Abandoning Ship

The Unspace Studio

Atrium Intervention with Roger Connah 2010

Try to visualise all the streams of human interaction, of communication. All those linking streams flowing in and between people, through text, pictures, spoken words and TV commentaries, streams through shared memories, casual relations, witnessed events, touching pasts and futures, cause and effect. Try to see this immense latticework of lakes and flowing streams, see the size and awesome complexity of it. This huge rich environment. This waterway paradise of all information and identities and societies and selves.

             - The Raw Shark Texts Steven Hall. Canongate, London 2007

Change.Collapse.Reinvention.

In The Raw Shark Texts, Steven Hall transformed metaphors into literal, physical things that one can, in the moment, imagine with intense clarity, creating an image out of emotions and feelings.  Through this translation from metaphor to literal and back to metaphor, Hall is creating space. It is where text space and un-space collide.  The space of the selected text, ‘nebulous emotions’ becomes the basis for this project, which intends to evoke feelings in a space that has long been void of any.The atrium is nothing more than a connection, a threshold between the severed two halves of the university campus.  And yet this space was intended to do so much more.  The atrium, and the University Centre itself is supposed to be the heart of the university, where all the bright colours and identities of the students are waved as vibrant flags.  However instead we have meaningless roundabouts of country flags that, rather than creating an identity, conceal it. We also have rules upon rules which constrain the way students can use the space ‘creatively’ as the university ‘intended’.In the atrium there is no sense of ‘place’.  One cannot identify a single characteristic (other than Starbucks) of the atrium that one might be able to use to determine and communicate their location.  There is no sense of separation between the study space, commuting space and activity space. Through architectural intervention we intend to rectify these issues, and give students a voice in what is rightfully ‘their’ space.

 A 52 Week Architecture:

As an ongoing theme in this project, the idea of a 52 week architecture, one that is unfixed and ever changing throughout the year, has evolved into a 52 week student collaboration to answer important political and social questions.  In order to bring the different demographics together, a different question will be proposed each week.  Students can log in their answers via cell phone or computer.  An LED screen which wraps through the structure will show the uncensored views of the students, each answer influenced by the individual student’s heritage, culture, religion and views.  These answers can be anonymous, or if the student chooses to do so they may be simultaneously posted to their Facebook page via the application, allowing them to start important conversations with their friends.

Through The Lens:

Convex mirrors are to be hung within the structure, allowing students in the hibernaculum area to view all of what is going on in the Atrium space.  However these lenses distort and disconfigure reality.  Things are veiwed from a completely different angle and scale through these mirrors.  These lenses are to act as an allegory for the way in which students receive information in our university, our community, our society and global media:          

Through a Lens.

A Transformable Architecture:

In the exhibition area large panels swivel.  On one side of each panel exists a posting board, where information can be left or an exhbition can be organized.  Students would then be able to exhibit their artwork in a much more prominent place than the gallery that exists on campus, allowing for wider exposure.  Swivelling the panel would reveal a mirror, where once all panels are turned, create a mirrored wall for dancers and performances.  The panels exist on a two way track, where they can be pushed back, forward, or out of the way to the side of the atrium.

All Places are individually experienced, for we alone see them through the lens of our attitudes, experiences, and intentions, and from our own unique circumstances.

Everything is Changing.

In the early days of my second life I noticed how the shadow of a telegraph pole would inch between the gardens of two houses across the street–from 152 to the garden of 150–over the course of several hours, from lunchtime into evening. After watching this a few times I did the maths: the shadow movement from one garden to the next meant that both houses, the telegraph pole, the street, all of us, had travelled one thousand, one hundred and sixty miles around the earth with the turning of the planet. We’d also travelled about seventy-six thousand miles through space around the sun in the same period and much much further as part of the wider spiralling of the galaxy. And nobody noticed a thing. There is no stillness, only change. Yesterday’s here is not today’s here. Yesterday’s here is somewhere in Russia, in a wilderness in Canada, a deep blue nowhere out in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. It’s behind the sun, it’s in deep space, hundreds of thousands, millions of miles left behind. We can never wake up in the same place we went to sleep in. Our place in the universe, the universe itself, it all changes faster and faster by the second. Every one of us standing on this planet, we’re all moving forwards and we’re never ever coming back. The truth is, stillness is an idea, a dream. It’s the thought of friendly, welcoming lights still shining in all the places we’ve been forced to abandon.

          - The Raw Shark Texts Steven Hall. Canongate, London 2007 

                                 still        

                    –think about this carefully, think past         

                                        the obvious sense of it to the huge        

                                                  and amazing miracle hiding inside– ...