Urban Interior - informal explorations, interventions and occupations

Urban Interior

Informal explorations, interventions and occupations

Urban Interior

URBAN INTERIOR Informal explorations, interventions and occupations Edited by Rochus Urban Hinkel Authors: Suzie Attiwill Kate Church Mick Douglas Mathias Heyden Rochus Urban Hinkel Marieluise Jonas Scott McQuire Jane Rendell Alex Schweder La Malte Wagenfeld

The Deutsche Bibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbiografie; detailed bibliographic information is available on the internet at http://dnb.ddb.de 1. print run 2011 © All Rights at Spurbuchverlag, Am Eichenhügel 4, 96148 Baunach, Germany Designed and typeset by Chase & Galley, Melbourne, Australia ISBN 978-3-88778-351-8 Copyright 2011 by Spurbuchverlag.

All rights — including translation into foreign languages — reserved.

No part of the work must in any mode (print, photocopy, microfilm, CD or any other process) be reproduced nor — by application of electronic systems — processed, manifolded nor broadcast without approval of the copyright holder. www.urbaninterior.net

Urban Interior

Informal explorations, interventions and occupations

Super Akzidenz Grotesk Bold Baskerville Medium Caslon Regular Chronicle Light Garamond Light condensed Mercury Regular condensed Minion Medium condensed Palatino Bold condensed Plantin Extra bold condensed Times 10 Extra bold Akzidenz Grotesk

Author

Rochus Urban Hinkel

Page

Chapter

06

Prelude

—

Jane Rendell

Suzie Attiwill

11

Kate Church

27

Mick Douglas

45

Mathias Heyden

63

Rochus Urban Hinkel

79

Marieluise Jonas

99

Scott McQuire

113

Alex Schweder La

131

147

Malte Wagenfeld

— — — —

— — — — —

Intermezzo Urban and Interior: techniques for an urban interiorist Making visible: registering the asynchronous city Situating social contingency: mobility and socially-engaged public art Evolving participatory design: a report from Berlin, reaching beyond Private encounters and public occupations: a methodology for the exploration of public space Oku: the notion of interior in Tokyo’s urban landscape Geomedia, networked culture and participatory public space Performance architecture The porous-city: atmospheric conversations of the Urban | Interior

164

Endnotes and references

172

Author biographies

176

Acknowledgements

PRELUDE

Rochus Urban Hinkel

Urban Interior is a book located at the threshold between the interior, habitually conceived as the private realm, and the urban, or what is generally recognised to be the public realm. The creative projects in this book aim to overcome the traditional dualism between these domains with projects that focus on the spatial and temporal dimensions of the inhabited, urban environment. Central to these projects is a shared concern with aesthetic, experiential, poetic, political, sensorial, social and technological relations. Urban Interior, as a book of collected essays questions and expands the definition of urban and interior practices and domains by way of informal explorations, interventions and occupations in the public realm.

The individual chapters describe and discuss projects that range from socially engaged practices to phenomenological investigations, from ephemeral phenomena to installation based insertions, from performance based investigations to observation based enquiries, to relational participations and social appropriations. These projects are located in cities around the world, they describe, are embedded, and respond to the particularities of Melbourne, Berlin, Karachi, New York, Seoul and Tokyo, and the contributors to this book include researchers, practitioners and academics from Australia, Europe and North America.

Urban Interior is also the name of a research collective from the School of Architecture and Design at RMIT University, Melbourne. It was formed in April 2007 by a group of academics and practitioners who came together to discuss their potential crossovers, in order to build a collaborative and cooperative relationship. The Urban Interior Research Group {UI} is a cross-disciplinary and non-hierarchical collective with members extending from fields of architecture, industrial design, interior design, fashion, landscape architecture, public art and sound. The invited contributors to this book are Mathias Heyden from Berlin, Scott McQuire from Melbourne, Jane Rendell from London, and Alex Schweder La, who is based in New York and Berlin. All invited contributors have shared moments of discussion, exchange and investigation with {UI}. Together we contribute to the exploration of the ideas and concepts that compose what we have collectively identified as the Urban Interior.

Jane Rendell's intermezzo is composed of quotations located before and after each chapter in relation to the concepts and ideas of each chapter, creating a space between different enquiries, as well as making connections throughout the book.

Jane Rendell describes the intermezzo as 'a series of doublesided joints located between the interior spaces of the nine essays comprising the urban texture of the book'. She has helped weave together our shared and disparate concerns.

This publication marks a milestone in the {UI} collaboration over the last four years. It manifests the viability of this research group by bringing a self-establishing process to a point of culmination, which is simultaneously a starting point for future endeavours.

