Last week I spoke about Urban Tapestries at Archilab 2004 -- a biannual gathering of innovative international architects. The signage for the show dominated the town of Orleans, France for the entire week!
The theme of this year's conference, "The Naked City", examined ways in which the city could be stripped bare of its conventional layers so that the material underneath could be combined in novel ways. Bart Lootsma, the curator, wanted the assembled architects to appreciate the insight of the Situationists and the application of the dérive to their work as the designers of urban reality. Naturally, this emphasis suits the Urban Tapestries approach wonderfully -- we are trying to build toolsets that allow residents of the city to not only create, but to archive their own personal dérives. I set out one version of this approach in the article that I wrote for the exhibition catalogue entitled: "Urban Tapestries: The Spatial and the Social on your Mobile".
The Conference also featured a gorgeous and extensive exhibition, for which Giles designed an Urban Tapestries display consisting of a film loop, a table for constructing a specially-produced bilingual eBook for the event, and three posters examining Public Authoring, our Prototypes and Trials, and our Research Methods. (The room shown here was one of over a dozen such galleries at the exhibit!)
