Pamphlet Architecture No. 11_ Hybrid Architecture

Shadowland

Also the shadowland website from the exhibition from last year. Proposals on how to tackle some of the problems in Ireland post NAMA

http://www.shadowland.ie/Shadowland/Home.html

Richard Sennett - The Public realm

An article from Richard Sennett's website. I was originally reading for my dissertation but found there were crossovers with some of the discussions we've been having.

http://www.richardsennett.com/site/SENN/Templates/General2.aspx?pageid=16

Over and Under

Two Projects I came across, both looking at the idea of installations to work within existing transport hubs. Thought it might be interesting for some of us.





The first, an Olympic Sculpture Park for the Seattle Art museum by Weiss/Manfredi, takes the approach of bridging over the two transport routes, creating an elevated public space with improved views of Seattle bay.




While the second, Underspaces 1 by NL Architects, packs itself into the void present beneath the existing elevated car bridge. It incorporates a skateboarding "park" as well as more commercial units. It would seem to make this gritty underpass a much more populated area. More footfall would increase eyes on the ground and thus heightened "third party" security, displacing antisocial behavior that would have probably occurred in such a hidden sheltered location.

"Below a highway overpass that has split a neighborhood in the Dutch city of Zaanstadt for decades, you can now find a supermarket, soccer fields, a skatepark, a fishmonger and a florist, a basketball court and a car park. There is even a marina.

Developed in part through an open and interactive public design process overseen by NL Architects, A8ernA “provides a quick solution to re-establishing the connection between the two parts of the divided township whilst also regenerating a space that had become dead, literally and symbolically in the shadow of the flyover.”

From: openarchitecturenetwork.org

More Exhibitioning

Denis Mc Nulty has an exhibitionon on in Green on Red gallery at the moment. I thought it addressed some of the issues we have been looking at. One piece (attached) seems to be reminiscent of our conversation last week. Two televisions; one new, one old, stacked. Red "noise" on one and two images alternating on the other. The two images go between an abandoned construction site, flooded and with plant life beginning to take hold and Monet's Water Lilies. It reminded me of the conversation we were having about the potential in ghost estates.

Press release from Green on Red...

"Green On Red Gallery is delighted to announce The Driver and the Passenger, Dennis McNulty’s second solo exhibition in the gallery. The exhibition will include all new works in a variety of media that draw on sources from other architectures and other epochs, while responding to the gallery space. There is a fragmentation in the treatment of his subject that is both stylistic and philosophical. A series of locations are at the heart of The Driver and the Passenger. An iconic modernist house in New Canaan, Connecticut; a slowly decaying inner city furniture shop; an unincorporated town on the Pennsylvania turnpike; a social housing complex in London; a huge unblockable hole under the sea and the drowned foundations of an abandoned construction project in Dublin city centre. We are presented with a series of scenarios - physical manifestations of the turbulent forces that compete to generate the complexity of the contemporary moment.

The Driver and the Passenger presents a kind of speculative fiction. The processes which produced these scenarios are extrapolated and bent until their logic collapses. Light and sound share the space with reinforced concrete, glass, steel, plywood, aluminium and perspex. Temporal and spatial projections create fleeting moments of equilibrium which then dissolve in the face of new crises, new catastrophes, new complexities. Obscure flows boil underneath. The slow grinding of the physical world simultaneously slows down and speeds up. Certain surfaces remain transparent and impenetrable, while others yield easily. The visible and the invisible, the audible and the inaudible exchange places.

The passenger turns to the driver, reading from an unfolded sheet of A4 paper. ''In this show McNulty presents a number of works which have been produced over the last year or so.'' The driver looks over at the passenger and smiles as they accelerate up the slip-road onto the motorway. "