The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part III: Tactics
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Fat
20.7 | Ten central London bus shelters were used as installation sites for collaborative
work between musicians and arts practitioners—shelter by Beaconsfield. Fat, Roadworks,
1997.
ADSITE
Adsite is a project that utilizes the tactic of parasitic urban intervention. Two
hundred bus shelter advertising sites within central London were hired and
occupied by the work of as many artists, architects, and other practitioners.
The existing London bus shelter system was chosen primarily because it was
accessible both to the practitioner and to the audience; it was highly visible,
occupying a site within an urban context that transcended the limitations
of the traditional gallery system. Roadworks set out few curatorial requirements
to the participants; there were no rules regarding content, the only
stipulation being the prescribed size.
SOCCER CITY
The types of buildings that are admitted into the architectural canon share
an abstract idea of the kind of space architecture is interested in. To contrast
two examples, the art gallery (as a prime “architectural space”) and the football
pitch (as an “uncanonized space”) display very different conceptions of
what space is, or what spatial experience might be. The art gallery is a passive,
contemplative, and abstract space, while the football pitch is active and
dynamic. There spatial relationships ebb and flow and space is made legi-