Looking & Seeing
an [IN]Site residency with David Rudlin at City Arcadia
This was an Invitation to work with award winning Urbanist David Rudlin (URBED), recent winner of the Wolfson Prize at City Arcadia as part of the [IN]Site Programme.
David Rudlin entered a one-week residency at City Arcadia with ‘Looking & Seeing’.
This residency, centred around the making, mapping and modelling of Coventry city centre in plasticine.
The aim was to explore the Past, Present and Imagined Future of Coventry’s radical planning history.
David Rudlin worked from the historical basis of a meeting in 1951 in Hoddleston in Hertfordshire, between members of the International d’Architecture Moderne. The theme of this congressional meeting was ‘The Heart of the City’, with a focus on town and city centres.
The star turn was the Coventry City Architect D.E.E. Gibson, who told delegates that his plans represented ‘the first time that a central area (had been) analysed in terms of its main uses and a plan drawn up which retained only those necessary to its correct functioning’. Coventry was the future; a functional, efficient town centre in which the traffic flowed, the air was clean and which civilisation could flourish.
Looking and Seeing was an attempt to recapture some of the idealism of those more optimistic times and to understand what it was that D.E.E. Gibson and his colleagues were trying to do in Coventry.
Looking & Seeing was broken down into three parts:
1: Mapping: Modernism V Tradition
A series of large-scale ground plans contrasting the Modernist city centre with its planned and unplanned predecessors.
2: An Artist’s Impression: Architects always produce visualisations of what their schemes will look like when complete – full of smiling happy people beneath blue skies. What is the reality of our cities?
3: The Malleable City: A large-scale plasticine model of Coventry built by residency participants at a scale of 1:1000 (5m square). It is meant to illustrate how the city can regrow and repair itself
an [IN]Site residency with David Rudlin at City Arcadia
This was an Invitation to work with award winning Urbanist David Rudlin (URBED), recent winner of the Wolfson Prize at City Arcadia as part of the [IN]Site Programme.
David Rudlin entered a one-week residency at City Arcadia with ‘Looking & Seeing’.
This residency, centred around the making, mapping and modelling of Coventry city centre in plasticine.
The aim was to explore the Past, Present and Imagined Future of Coventry’s radical planning history.
David Rudlin worked from the historical basis of a meeting in 1951 in Hoddleston in Hertfordshire, between members of the International d’Architecture Moderne. The theme of this congressional meeting was ‘The Heart of the City’, with a focus on town and city centres.
The star turn was the Coventry City Architect D.E.E. Gibson, who told delegates that his plans represented ‘the first time that a central area (had been) analysed in terms of its main uses and a plan drawn up which retained only those necessary to its correct functioning’. Coventry was the future; a functional, efficient town centre in which the traffic flowed, the air was clean and which civilisation could flourish.
Looking and Seeing was an attempt to recapture some of the idealism of those more optimistic times and to understand what it was that D.E.E. Gibson and his colleagues were trying to do in Coventry.
Looking & Seeing was broken down into three parts:
1: Mapping: Modernism V Tradition
A series of large-scale ground plans contrasting the Modernist city centre with its planned and unplanned predecessors.
2: An Artist’s Impression: Architects always produce visualisations of what their schemes will look like when complete – full of smiling happy people beneath blue skies. What is the reality of our cities?
3: The Malleable City: A large-scale plasticine model of Coventry built by residency participants at a scale of 1:1000 (5m square). It is meant to illustrate how the city can regrow and repair itself
Head to Dossier #3