AA Summer School 2011
STORIES FROM THE CITY
Ingrid Schroder, Julika Gittner
BACKROOM BAUPROBE* ‘…architecture, attesting to the tastes and attitudes of generations, to public events and private tragedies, to new and old facts, is the fixed stage for human life.’ (Aldo Rossi) The architecture of the city is commonly understood as a backdrop to our lived experience. From news broadcasts to personal tragedies our stories inevitably occur in front of or next to some more or less intentionally chosen architectural scenery. Our Summer School unit will look at designing the city as a stage set that is not incidental but instrumental to the stories that unfold through and around it.
* BAUPROBE
BACKROOM
The 'Bauprobe' is a 'build rehearsal' used in Central European theatre to test a stage design before it goes into production. A full scale mock up is set up on stage using substitute flats, rostra, cloths and furniture in order to find out if its spacing is adequate for the play. This practice is used to save money by avoiding costly adjustments to the finished set but it also marks the moment of the first meeting between the acted and the physical part of a story, both of which are then fine tuned and adjusted to each other.
The moment we step into the back rooms of stories we exit the city stage, the scenery of chimney stacks and bill boards transforms into picture frames and window ledges. And yet the stories that unfold in the backstreets, backrooms and bedrooms are infinitely interlinked with the larger events that are taking place on an urban scale.
07.00 07.15 07.30 07.45
The mother gets up and goes to get breakfast in the KITCHEN The child gets up and goes into the BATHROOM The father gets up and goes into the BATHROOM The father and the child have their breakfast in the KITCHEN … (Georges Perec)
We will construct a series of imagined stories from recorded snippets of London’s hidden narratives and expose these fictions to the city as a means of revealing a set of distilled urban situations. The project will take the form of a number of 1:1 mock-up constructions that will be placed in public spaces in London. The pieces become the portable and temporary settings for the public re-enactment of our narratives in the city. The displacement of these small scale fictions into the wider context of the city will begin to draw out unexpected connections, and shift the reading of these incidental moments of imagined everyday life into instructions for a new thematic infrastructure for London.