Critical Comment on Street Jewellery #487 / Pascale Atsma

by NESS LAFOY, JOSH STEVENSON, WILL VERITY, PAULINE MARCOMBE

    The project is localized in an area of ​​the Haringey neighborhood, an area that is basically used to get from one point to another. The street has got a lot of traffic, people only use them to pass without looking around even though there are several shops. The streets seems quite sad, due to the traffic and the rush of people running through it.

The authors speak of creating small works of art, to call it in some way, objects or decorations that make you look around, look up in order to escape the routine of running through the streets which, in first site don’t contribute anything.

   It is called Street jewellery, because it is exactly what it is about, decorate the street. It seems a very interesting project also because it consists basically on ephemeral architecture that can be touched, destroyed, stolen or modified. The only intention is to bring beauty. Here I think it could go a little further, rather than just objects to see you should be able to interact with them, they can be used to start a conversation, whether to stop two minutes and look around, perhaps as a shelter from the rain. I think we live in a society that live to quick, our lifestyle is stressed and we do not appreciate where we live or where we spent every day.

   They also talk of creating an online platform where people could propose small or big interventions, involving the whole society with all the help and enthusiasm of the people, not just those who see it from outside, or in my case, even another country, but the people whom live there themselves.

As examples of other solutions:

Xintiandi Installation. Unstudio

Designed by UNStudio, in collaboration with China Xintiandi, the project conceptually explores the role of display in Shanghai: the symbiotic relationship of cultural reflections that occur between the city’s occupants and urban landscape. As an extended corridor archway that frames the entrance to Xintiandi Style Retail Mall, the project uses a single architectural gesture that transitions from wall to ceiling to wall, not only tracing pedestrians’ movements along its trajectory, but translating them into a reflection that revolves and inverts around the visitors as they walk through the installation. Simultaneously, the pedestrians’ reflections move between a sequence of three ‘phases’ of context: retail, ground, and urban landscape. The large scale mirrors mounted at each end of the installation act as concentration points, capturing the whole lapse of the effect, and combining it into one moving image. The result is a reinterpretation of the relationship between urban context and the viewer, binding these together in a cultural setting of the retail, the city, and its inhabitants.

http://www.unstudio.com/projects/xintiandi-installation












Sehstation pavilion, Andy Brauneis, in colaboration with Nicolette Baumeister y Christian Schüller

The pavilion " sehstation " is the centerpiece of the advertising campaign " Sehen Lernen " (learning looking) aimed at promoting awareness of citizens on design and use of public spaces. So the pavilion is designed as an observatory of urban space that invites citizens to pause and observe with a critical eye , their daily environment.
The shape of the pavilion reproduces the " bellows " of the first cameras , so that visitors can climb inside the staggered pyramid , obtaining a higher point of view , sit and watch...

http://blog.bellostes.com/?p=2347