The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part III: Tactics
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Cornford & Cross
Official projections up to the year 2025 forecast that car traffic in
the United Kingdom will continue to grow steeply; 1 yet according to conventional
wisdom, increased demand must be accommodated. Park in the
Park critiqued this short-term technocratic approach by proposing the conversion
of Newcastle’s Leazes Park into a vast pay-and-display car park. This
strategic plan to increase private car parking at the expense of public green
space aimed to provoke questions on where the limits are for car use.
The installation explored these ideas through cartography because
through interpreting and communicating complex information, map drawing
combines editorial skill, artistic judgment, and scientific rationale.
Maps make visible, and even reproduce, certain aspects of the social relations
of power, such as how property and mobility are manifested in land use
and transport. Maps and plans are central to the whole process of land development,
from identifying a new business opportunity, through gaining
planning permission, to construction and end use.
West and Partners was briefed on the project and spent several
weeks designing a fully functional car park, complete with coach and disabled
parking provision, landscaping, and modifications to the local road
network. The design was realized with a combination of recently launched
Ordnance Survey Superplan data and in-house CAD software.
The core of the work, which combined these urban designs with
digital maps, aerial photographs, and satellite images, was produced to
“lock in” to the context in which it was exhibited: the expansive empty
spaces of the new Quayside office development. To engage with the site,
which offered far more floor than wall space, maps were produced to a very
large scale, resulting in 5-, 3-, and 1-meter squares. These were positioned
on the floor, forming echoes between various grid systems—relating the
tiles of the aerial photographs and Ordnance Survey maps to the standard
carpet tiles on the floor and to the tiled suspended ceiling. Rather than forcing
the digital maps to fit the grid of the building, we aligned them due
north. This combination of formal decisions put viewers in a privileged position—looking
down on the ground plane, easily able to identify and orient
themselves in relation to features in the cityscape—and encouraged
them to make links between the bland, detached exhibition space and their
own mental map of the city.
NEW HOLLAND
While Park in the Park challenged viewers with a scenario in which consumer
demand could push the urban landscape to a new extreme, the final
project discussed here used ideas about the urbanization of the countryside