ARCH: Genius Loci

CONTENT / We, as designers of buildings and places, need to understand the spaces in which we are creatively working. Without that we cannot begin designing. This workshop is all about using photography as a tool to help us to understand place and to capture our personal take on it. It will provide you with an introduction to a lifelong and transferable skill. This is important because it will encourage you to look carefully at place, to read the intangible elements of place and to record them. The workshop brings together two things: an urban humanities approach to observation and understanding, and the use of photography as a tool to capture your ideas. You do not need to be an expert photographer to participate, a mobile phone camera is ideal.

URBAN HUMANITIES
This workshop uses an urban humanities framework to address the question of what is place – what is its genius loci? It is an emerging way of looking at place that has developed from thinking at UCLA, Berkeley. Take this quote:

“Perhaps the most widely recognized fields of expertise considered relevant to urban concerns are design and planning along with engineering and the physical and social sciences. But what of the humanities? Those fields that aim to understand history, the arts, meaning, expression, and experience make substantial contributions to our thinking about cities and culture. From classicists to contemporary film scholars, humanists enrich an understanding of situated collective life… [but]… the absence of a humanist perspective in urban thought is brutally apparent (Cuff and Wolch, 2016, p. 14).”

This workshop uses the urban humanities to inform a reading of place and to photograph it. In doing so, it addresses this ‘absence’ that Cuff and Wolch draw to our attention. It allows for a subjective, iterative and creative interpretation of place as something of a counter balance to more established objective, data driven, quantitative approaches to urban analyses.

This more humanistic way of looking at place drives artistic practice such as that of Cecilie Sachs Olsen at zURBS artistic collective in Switzerland, http://zurbs.org/wp/biographyintro/. In explaining her work, she draws attention to the fact that:

“zURBS work is situated within the Urban Humanities and the exploration of the complexity of urban space in order to generate new and varied forms of creative output that demonstrates the rich terrain where urbanism, geographical knowledge and practice, and the humanities overlap. Central to this work is creative and practice-based art research” (Sachs Olsen, 2016).

PHOTOGRAPHY
There is a famous article, written by Claire Zimmerman, an architectural historian. published in the Harvard Design Magazine in Fall 2001. In the article – Tugendhat Frames – Claire Zimmerman examines the house designed in the 1930s by Mies van der Rohe in Brno. This house has been, and

still is, often cited by students and academics as one of the prime examples of modernism in architecture. Yet, most of our understanding of it is derived from photographs, the house being inaccessible during the Cold War. The article asks how seeing place through the framed lens of a photographer influences our view of it.

Poyner (2002) makes a strong case for ‘amateur’ (but informed) photographs being very useful in capturing place:

“… By virtue of one’s training or experience one simply looked at things in a different way and selected details and viewpoints which the professional photographer wouldn’t have chosen” (p. 71).

and

Sarah Pink (2006, p. 16) noted that the visual brings fieldwork experience “directly to the context of representation” and the same author argues that, amongst all the senses, the visual as expressed by photography has a strong role to play in the ‘mapping of space’ (Pink, 2011, p. 4).

With these two themes in mind – urban humanities and photographic interpretation – we will explore, in groups, places you are (or are not so) familiar with.

AIMS / The aims of this workshop are, therefore,

•   To understand space
•   To think about different way of using photography to capture our ideas
•   To consider the intangible

To learn how to use photography to communicate

 

METHOD / We will start by thinking a little about the urban humanities – those matters mentioned by Cuff and Welch. We then move on to consider the deliberate framing and composition of the image – in the way Claire Zimmerman describes and then we produce creative output along the lines of Cecilie Sachs Olsen.

We will use different photographic techniques, all of which will be explained to you. In particular:

•  Photography as found drawings – a very personal view of place
•  Documentary and found photography – using someone else’s photographs to express your own view
•  Deep mapping and photography – exploring a very small place in depth using ‘forensic’ photography

You will work in groups, experimenting with these techniques and using them to produce a group portfolio that investigates and interprets a given place.

Everything is designed to be delivered online.

INDICATIVE SCHEDULE (All times are UK)

Friday 25.03.    14h00 GMT [or alternative tba]

Short introduction and initial task

 

WEEK 1

Monday    13h00-15h00

Presentation of the workshop
Urban humanities

Different approaches to photography

Formation of groups

Setting the first task

 

Wednesday 11h30-12h30

Seminar

Presentation first task

Interpreting photography

Setting the second task

Reviews at given times

Friday 13h00-17h00.    Final submission and review

EVALUATION – ASSESSMENT

Each university has its own expectations and requirements and you will be informed of those separately. As a general guide to assessing your involvement in this workshop the following will be considered:

Evaluation is based on:

•  A grasp of the role of urban humanities a frame for understanding and interpreting place
•  Ability to use different photographic techniques, especially ‘archival’ and ;found drawings’ to help an understanding of place.
• Visual communication
• Ability to explain and justify an approach take to the brief
• Ability to produce a group output

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cuff, D. & Wolch, J., 2016. Urban Humanities and the Creative Practitioner. Boom: A Journal of California, 6(3), pp. 12-17.

Sachs Olsen, C., 2016. Re-imagining the city through the Urban Humanities. [Online] Available at: http://geohumanitiesforum.org/project-re-imagining-the-city-through-the-urban- humanities/

Pink, S., 2006. The Future of Visual Anthropology. London: Routledge.

Pink, S., 2011. Amateur photographic practice, collective representation and the constitution of place. Visual Studies, 26(2), pp. 92-101.

Poyner, R., 2002. The Camera as Pen. In: Typographica. New York: Princeton Archhitectural Press.

Zimmerman, Claire (2001) Tugendhat Frames, Harvard Design Magazine, Fall 2001