARCHITECTURE: THE ENGAGEMENT OF PEOPLE WITH THEIR ENVIRONMENT AS EXPERIENCED THROUGH MOVEMENT & GESTURAL ACTIONS]
walker the bartlett school of architecture 2010
university college london
the bartlett school of architecture masters in architectural design kim walker, winter term 2010
electronic mail design work reference catalogue
kimberlycwalker@gmail.com www.kimberlycwalker.tumblr.com www.paperspaceinspire.tumblr.com
index 1
prelude
3
setting the stage
7
the plaza, covent garden
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grand hall, royal opera house
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ebb & flow
17
defining the characters
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constructing the scene
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recomposing the scene
41 ending
prelude
1
Architecture plays an animating role in society. Spaces, as they are composed through layers of vertical and horizontal surfaces, influence people sensorily, determining how a person chooses to place themselves in the world at that moment. Architecture is formed through the daily participation and engagement of people with their environment. It is never perfect - it is untidy and it is messy, but therein lies the beauty and spirit of a space, found through being a part of it. When experienced close up, a building disappears and becomes something which guides and forms movements within the spaces. It is these idiosyncrasies of a real human-made experience - the imperfections and their corresponding
adaptations made on a daily basis through the practical engagement with a context - that give form to a lived space, one in which people are at the foreground and the buildings are their backdrop, and it is the interactions between the two that become points of interest. This project looks at architecture through the lens of choreography. ‘All the world’s a stage,’ as Shakespeare eloquently tells us, and thus the city is examined as an ongoing choreographed performance made up of characters and the crossing of their particular rhythms and movements. These everyday movements are seen not as mundane but unique, the commonness of the ordinary as uncommon. When the familiar
is noticed it becomes new and surprising. The architecture is communicated through the human language of small habitual stories that are based in the contemporary urban landscape, and is defined by these specific instances and the movements they produce. Diller & Scofidio write: ‘Perhaps it is the personal interaction with the meaning of a narrative, in film or other experience, which is the preeminent concern today. The fixed scene and action of the theatre is discarded for the reactive improvisation of street performance. The emphasis like jazz is on unique event, not bounded by a closed form but constructed around a recognized format. The spectacle includes the spectators who define it by their presence and active interpretation.’1
An architecture that communicates and makes visible the fleeting forms of
these human movements is to be developed in three parts. The first, defines the location and elements of a staging area where space is continually being shaped and reshaped by people, acting as a frame for social performance. The second part locates specific human sequences found in the staging area and defines them as characters through their actions and movements. Lastly, the third part deals with constructing the scene by first using the movements of the characters to connote forms and then recomposing the forms and characters together, through the orchestration of human movements and the patterns that are found in-between them.
2 1
Architectural Review Feb. 1989
setting the stage a frame for social performance
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The staging area is both socially constituted and situated in the public domain. It has a seemingly chaotic, uncontrolled aspect to it but is actually, imperceptibly, quite directed. It is engaged in a dialogue: a dialogue between the environment and the people within it, and a dialogue between the mixture and crossing of people with other people in the space, wherein these parts are continually interacting and adjusting with and shaping each other. Here the spaces expand and contract as bodies move, giving a thickness and particularity to it. It is a destination place with a discernible rhythm throughout the day. It has a long history in which the architecture tells the changes over time. There is an aspect of performance
within the ways people are in contact with each other, through their participation in the space, and as they animate the space through their movements, momentary traces are left lingering behind. The area of Covent Garden, specifically the west plaza in between the market building and St. Paul’s church and the grand hall of the Royal Opera House are the locations of the staging area. Within these two places the focus is on the people who are watching the performance; the audience as an integral part of the show, giving it a rhythm and depth; the audience as both a body in itself and being made out of individual bodies to form the whole.
4 human performance, joining the space of the street & the theater
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6 site plan, staging area locations
the plaza covent garden
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The street performers use the street as their stage, with props and costumes to deliver their acts. Their audience is not required to pay and is simply made up of passers by whom the performer collects together to create a crowd. As Covent Garden is a well known attraction, many of the people found there are tourists from all over the world. The collected audience becomes an entity itself, with a life of its own. It can be unpredictable and fickle towards the performer and the performer has to learn how to read the body language of its audience.
