City Breaks
Chris Barr, 2nd
Jan. 2005
Under the working title of walking
dialogue my approach to the city break in Helsinki has been
largely formed whilst negotiating the streets themselves. In search
of a way in perhaps, my initial impetus has been to collect the
maps that I have persuaded people to draw for my own orientation
as a means of perusing an alternative cartography. In doing so the
city has revealed itself to me as the spaces between streets, a
plethora of varied encounters and expressions that are only possible
through the generosity of its people and their time.
The desire to develop my ideas
surrounding the distinction made by the physical city and its community
in walking dialogue has continued through the production
of architectural models, which play with the displacement of the
relationships with scale and other such details. In any city there
are architectural idiosyncrasies and my immediate observations of
Helsinki were formed in relation to the overwhelming amount of text
that sprawls across the buildings in the more commercial parts of
the city. As a stranger to these signs and their meanings the texts
seemed to emphasise the un-reconciled contradictions between the
modernist agenda of such pioneers as Alvar Aalto and the ambivalence
towards spatial boundaries compounded by the omni-presence of the
international style skyscraper and the semi-transparent membrane
of its all over glass surface.
In addition to this I am hoping
to install a heater outside of the Muu gallery in Helsinki, which
will serve as a simple gesture designed to create a dialogue between
sculptural intervention and architectural improvement.
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