Drawing of the game / Version 2 / Pascale Atsma

Drawing 2 / Street Jewellery / Pascale Atsma

Drawing / Street Jewellery #487 / Pascale Atsma

Sample of an action at Coleridge Rd

Yellow tubes at day, light tubes at night 

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

Critical Comment about Holland Park Mews

   The project is based on the gathering of neighbors, in response to the problem of an increasingly antisocial and independent society. I think it is a good basis but I didnt really understand why they have chosen the area of Holland Park, apart from the charm of the houses, it is an area of luxury and class. Perhaps for this reason this location is selected, because the people living there might tend to work and come home to a private sphere, lacking all interest in their neighbors.

   As for the proposal of some mobile parks as they call it, I think it could be improved a lot. I chose this project partly because of how it's done, I think it is a project that can still work hard and improve, like all. The concept itself of having a "private" but at the time shared mobile park, seems a bit confusing. They speak about the concept of something "mine" to something “ours”, but if the mobile is in front of one house, the owners of it have to take care about it individually. This idea could have been quite polished, which at first may seem logical and good, but in my personal opinion, in reality I do not think it would work.

   I am really interested in the mews houses, how they work and how they are integrated with each other. It´s a pity that they have not worked more with the houses themselves, but only relied on the street.

   As examples of other solutions to the mobiles I have found PARKMOBILES:

   They were created to enliven street life in the evolving Yerba Buena District of San Francisco. Designed for economy and durability, Parkmobiles are rugged, custom-designed industrial containers that incorporate seating and landscape into easily deployable units. Six Parkmobiles, each with a different plant mix, were moved throughout the district’s streets, creating new active public spaces. Parkmobiles was part of CMG Landscape Architecture’s Yerba Buena Street Life Plan, a community-based public space plan with 36 intervention projects for the next generation of public space in the district. 

http://www.cmgsite.com/project/yerba-buena-district/parkmobiles/

   An other example is PARKCYCLE SWARM:

 The parkcycle swarm is a modular system that empower persons to build an instant public park whenever and wherever they want to. The parkcycle swarm consists of a number of human powered mobile gardens. The individual gardens can be combined to form public parks. A parkcycle swarm can consist of any number of individual gardens. Areas normally used by cars like parking lots or roads in general can be reclaimed and used for non polluting peaceful social activities instead. Each vehicle has been designed to comply with local bicycle standards. The version showed in this manual fits the EU standards of bicycle design. Adaptations to local regulations in other parts of the world may be necessary and can influence the size of each individual cycle.The parkcycle swarm can be seen as a DIY urban planning tool as an alternative to the top down urban planning that dominates most cities in the world. N55 encourage persons to build their own cycles and form parkcycle swarms and hereby influence their local urban environments.The parkcycle swarm is a collaboration between N55, Till Wolfer and John Bela from the Rebar group.

 http://n55.dk/MANUALS/PARKCYCLESWARM/PARKCYCLESWARM.html