The Art Assignment #30 | Boundaries
This Art Assignment got me really excited, because it deals with exactly what I dealt with in the final project of my architecture studies I just handed: boundaries.
In my final project, I dealt with limits, and their ability to become boundaries - spaces to linger in, and activate. I worked in a neighbourhood in Haifa, Israel, which is called Bat Galim. This neighbourhood is disconnected from the city by train rails, contains an army base and a hospital, and borders with the sea. Living in this neighbourhood is living by a wall.
In my project, I tried to think of a way to turn these borders (specifically the army wall, and the border of the train where the high noise barrier is), these limits no one touches or arrives at, into urban spaces people would like to stay at, linger in, experience.
In Hebrew, the word used for “boundary” - Safa - is the same we use for “language”. I took this double meaning of the limit becoming a boundary and a language at the same time, and looked for the type of languages it needs to have in order to become an active space - an event.
There are two types of languages I use - the first is the strategic language, the formal language. This is the language which was already set by someone, the group of symbols and notes and rules which form the language as we know it “by the books”. In architecture, these are the architectural drawings, the different lines we use to set the borders and decide where and when and how, setting the limits for the people to live by, in, between. The second, is the tactic language - the slang, the street language. This is what people make of the strategic language in their everyday lives, changing it to fit to their needs and purposes, working on it, arranging it as they see fit. This language is invasive, it’s temporary, it’s active and it responds to a specific time and place. As it becomes, it creates an event.
Those two languages are depended on one another. The tactic language can’t be without a strategic language to rely on, to respond to, to take from. The strategic language has to learn from the tactic language and provide it with the tools, the infrastructure to work on and develop.
In my project, I developed an infrastructure which replaces, or is set in the areas of the borders, and allows the people living in the neighbourhood to react to them, build on them and change them to their needs, and by that, transform them from borders into boundaries, into spaces of stay, into events. The street language is now both strategic and tactic, both formal and slang.
Through this project, I try to raise the question of architecture as a language saved for architects only, and if architecture should be saved for the “higher seats” or has the responsibility to put the foundations and infrastructure for the citizens to act on it, as they are the ones living in it, by it, using it in their everyday lives.