CHIAROSCURO
& THE CITY
MArch Final Project
Can the use of light in architecture provide a resolution to the narrative
performance cycle of birth, redevelopment and
conflict within the City of Birmingham?
My final project responded to the key question of how light in architecture can provide a resolution to the narrative performance cycle of birth, redevelopment and conflict within the City of Birmingham? The development from this is an Urban Opera scheme of parasitic structures inhabiting religious spaces across Birmingham responding to light and subverting the power dynamics within the Church, as an unwitting audience walk past and become players in the performance of the City.
Development Work
Our Unit Approach developed cinemetric techniques that respond specifically to the Opera to analyse and examine qualities that could not be represented through traditional orthographic techniques.
Each of us developed individual approaches, mine focussed on the transition between two acts of the Opera and how this was expressed through light.
‘The gold dust of the background, which until that moment had only a dull, sleepy lustre, will, as you move past, suddenly gleam forth as if it had burst into flame.'
Tanizaki, J, et al, 2001. In praise of shadows, Vintage classics. Vintage.
CONSTRUCTING THE LANDSCAPE
MArch Year One
The project is based in Wroxeter a town in Shropshire on the banks of the River Severn. The town was the site of a Roman City Viriconium Cornoviorum, the fourth largest town in Roman Britain.
The key design move of the project used English country prodigy houses and their relationship to the landscape to define how the vineyard visitor centres and production buildings would relate to the contoured landscape of the existing landscape.