What {UI} has established along the way is that there can be no single definition of what constitutes the urban interior. {UI} also discovered the necessity of leaving the research projects open and diverse, rather than framing one cohesive objective upon which all uniformly agree. The research gathered here is one moment in a continuum of ongoing design practice research and reflection that continues in flux. The space between the urban and the interior is one that continues to unfurl, requiring that one interrogates the productive interplay at the threshold where it is not possible to say whether one occupies a realm of privacy or publicity, a space on the inside or outside, a collective or individual moment. Welcome to the diverse spaces and times that frame for the meanwhile what an urban interior might be, and importantly, how it might work.

The Urban Interior research group {UI}

The research collective Urban Interior {UI} came together more by happenstance than by design, that is to say, its members share as many differences as they do similarities. The benefit of this is that we have achieved a rigorous diversity in our research engagements.

Urban Interior has become a space and time in which we can both agree and disagree as we set forth our evolving research positions.

Each {UI} member develops his and her particular research trajectory, while at the same time, sharing within the research group’s interests and investigations between and across disciplines in an interdisciplinary space, which allows us to collectively question the definitions of the design disciplines. While each member works on individual research trajectories, and occasionally collaborates on a project, we primarily exchange thoughts and share ideas,

find common ground, and discover differences in various shared spaces and within the space of this collaborative book. We remain conscious of the spaces in which we choose to gather together, as well as those more or less public and/or private spaces that offer us the opportunity to undertake design experimentation.

In order to exchange, discuss, share and critique our individual and collective projects we have developed several formats and have occupied various spaces over the last four years. We commenced within the productive space of discussion, in various meeting rooms and also sound labs. We have also gathered at informal dinners, around tables where we have shared wine and food and thoughts.

We have shared our ideas and thoughts with others in the spaces of Urban Interior exhibitions such as UI Occupations, at Craft Victoria (2008), Guilford Lane Gallery (2009), and at the State of Design Festival (2009), all in Melbourne. We have presented together at the Occupation Conference at the University of Brighton, England (2009). We have openly discussed our research with peers and stakeholders in five UI Colloquia since 2007 in various locations including the City Library in Melbourne (2007), the exhibition space of Craft Victoria (2008), the Kubus on the Rosa-Luxemburg Platz (by the theatre Volksbuehne) in Berlin (2009), and in the meeting room of Crowd Productions, above a car park tower, in the centre of Melbourne (2009). Since 2007 we have established relationships with academics, researchers, practitioners, artists and other stakeholders in Melbourne and across the world, in particular in Europe and Asia. www.urbaninterior.net

NOTE

A prelude (Lat. praeludium) is a short piece of music, which can be an introduction to succeeding movements of a work that are longer and more complex. The prelude can be thought of as a preface; it may stand on its own or introduce another work. In the context of this publication it introduces ideas, sketches out the process of development, and illustrates the framework of the Urban Interior Research Group {UI}.

Intermezzo Jane Rendell

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I always sensed that the fine arts department thought we were somehow compromizing art because we built things for people as opposed to being pure and doing it for yourself.

Private encounters and public occupations: a methodology for the exploration of public space Rochus Urban Hinkel Could it be that the key difference between the practice of art and the practice of architecture is the simple fact that the work of art immediately presents itself to us, while the work of architecture and design is often presented as a representation of a speculative project that may never manifest? This observation may be too simplistic, but it is an observation that can readily be made in the context of tertiary education, where students nearly always operate speculatively and through modes of representation.

When I commenced teaching architecture and design in the mid 1990s I began a number of exploratory projects that investigated spatial phenomena, for instance, atmosphere, through designing the framework for an experience, rather than a representation of a space that might procure an experience. In recent years I have continued similar explorations, but I have extended the modes of investigation. From setting up a design installation that might arouse a spatial experience in a given space (a project that might be implemented in days or weeks of making and installing) I have extended my explorations to a scenario in which students and designers engage and interact with both private and public spaces and the people in them. Both of the above approaches are part of moves beyond the object focus of much mainstream design culture and teaching, and are more concerned with our experience, perception, relationship and interaction within spaces. Where the discrete design installation explores a specific experiential and spatial interest, the development of my research has been directed towards more social and political investments, and experiences in private and public spaces. Furthermore, this approach challenges the distinction between art and architecture that I framed above. Architecture is also a medium that can be explored directly from the early stages of its development; it does not have to rely only on the mediation of representation.

This chapter will contend that an engagement in speculative installations and interactions in the public sphere can be combined as design research approaches, and will give examples of how they can be explored in tertiary education, specifically in the pedagogical context of the design studio or seminar. Within the examples I