We just ended a week long workshop called grenzgeografien (you can check the site at www.grenzgeografien.org We were working on an urban project in Jerusalem with a few students from the ETH in Zurich, from Bir Zeit University in Rammalah and from Bezalel. Actually the project has been going on for more than a year now, coordinated by Philip Misselwitz, it's the fourth workshop held. The work focused on the village of Sur – Bahir on the southern outskirts of Jerusalem and on the neighborhood of Har Homa, the first being a Palestinian village, the second an Israeli Jewish neighborhood.
The task was to map up different parameters, anything from Imagined landscape to Fear. Each group had a week to put together a map.
Looking back at the presentation that was held on Friday, I can't escape the realization that quantitive representation, which in my eyes has been on center stage for the last couple of years, is slowly shifting towards qualitive representation.
It's obvious that mapping, as an alleged basis for design, is extremely appealing, it seems like a very natural and human initiative. It's also time consuming, not to mention its repetitive nature, you can easily get into the groove. But best of all it postpones decision making to a prospective future, you must have a belief in the apparent order of things just waiting to emerge by an introduction of just one more parameter.
What would be, for a change, a graphical representation of a hunch, a feeling or a story?
How can you represent a metaphor? (could it be a Sketch?!?)
This relates to my graduation project, now almost a month old, dealing with a very large piece of land, literally stretching from one side of Israel to the other, approximately 15 Km long and 5 wide. How to deal with such a monster. Standard course of action would be ‘map – conclude - zoom in – design', I'm not sure this paradigm is what I'm looking. It takes so many correlations for granted; this extreme jump in scale might be unbridgeable.
I cant miss out on design , again!
2 Comments
yood, your link to www.grenzgeografien.org is broken, there is a bracket at the end of the word, just delete it from the link.
yood,
just got back from a conferance at the bartlett in uk on critical architecture where Eyal Weizman presented the work of 'territorial lives'.
this was one of the most powerful papers presented at the conferance and really moved the group to a better understanding of not only the issues and the power of architecture within the context of the isreali palestinean crisis but how at the representation is a very powerful tool to explore critical thinking.
if you were part of this project i must congradulate you -- it was very admirable.
its too bad you didnt attend critical architecture conferance because practice / critism / theory / representaion was the theme. clearly project or ideas where a form of activism is present as part of the projects ideas is common thread in influential / critical architecture.
i am less convinced of its connection to metaphor though. you might try contracting some of the participants or looking at their writing for your development.
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