The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part III: Tactics
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Cornford & Cross
A related photographic work exhibited in the university gallery referred
to the more subtle ways of channeling movement around the privileged
lawns of the “ivory towers” of Oxbridge colleges. No security fences
are required here. Instead, time-honored codes of conduct dictate who is entitled
to walk on the grass. Few members of the public would risk the embarrassment
of rejection from the quadrangle: spaces such as these have,
since antiquity, challenged visitors to rank themselves according to the hierarchy
of English social class and academic status.
The project title, Camelot, referred to the phenomenally successful
United Kingdom National Lottery, an institution on which many artistic
and cultural projects are increasingly financially dependent. The lottery organizers’
choice of “Camelot” evokes a mythical “golden age” of English
history, when the court of King Arthur established fair play in a feudal society
through the code of chivalrous behavior. Perhaps the old idea that
only an accident of birth separates the prince from the pauper underlies today’s
popular interest in the journey from rags to riches through the luck
of the draw.
A particularly positive aspect of our Camelot was that it raised the
status of the site and triggered debate; the resulting publicity focused attention
onto the local authority council. We will be interested to see how
the site will be permanently improved when funds are made available.
PARK IN THE PARK
Across Two Cultures: Digital Dreams 4 in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, November
1996, was a conference and exhibition programmed by Lisa Haskel and curated
by Helen Sloan that explored the links between scientific and artistic
practice. We worked with London-based architects and town planners West
and Partners, the Ordnance Survey, the National Remote Sensing Centre,
and aerial photographers to produce Park in the Park—exhibited in a new
and as yet unoccupied office development on Newcastle’s Quayside.
This project questioned whether the “purity” of scientific knowledge
becomes compromised through its translation into public policy or
goods and services for the market. City planners, policy makers, and corporate
strategists now have access to precise and detailed scientific data as
a result of combining satellite remote sensing and aerial photography with
geographical information systems. However, the technologies’ potential
for radical planning could be better used for long-term solutions to the
problems posed by unlimited demand for finite resources. Park in the Park
foregrounded the relationship between consumer demand, land use, and
urban planning.