The system behind the street performance is much more constructed and controlled than seen from the street. Covent Garden is one of the few parts of London licensed for street performance, the performers must obtain a permit and have auditions with the Market’s management and representatives of the performers‘ union before they can perform there. Once through the auditions, the performers sign up in timetabled slots for a number of venue locations around the market. The locations are marked for a certain sort of performance, such as only classical music is allowed in the courtyard space and the louder, larger crowd gathering acts are in the east and west outdoor pitches; each
pitch has its positive and negative aspects depending on the characteristics of the day. The performances go all day long with two performances an hour from ten-thirty in the morning till it gets dark, all year round. The life of the individual street performer is of interest in itself: these performers are part of a community of performers, they must be quite established and skilled as performers to work in covent garden, and they have gained an intuitive understanding of how to control or influence a crowd with their body and voice and, in turn, how to create space.
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grand hall royal opera house
The Royal Opera House attracts a paying-theater-going public who has come there for a specific performance that takes place most evenings. Its setting is a much more formal atmosphere than that of the street, situated in a grand building which was designed specifically for producing and performing an elaborate show to an audience. The ticket holders to the theater are a vital part of the performance, mingling and socializing in the grand Hall before, during intermissions, and after the show; they attend to see and be seen.
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The grand Hall originally opened in 1860 and was intended as an exotic fruit and
flower market by day and a venue for balls and concerts by night. A fire in 1956 destroyed the original barrelvaulted roof, during the redevelopment of the 1990s, half of the original structure was
raised four metres above above the street-level and the barrel-vaulted roof was reinstated with a mirrored end giving an illusion of the original size. This space is now a foyer and bar, and is used for concerts and events. The grand hall within the royal opera house contains many different levels and edges through which a person can participate in numerous ways with the space and with the people in the space. People move up into the hall through a ceremonial staircase, in the middle of the great
volume of the hall is the champagne bar around which people mingle, situated on a second level around the edges is a restaurant from which diners can look into the space, on one edge is the escalator moving people up to the third level mezzanine bar above, where a glass box projects into the volume of the hall and in which people are on display themselves as they look at others below. One is always watching what others are doing while those same others are watching you, forming a circular system of observation and performance. The performance extends outwards from the theater into the grand hall which acts as foyer, bar, restaurant, stair, all as a stage where the audience becomes the performer.
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ebb & flow 01. the performer - using his/her whole body: arms, hands, voice, eyes - begins to gather the people in and around the plaza around for the show.
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Throughout the day there is a rhythmic pulse to the performances: people gather round and become engaged as a crowd with the performer, the performer may then pick one person out of the crowd to assist him with an act, making the crowd a part of the performance. When the act ends, the performer collects donations and the crown disperses, changing the plaza from one which contained a distinctly formed space into one of people dabbled around the edges and wan-
dering through. Then it all begins again with the next performer collecting his or her crowd together. The crowd is an entity moving through the space; it changes the space depending on how it is formed within it, giving it a sense of expansion and contraction as the crowd ebbs and flows throughout. As an entity, it contains echoing patterns of collective behaviour, repeating rhymically as time plays out; the crowd has a way of making
02. a semi-circle is formed, with a tighter ring in front and bystanders spread out around the back. the show begins.
both chaos out of order and order out of chaos, as it becomes one mind made from many. The performer uses the movement of his or her whole body to direct people together and form a circle encompassing him or her and temporarily redefining the space.
03. the show is in full swing, more people have stopped to watch, and a defined room has been constructed around the performer. the audience is part of the show, and the performer uses individuals from the crowd as characters who are part of the act.
04. upon the show ending, the performer calls out to the audience to support and contribute to the show by giving donations please. the circle is broken and people diverge, moving here and there, into the center with the performer or away in every other direction.
05. people walk through, wander around, stand along an edge, sit on a step, and watch the plaza while the next performer begins to gather them around again.
12 ebb & flow, people forming space
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14 orchestrating an audience, forming space through gestures
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16 to see & be seen, the spectators as the performance
defining the characters
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Within the staging area people behave in certain ways and passing movements, actions, and gestures of individual people are captured and examined. These captured instances reveal something of what lies beneath the surface of what we see, shaping a space that is continually changing, imitating itself over time. In reducing the speed of time, fragments of a story are found that tell not the whole picture, but of the spaces which are less visible but form our everyday life. These gestures which evolve from the body can become used as as architectural elements that define the space. In his book Lights Out for the Territory, Ian Sinclair explores those marks people leave behind, discovering that ‘the physical
movements of the characters across their territory might spell out the letters of a secret alphabet.’ When calibrating human sequences, the movement or action becomes a language, as a diagram in time, slowing everything down and measuring the incremental individual gestures that are combined together to form a whole movement. In observing, replicating and composing the movement, gestures and orientation of a body caught in an action, a story emerges that describes a character. The captured sequence is further articulated by measuring the step by step motions and calibrating the shifting space and sense of expansion and contraction in between the movements, giving form to the actions.
