Urban Islands: Geoff’s Studio

July 25, 20091 Comment Tagged: cards, studio, tarot, urbanislands

This is the second of the more detailed looks at the three studios being run for Urban Islands - loosely based around the mid-review of the workshops last Monday. (You can find the previous reviews here and here). The second studio is being run by Geoff Manaugh who ”presents architecture news and conjecture to-the-minute via his acclaimed blog BLDGBLOG” and is a contributing editor to Wired UK magazine.

Geoff's studio is engaging in activities a little different to the other studios. In many senses the work they are doing is more conceptual than tangible, although there will be tangible outcomes on show at the Review Day.

The starting point for Geoff's students was in the concept of Tarot Cards (the physical, functional aspect of them rather than the mystical or clairvoyant. As a group they came up with traits of the island that could be represented on a card, and split them into "suits". The 5 suits ended up being Materials (like steel or concrete), Processes (such as recording or demolition), Routes (things like ferry routes, or electical paths), Absences (things absent from the island such as silence and cockatoos) and the Major Arcana (items that are an elemental part of the island like tourists).

Each of the suits were populated with items the fit the category, and the students were each given reponsibility for 4 or so of these "cards". Their first task was to create physical cards that were representative of their given items, but also communicated MORE than just the item. At the review, all the cards were laid out (a4) on tables for us to peruse. There was unsurprisingly a great variety of styles and approaches to cards, but what was astounding was the quality of the workmanship present in ALL of them.

Some cards were literal, some where illustrative of the item being referred to, some were presented as old scientific drawings, some as comics and some even modeled in 3d from the "card". (I have included shots of a number of the cards at the bottom of this post).

Following on from this, Geoff number the cards 1 through 48 and, using a random number generator, assigned 4 cards to each student - providing them with a new "narrative" drawn from the Island, but not strictly speaking from the reality of the Island. The students are going to be using these 4 items or constraints to inform whatever their final project will be for presentation on Saturday.

We were presented a couple of examples of initial ideas from students who had already started formulating their projects - ideas that were a little wild and out there, but thoroughly interesting. And it seems that will be the direction this studio takes - starting at an idea (no matter how fantastical) and then working backwards and rationalising it.

Discussion from the instructors afterwards was mostly centred on encouraging the students to have these big wild ideas, and the prove them. There was talk of creating architectural fiction by essentially referring to these ideas as certainties, perhaps as things that had already happened. Mette floated the idea to the students of creating fake artifacts of projects that HAD (in the students imaginings) already happened in the islands past.

Geoff has been tweeting little updates throughout the weeks, and it certainly sounds as though his studio is going to be presenting some incredible ideas. So once again, if you are in Sydney tomorrow (25th July) I encourage you to come along to Cockatoo Island for the review day.