Jordan Beh

BA Architecture [Stage 2] Plymouth University Ephemeral Worlds 2013-2014

[jordan-beh]

Prague - Day One

A numerous landmarks was explored during the study trip. Focus on the main buildings such as: 

Charles Bridge - A historic symbol of Prague, connecting between Old and New Town. As peaceful and romantic it may seem, the Vtlava (Moldau) River has not always been as calm as it looks today. It’s fury, combined with the power of heavy rains have many times flooded and destroyed the bridges people built over it.

Franz Kafka Museum - A long-term exhibition dedicated to Franz Kafka about housing existential space and imaginary topography exhibitions. 

Nerudova Street - A picturesque street leading up to Prague Castle. In this steep street you can find many restaurants, souvenir shops, embassies, but what’s most remarkable about this street are the house signs and the people that lived in that houses.

Prague Castle and St Vitus Cathedral - A history of more  than 1100 years  speaks for itself. The story of the Prague Castle identifies itself with the story of Prague and Christianity (860s, Chyril and Methodius) in the Czech Republic. In 870s AD the Prince Borivoj, one of the first Czech rulers from the Royal Dynasty of Premyslids ordered the building of the Castle, originally out of timber and with a soil rampart fortification.

Petrin Observation Tower - Dominating Prague from the height of Petrin Hill, the Lookout (Observation) Tower is one of the things it would be a pity to miss if you are in Prague.

Mirror Labyrinth on Petrin Hill - The Mirror Labyrinth is like a miniature Castle and it is situated on the Petrin Hill, next to the Petrin Tower (miniature Eiffel Tower). It is a remaining of the Former Prague Exhibition Grounds from 1891 and the interesting thing about it is that the wooden construction imitates the Gothic part of the fortification in Vysehrad.

[jordan-beh]

PROJECT 2: LIFE ON THE FRINGE

Ephemeral Worlds led by Dr. Sana Murrani with Richard Bower & Fiona Zisch

Duration: 2 weeks

Context: Prague

Individual Outcome: Triptych

Weighting : 20% of module mark

External & Involvement: Interacting with the public

The Life on the Fringe project aims to establish the importance of leftover spaces, counter spaces and thresholds/edges/peripheries in between spaces; as spaces with strong linkages and properties enable them to be part of two different spaces and at the same time not belong to either. Such spaces can become seeds for emergent design ideas and can unfold new ways to deal with design processes. Prague is rich with such thresholds that exist between the old town and the new town, between the two sides of the Vltava River, between different transport systems and between two very different social classes [the rich and the poor]. We’ll be looking at the best places and buildings the city can offer as well as the hidden world of homelessness within the city. We’ll be looking at buildings but also paying attention to those very important thresholds between the different social spaces and counter spaces.

 Identify a threshold, an edge, a fringe or a periphery [could be social, physical, environmental, or geographical that exist between two spaces, in between two territories, in between buildings, etc.]

Produce a triptych [3 A3s]: the first A3 to have a map which explicitly identifies the location in Prague that you chose for your subject in relation to the main transport points, tourist attractions, governmental/religious buildings, or neighbourhoods that you passed by.

Add you narrative which explicitly links your interpretations of your chosen fringe to a theoretical discussion [relate to the theories discussed in studio and listed in your brief]. The second A3 to be of a striking photo taken of that threshold/fringe/edge/periphery [try to capture it from multiple angles. And the third A3 to be a 3D model [diorama] inhabited and detailed of that space, highlighting and emphasising your narrative of that fringe.

[jordan-beh]

City Narrative

Through analysis of the texts and production of the dioramas, we gained a greater understanding of the homelessness experienced within the city and along the course of our investigations.

The dioramas are situated across the city within key areas of our investigation and at key sites of [non] place and forgotten space. We cerated the tube station map as a way of contextualising the fragmented nature of time and space within the city.

"Narrative structures have the status of spatial syntaxes. By means of whole panoply of codes, ordered ways of proceedings and constraints, they regulate changes in the space made by stories in the form of places put in linear or interlaced series; from here, one goes there; this place includes another (a dream or a memory); etc."

By Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life 1984

This narrative map runs the journey of our trail and investigation, it sites our eight spaces as well as our four narrative texts to their place in the city. The face of the city is constantly changing through time, we as its inhabitants follow this change and ultimately not escape its impact on our daily lives.

[jordan-beh]

Final Diorama Map

We sited our final dioramas across the city on a map of disjointed scales. Highlighting our exploration of a warped perception of time and space within the city. We used the change in spatial scale to represent key areas of the city that have lost their sense of place through time. As the city forgets about these spaces; too many of its inhabitants lose their concept of history and memory.