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the crowd, as a collective The crowd is one, as one it negotiates and manipulates its spatial setting, be it in the plaza or the hall. It cannot be hurried, it moves of its own accord at its own pace, but it can be prompted and encouraged to do as one outside the crowd wishes. The crowd mingles, mixes, blends, weaves and merges; in one moment it is still and close together and in the next it opens up and moves again. Within the crowd there are heads and there are feet: heads of varying heights always scanning what’s around them, and feet, as footsteps upon the ground, standing, swaying, walking, perceiving the surface beneath them. 19
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mother & son, break/reconnect The small child, eyes wide taking in the excitement of the plaza, sneaks his hand from his mother’s grasp, running, stumbling away from her and finding the brick wall, placing his hands on the brick wall to steady himself. The mother, watches, then as instinctual habit, as protector, follows after, gathering her child’s small hand back into hers.
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two strangers pass/glance In opposing directions they pass under the arches of the portico, she walking towards him moving from inside to outside, he walking towards her from outside to inside. Eyes looking straight ahead, they pass, conscious of but paying no attention to the other, continuing on, through the space that the other one just came from. 23
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a lady, as if in a dream Under the golden lights of the lavish grand hall, she glides as if in a dream. Elegantly winding her way through the mingling crowds, eyes looking forward, her skirt sways in that ballerina-esque way. It is as if she is both a part of the backdrop which is the crowd in the vast, multi-leveled space and as if she is completely alone and it is only her in that grand space full of other people.
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constructing the scene
The ways people move their bodies are expressive of how they feel, what they want, what they’re thinking, what they’re about to do, of an individual personality. These movements can connote forms, and vice versa the forms can connote movements. Within a larger framework, architectural spaces can be designed to suggest different gestures or ways of being within them, one says to ‘come in’ another ‘stay away,’ one implies ‘slow down’ while another cajoles to ‘speed up.’
27
The actions and interactions of the characters are turned into an architectural language through the forms that are found in their movements. Our bodies weave various folds into the world which are retraced, noting places of overlap and intersection. These forms reveal the simple but generally unnoticed human made moments that are in synchrony with each other.
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29 character one: action as form
30 character two: action as form
31 character three: action as form
32 character four: action as form
recomposing the scene The reconstructed scene is expressive of an orchestrated dance of everyday actions and gestural movements of bodies in a space as seen incrementally through time. It is footsteps and hands clapping, an arm wave and a head shake, a smile of recognition and a look of confusion. It is interested in not one or the other, but in the shared space between. It is performative
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and it is personal space as seen through the subjective. This new scene is that which Paul Shepeard speaks of, ‘the idea... that [architecture] is really the conclusion of some dramatic impulse, made specific by the circumstances that surround it.’
The recomposed scenes explore a sense of the spatial environments created by people through their incremental movements and their ‘dramatic impulses.’ Combining the individual characters’ calibrated instances creates
new sequences that blend together as one. Traced marks that embed the movements and gestures into a surface create forms and shapes. Composing these scenes involves the mapping of geometries and patterns which people generate in space and building up layers of information within and around them in order to visualize the space inbetween. People, as characters, are continually moving, changing, editing and redefining the spaces that they are within.
reconstructed scene: linking actions and forms
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35 reconstructed scene: crossing constructions of the characters
36 reconstructed scene: the spectators as the spectacle
37 reconstructed scene: double take, slight shift
38 reconstructed scene: two points of view in the grand hall
39 movement of character two, slipping through space
40 1 interact invisible intersections left behind the characters
ending
The urbanist, organizational analyst, journalist and people-watcher, William Whyte conducted an extensive study on the social life of plazas in New York City, analyzing many variables of why some were used consistently and others were not. In the end he came to a simple conclusion:
‘People tend to sit most where there are places to sit.’
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if there is not, they will move on. A lived space is a simple thing, it is how people actually use a space and how through that they give the space form. People form and reform the lived space everyday and the lived space likewise forms the actions and movements of people. It plays out as if choreographed; people move about their day, small instances combine to form actions, individual moments and characters combine as a performance in the life of a place, forever in movement.
This statement speaks succinctly to the the basic exploration of this project: the idea of a lived space. If there is a place to sit - a bench or a step, a ledge or a patch of grass - people will sit there, bits of larger pieces, indicating shifts of the charactsrs’ forms
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