Briefing Document Conclusions

The following are conclusions and questions I made in the briefing document, perhaps they'll jog my memory for future proposals.

• Exploration of a new mode of orientation within the contemporary historical city that transcends the digital and analogue. Th e new architecture should attempt to encourage the healing of a schizophrenic urban environment that orientates the digitally literate and the analogue city user.

• Can the proposed architecture create a physical interface between our physical and virtual orientation devices?

• Can a new architecture re-engage the digital city (the virtual space disassociated with the physical realm) with the historical city of memory?

• Exploration of the evolution of the cultural image in a historic city (the city of memory), and the role that historical fragments can play in contemporary orientation. A new physical orientation device should attempt to re-engage historical fragments with new layers of urban identity and the virtual city. It should encourage the interaction between the digital and existing physical communities.

• Exploration of an analogue/digital hybrid architecture that can uncover new identities related to our inherent connection to a means of orientating oneself in time and space.

• Through the design vehicle of a contemporary clock tower, examine how the epistemology of this typology can be redefi ned in the contemporary city. As a new orientational typology, how can the territory of this architecture embrace or reconstitute existing urban territories.

• How can a new clock tower architecture transcend the schism between the disoriented and oriented city dweller. Th e architecture must engage with the community in a manner than encourages a reconceptualization of an individual’s personal layers of orientation. This may engage the disoriented person (a marginalised individual through loss of personal identity, or negative bandwidth) with means for finding one’s identity, or engaging the digital user with the analogue city as a means of giving meaning and substance to their exploits in the physical world.

• Question the notion of orientation by proposing an architecture that does not orient through the imposing of a particular ideology or way of seeing the world. Rather, it enables the pursuit of many different ways of seeing our position in space and time.

• The architecture must question the origins of our cultural images and how these encourage a particular approach to orientation. Can many diff erent cultural images coexist and enable the pursuit of one’s own means of living amongst the diversity of others. Can the new architecture enable diversity and personal identity while promoting the notion of community?

Crit February 9th 2009

Yesterday I had an interim review with Michael Stacey and David Short. It was an opportunity to talk about my project from the start to tutors who hadn't seen it before, hence a fairly good exercise to sure up in my mind what exactly my project deals with.

I'll introduce it from the start, for those who don't know what I've been looking at.

As a starting point, the study examines how the perception of our position in the world is shaped by our relationship to surroundings, people, ideas and our possessions. Our alignment to these things creates what we call our identity and this gradually shifts as we sift through what we do know, what don’t know, and what we choose not to know or to neglect. In part, I specifically address how the artist and scientist respectively make sense of the universe and attempt to relay their positions through various metaphorical and real devices; specifically through the Panorama and Diorama buildings.

Cross section and plan through Robert Baker's panorama, Leicester Square, London, 1976 in Oettermann, S., 1997, The Panorama, New York, Zone Books, pg 104

This developed into examining the historical preoccupation with locating ourselves within the universe. The study concentrates on the era prior to the machine; specifically the transition from the geometric and geocentric theory of the world as narrated by Aristotle to that of the Astrolabe in the dawning Islamic World. By introducing movement to geometry through the Astrolabe, the Islamic astronomers suggested an early form of relativity, where all points in the sky were relative to one another and the earth below. Through this device, medieval society cultivated an intimate understanding of the earth and sky, and the way in which both were interlinked in the present and as a means for predicting the future.


Unequal hours diagram show shorter hours during the winter, longer hours in the winter




Diagram show construction of Astrolabe geometry using stereographic projection

I consider the implications of using the celestial spheres as a universal instrument for negating how we live our lives, translated architecturally through the clock tower. As our cultural images change, our means of orientating ourselves within the landscape alter. Parts of the landscape are reappropriated and assigned with different meanings. During medieval times in St Albans, the abbey and clock tower became a focal reference point from which time (based on that kept by the monks) was relayed to the populus.

Wallingford Clock, St Albans

In a contemporary society where time is democratised through personal time keeping devices, the clock tower becomes an orientation device in a geographical manner (like Kevin Lynch's image of the city notion), and new means of orientation relate to our global positioning and information networks. Mobile phone masts and wireless connectivity enable us to orientate to our own networks, and the strenght of these signals and their interface's determine the degree to which we become connected.

Map showing global internet bandwidth
http://throb.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/world_bandwidth_usage.jpg


Can the overlaying of historical and contemporary orientational fields reveal the true nature of our position in the world in space and time, and a new clock tower architecture? How does a contemporary 'clock tower' manifest?