"If a place can be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined as a relational, historical or concerned with identity will be a non-place."

By Marc Auge, Non Places 2008

[jordan-beh]

Down and Out in Paris and London

From exploring Down and Out in Paris and London, we immediately saw a connect between the atmosphere of the church in the text and the atmosphere of Drake Circus within our trail. The church drew in the homeless with the lure of tea just as Drake Circus does to the inhabitants of the city through the power of advertisement and the idea of self gain. Both spaces seem without time or place they can be seen as transient spaces, never truly inhabited. Both funnelling people in and out. Both are false senses of refuge and home.

"It is as though we human beings are dominated by a compulsion to return to the familiar, or where there is nothing familiar to be found."

By Neil Leach, Camouflage 2006

Both spaces use this falsehood to draw us back to the familiar.

This distorted sense of time and place reflects through the city of Plymouth as a whole and it's what we found drove many of our theories and spaces. With this, we began to site our dioramas in a distorted compression of time and space across the four texts and the city of Plymouth. Using the non space of the tube map to draw the cities together.

[jordan-beh]

Down and Out in Paris and London

"Outside the church quite a few hundred men were waiting, dirty types who had gathered from far and wide at the news of a free tea, like kites round a dead buffalo. Presently the doors opened and a clergyman and some girls shepherded us into a gallery at the top of the church. It was an evangelical church, gaunt and wilfully ugly, with texts about blood and fire blazoned on the walls, and a hymn-book containing twelve hundred and fifty-one hymns; reading some of the hymns, I concluded that the book would do as it stood for an anthology of bad verse. There was to be a service after the tea, and the regulation congregation were sitting in the well of the church below. It was a week-day, and there were only a few dozen of them, mostly stringy old women who reminded one of boiling-fowls. We ranged ourselves in the gallery pews and were giving our tea; it was a one-pound jam-jar of tea each, with six slices of bread and margarine. As soon as tea was over, a dozen tramps who had stationed themselves near the door bolted to avoid the service; the rest stayed, less from gratitude than lacking the cheek to go."

By George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London 1933

[jordan-beh]

Invisible Girl

The Invisible Girl text we found had very little description of space, it was a lot more focused on complex emotions and mood. We decided that this diorama would be best represented by creating a dramatic, noisy atmosphere that linked to the text but also started to ground out city research into the texts.

We turned the space of the text into a garden situated within Plymouth, with the other three texts having definite geographic locations. This would link them into our narrative.

We created a sense of rubbish and despair yet the work bench would stand as a symbol of regeneration. The garden would sit in the midst of repair yet without working on the whole picture, then nothing would ever be accomplished.

This narrative is one we found played out across a lot of the forgotten spaces of Plymouth; there are signs of growth and regeneration yet without sorting the whole story. these efforts are doomed to fail. 

[jordan-beh]

Invisible Girl

"Kitty leaps onto the workbench sending tins of paint and bottles of stuff flying. I freeze. I hold my breath. I tremble. I wait for Grace's mum to come shouting into the garden in a panic to see what all the noise is about. I wish she would. I cross my fingers and toes and hope she won't."

By Kate Maryon, Invisible Girl 2013

[jordan-beh]

No Fixed Abode

As a group, we explored Charlie Carroll's No Fixed Abode, we found the descriptions of the spaces across the country very powerful and saw a way of expressing them into a snapshot of condensed time. These spaces that Charlie made his home across the country all had place and memory yet he felt no sense of home in the historical landmark of Trafalgar Square. We saw Charlie's heterotopian vision of this space merged with his past memories, we saw what he wanted to see, a place he could call home.

For our first diorama, we decided to condense Charlie's time and space and build a snapshot of his history around the Trafalgar Square; the parts of Cornwall and Bristol emerge out of London's cityscape providing shelter and a sense of place for Charlie to call home.

[jordan-beh]

No Fixed Abode

"Perhaps the night on that Dalston couch in that quiet and heated living room has spoiled me, but I had slept rough over the past months enough times to know what it was I needed. A space. A space which I could stick my metaphorical flag into and claim my own, no matter now temporarily. I had no sense of that on Trafalgar Square; everything was to fluid too open. There was no demarcation, no feasible notion that someone might point to where I had sat through the nigh and day: "that's where Carlie sleeps." I knew I would never find anywhere like my woods in Bristol, my sand dunes and cliff tops in Cornwall, my canal-side pitches - nothing like that existed in Central London. But I had seen mattresses and duvets all around the city. They had not been discarded: they were makeshift bedrooms. That was what I wanted. Somewhere I could leave my sleeping bag."

