Saturday 13 December 2008

Transformative Spaces

André posted on his carnet de notes about a very interesting project called Urban Mobs, which alledgedly maps people's emotions in European cities. Quoting their official website: "Urban Mobs provide a tool to study crowd communication activities and paint a popular emotion cartography".

It reminds me of Lars Spuybroek’s intervention for the city of Doetinchem in the Netherlands, called D-Tower, constructed between 1998 and 2003. A website surveyed participants’ emotions every month to transform their sensations into an unstable and colourful tower in a public square. In this way, passers-by would notice what the artist/architect supposed to be the mood of the city. Marcos Novak calls this transarchitecture and Thomas Horan would define it as transformative recombinant design.

Of course that D-tower and Urban Mobs have their similarities in the way relational concepts are applied (with the aid of technologies) to depict, question and think through spatial manifestations. But, essentially, they do it and happen in different scale. I would say they both have similar ideas, one at the building (or architecture) scale, and another at the urban or regional (or global) scale.

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