apastoral: field notes

apastoral

apastoral

The following project explores the eroding spatial commons of the UK as a consequence of a landscape made up of increasingly privatised, interiorised plots. Through considering the way the property line is drawn and reflecting on plots, fences and offences, the work generates new forms of pastorality within suburban context.

Through the medium of the book, image and model, apastoral narrates a fundamental commentary on land and the architecture of the suburbs directed towards architects, policymakers and landowners that influence these environments.

frank brandon

Acknowledging a UK landscape made up of increasingly privatised plots, how can the property line, fences and offences be mobilised to produce new forms of pastorality within the suburbs?

field notes

The following chapters compile a work that follows on from a short 4-minute video that introduces the landscape I often walk in the suburbs.

In this video I introduce myself as the wanderer, a role that can be taken by anyone, who observes and frames the landscape to understand how they interpret it. I record this through the use of the body camera, drone and aerial footage.

The video also prescribes that an analogous relationship exists between my living room rug and the field I walked during lock-down, demonstrating the landscape as a construct of our imagination.

Field notes complies my observations. Throughout this section I establish a clear standing within the pastoral narrative, explore the plot, the fence and the offence. Ending in Middelheim sculpture park, Antwerp, where the first application of the project takes place.

pastoral

The pastoral is a literary genre that originated in ancient Greek poetry. Through its first records in the works by Theocritus, Hesiod and Virgil, it typically portrays a romantic, idealized, rural setting where its characters are living close to the land and free from the constraints of society.

Throughout the 21st century this term has evolved and the way we relate to the pastoral and its erosion is evermore relevant within the expanding urban context. Whether this be through the escapist dreams of living off the land, the nostalgia of the countryside, or simply being more conscious of our natural environment.

More often than not, the concept overlooks the realities of these

idealised, utopian visions. The ‘a’ in ‘apastoral’ symbolises the attempt to acknowledge these harsh realities of land such as private property, social hierarchies and temporality.

For myself, the tangible pastoral comes in the form of a field I walk to. It’s about reflecting on my thoughts and a recreational space to exercise or be amongst nature. Fundamentally it’s a relational concept.

Throughout this project the term pastoral will be framed in the relational sense, where our pastoral ideals appear less about the romantic and picturesque but more with a sense of collectivity.

plots

The field I walk to is an individual particle of the landscape, a metaphorical typology of space that can build up on an endless scale. The extent of these fields are determined by natural features, topography and whatever sits next to it. This edge is bordered by four lines to produce a rectangular plan. A landscape organised as a rectangular grid.

The reality of the field is its slow evolution into the commodified plot since the enclosures of the 1200s Within the neoliberal, urbanising state we occupy, every plot has an agenda or protocol that inhabits the space at its centre, increasingly privatised from public use.

Every plot is registered both institutionally - through the land registry - and physically - through the erection of the fence. More

often that not, the line drawn on these documents are in direct correlation with reality.

Line = Fence.

The fence of the plot is determined further by 3 other juridical factors. First, restrictive covenants on the land which are plot and case specific. Second, the boundary agreement between the neighbours that share the line; and finally planning regulation which acts as a blanket regulation across the specific suburb.

Therefore the fence at first glance unveils the agenda of a plot and its occupant. However, through further contemplation, the top down, fixed power relations and temporalities of the physical landscape are brought to light.

fences

The fence is a fundamental, yet overlooked architecture of landscape, determined by both institutional and physical stakeholders. They are the dialogue between inside and outside and the negotiation between what’s public and private.

From the outside they are able to mediate the economic and functional state of its interior narrating an umwelt of the landowner, their enclosed garden, and therefore, their treatment of the surrounding landscape.

Within the suburban context, the main supplier of these materials are garden centre, such as B&Q. The fence market they generate, when isolated, becomes readable as a genetic code of the landscape.

In the current context of the suburbs I have depicted 16 of the current serial, homogeneous states of these products that are sold to suburbanites that express a fixed privatised experience of landscape.

fences?

It is important to acknowledge the provision of safety and security that the fence can provide, however over the course of history the fence has had symbolic impacts as representing and reproducing the contested and splintered nature of the contemporary suburbs.

Through the boundary agreement these fences can be questioned between plot owners. This chapter expands an understanding of the term ‘fence’. Registering it, no longer as the black and white zones it generates but a grey area inbetween.

Through drawing and documenting, this chapter collects 36 different forms of boundary, ranging from the fence in its strongest form, slowly evolving and questioning new materials for the role of negotiator.

offences

An offence is defined as a breach of a rule or a regulation. In this scenario the offence is a term I’m using to describe an alternative fence which overcomes these property lines.

Using the wooden fence as a metaphorical device of the suburban fence, the following drawings illustrate a series of offencing concepts with connective qualities. For example: mobile, folding, sliding, stile, hinged, porous.

The introduction of these attributes into the suburban context will encourage the landscape to take on multiple states of open and closed, producing grey areas inbetween.

middelheim

Middelheim Sculpture Park, Antwerp, is the first application of this work in the form of a live project over the course of a week. The facility is a public park during the day which hosts sculpture works and at night the park closes around 5pm, becoming inaccessible through the series of 15 gates that surround its perimeter. The facility has a desire to be more public and relational with its neighbouring plots, however due to the pragmatics of securing artworks its state must remain within the privatised.

Through the use of the fence the park gains more agency to open and close zones to the public and produces a hierarchy of public and private in shades of grey.

This enables the reception to stay open and host events at night while the rest of the park remains closed; Or a dialogue to occur with the hospital next door; Or enable the artist residents to work longer, even when the park closes at night.

In this work I reduce the

landscape to the size of the Middelheim Site, zoning the areas of the park into protocol and agenda. For instance, the laboratory is where resident artists work, the archive is where unexhibited work is kept and the reception is the main hub.

The offences I propose are in the form of heras fencing, a traditionally industrial fence, suiting the current temporary fencing aesthetic of Middelheim. In the following sketches, this fence will be adapted with rotating attributes to experiment with grey dialogues between these zones.

apastoral

The apastoral is set within a generic suburban building block of detached homes that reflect the middle class nature of these regions. This building block is made up of residential plots, or enclosed gardens, that look to become transformed into a park through the use of the offence.

The following chapter first displays three possible concepts for opening up the interiorised plot. Here we can begin to speculate new top down realities of how the revised land registry could engage with property lines.

Following are a series of images that capture an alternative bottom up approach. Here, the still image acts as a medium to speculate a suburban context of fences and offences that build new tangible moments of pastorality.

The ten images can be read both in sequence as a wandering through the building block or as a disrupted sequence that creates different linkages, transforming the garden into the park.

concepts

proposal

The vegetable allotment

The party park

The spa baths

The parking lot

The nature reserve

reference list

David Hockney, Agnes Varda, JMW Turner, Friedich

Kaspar, Paul Shepheard, Sebastian Marot, Rem Koolhaas, George Monbiot, Guy Shrubsole, WJT Mitchell, Richard Long, Francis Alys, Jeroen Jongeleen, Hamish Fulton, The Situationists, Lucius Burckhardt, The Reveries of a Solitary Walker, Bruce

Nauman, Stan Brakhage, Shared Assets, Three Acres and a Cow, Derek

Jarman, Eric Rohmer, Werner Herzog, Patrick Keller, Dan Graham, 54N4E, KGDVS, Mies Van Der Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright, Gregor Schneider, Dennis

Tyfus, Dogma.