By Charlie Carroll, No Fixed Abode 2013

[jordan-beh]

Narrative - Stuart: A life Backwards

The first contextual narrative we explored was Stuart: A Life Backwards. The test described a bed-set ravage by drug addiction and despair.

We explored the meanings of text and drew from the narrative of a man frozen in time; wanting out of this left but never being able to get there. We took from the text the image of the mountains over a lake, this became his freedom, we then took the shake n' vac carpet cleaner as his path out yet the bed-set was his prison.

We created this diorama as a slice of time, a frozen frame. Time and space in this means life has been condensed into one vital moment.

[jordan-beh]

Stuart: A Life Backwards

"I finish my survey of his bedsit room. The picture on the wall is of a place with mountains and a lazy blue lake. The plaster it covers is gashed down to the brickwork from one of his periodic bouts of 'losing' it, when he gets into a sort of maelstrom of fury and - highly private occasions, these, he does not like to think about them - takes it out on the furniture and fittings. On the floor beside the desk is an empty carton of shake n' vac, decorated in pink flowers. Good stuffs, that. use it for anything. Like, se round the bed there? There should be a huge stain because I overdosed there last week. But just put shake n' vac down."

By Alexander Masters, Stuart: A Life Backwards 2005

[jordan-beh]

Spatial Narratives

We were given extracts from four different texts about homelessness and the task of creating dioramas from the narratives, linking them back to spaces we explored. The extracts were taken from No Fixed Abode by Charlie Carroll, Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell, Invisible Girl by Kate Maryon, and Stuart: A Life Backwards by Alexander Masters.

[jordan-beh]

Installation 2.2

We designed an installation that was built around the Derry's Clock; the installation was comprised of sheets of metal that curve around the centre clock in fluid motions. These sheets will have section lines of the city from different eras carved through them giving passers by a glimpse into the past.

The metal will also start off as new sheet metal, but there will be a corrosive added to it. The installation will last around three weeks or so in which the metal will have time to corrode and show the decay of time. This installation highlights in many ways how the city has changed over time and will create a place that the inhabitants of Plymouth can reflect on the history of the city.

The metal used will all come from discarded shipping materials, which again tie the space to memory and history. Without history, there is no time, no place. As passers-by watch the metal grow its own history, they can begin to explore the history of plymouth and the accumulation of time.

"These heterotopias that are linked to the accumulation of time, there are those linked, on the contrary, to time in its most fleeting, transitory, precarious aspect, to time in the mode of the festival. These heterotopias are not oriented toward the eternal, they are rather absolutely temporal."

By Michel Foucault, Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias 1984

[jordan-beh]

Installation 2.1

For our final installation, we decided to focus on the key space in the city. Our project has evolved through the exploration of space, time and the city and how these key aspects affect everyday life of the city's people and in particular the homeless community.

We focused our materiality on the metals we had collected from the site; the key feature of the metals was the intrusion of time; the history of the city is shown in the materials. We wanted to create something that would ground this history and really highlight the forgotten places of Plymouth. We picked the Derry's Clock as our space; this site is steeped in history and the clock as well as being a symbol of time. It is also one of the few symbols within the city that has stood the test of time; yet all this history hasn't stopped the clock becoming lost and forgotten.

Derry's Clock is a historical site that to most of the Plymouth is without place, to most of us it has lost its history and memory over time. We decided to use this absence of place as a framework to build an installation that focuses on the decay of time to bring a sense of time back to the space.

[jordan-beh]

Installation 1.2

Our initial installation was designed to re-appropriate the materials of our site in a way of forming a shelter. This shelter would be able to house a homeless person for a night and would be truly portable. There was a utopian ideal behind the installation where you would be able to see these shelters across the city housing the homeless each night.

The temporal nature of our installation reflects Plymouth as a whole. Yet, we felt this structure did not address the deeper issues of Plymouth's forgotten city and didn't look into why the city is the way it was. We decided to create an installation that would reflect on the cities history and memories in a way that explored the materiality of the city's past.

[jordan-beh]

Installation 1.1

Our initial installation was designed to reflected upon the city and re-appropriate some of the forgotten materials in a way that would create a shelter like structure. We designed a transient structure that used the reclaimed sheet metal to create a form of shelter .Then used the wire and insulation materials to create a private space of reflection.

While the shelter itself became an interesting installation, we felt that in the drive to create a shelter we lost a lot of meaning and context with the materiality of the design. So we decided to re-appropriate the materials once more and design an installation that would better our understanding of the city and in doing so the city's inhabitants too.