Unit 2
Après-PERSPECTIVE
Satoshi Sano + Tamao Hashimoto
Brief
Our focus will be the sensory.
How do sensory rather than habitual (human) actions shape the city?
Can urbanism be enriched through closer participation/observation and understanding of sensory spatial and urban complexes?
Our territory of action will be with a vast / specific site. We will speculate on the stratum of the mass, lived realm, and other fields in cities. Can development of the vast scale truly engage the existing social and physical condition?
We will explore methods of participating/observing, documenting, and re-configuring a perceived spatial conditions between the human and the physical environment of the city. You will forge and hone practical techniques in representing your participations/observations principally through drawing, photography, film, and notation of the city. These will become the vehicles for our exploration of the site, as a part of the evolution of Seoul.
Phase 1_Social (5th – 7th): Sensory Activities, Phenomena and/or Matters
Students will be required to extract ‘the Social’ from their own chosen territory. This will involve immersing themselves in the life and its surrounding context in order to understand the hidden social activities, phenomena, interactions and exchanges that exist.
Each student will select a ‘territory of action’ within/on or near the vast site and following a period of immersion, document their participated/observed/obscured sensory conditions predominantly through photograph, sketch, drawing, and/or film.
By the end of Phase 1, each student / group will have uncovered a deeper understanding of the social condition in their chosen territory. This discovered life will be discussed and then compiled as a group within a Collective Drawing, to understand the idiosyncrasies of social structures that exist on the site and its perimeter at large.
Phase 2_Physical (8th – 10th): Combination of Sensory Components
Phase 2 sets a clear focus on the ‘Physical’.
The architectural components, built context and curated / residual space that makes up our physical environment. Each student will find a hidden or veiled combination of physical components, materials and space that collectively influence our inhabitation of the site.
You will extract these sensory components and draw them in plan / elevation / section / axonometric / and so on. This will lead us to explore the potential relations of interiority and urban space.
Phase 3_Action (11th – 14th): Sensory Activities, Phenomena and/or Matters + Components
Following the phase 1 and 2, students will have documented the city in two unique but interconnected ways through evidence based inhabitation rather than speculation.
Phase 3 will lead students to focus on a propositional conflict between ‘the Social’ and ‘the Physical’. Like ‘Door, 11 rue Larrey’ by Duchamp, the conflict gives us not only a chance for exploring the spatial mechanism, but also a key for proposing new spatial notions, coexisting new/old rules and physical/social encounters.
The students will design an intervention to engage the sensory discovered during the phase 1 & 2. The proposals should manipulate, challenge, decipher and alter the conditions of the site in order to bring about reactive change of the City. These will be documented, drawn, shared, tested and presented.
The combined proposals of the students will then be imposed on a large Collective Site Plan, to transform the area of the vast site into a responsive construct for urban change, questioning the origins of its conception and testing its future direction.
Reference Material
• ‘Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perceptions, Attitudes, and Values’ – Yi-Fu Tuan
• ‘Life between Buildings’ – Jan Gehl
• ‘A Pattern Language’ – Christopher Alexander
• ‘Internationale Situationniste’ – Guy Debord
• ‘The Exhausted’ – Gilles Deleuze
• ‘City Choreographer’ – Lawrence Halprin
• ‘The Practice of Everyday Life’ – Michel de Certeau
UNIT TUTORS
