31/07/2015
Check out Urban Agency's piece for the RHA Annual Exhibition. The proposal is entitled " Look out" and deals with the importance of public spaces.
The exhibition runs until 8th August 2015... Don't miss it!
LOOK OUT!
By Urban Agency Architects
Look out! touches on our relationship with the landscape and, more specifically, the urban landscape.
The birth of the new Irish state inspired Irish painters to use the landscape of town and country to promote both modernity and the ‘Celtic’ identity of the new Ireland. The landscape depictions were often imbued with a strong sense of nostalgia, melancholia and emptiness. They were the landscapes of a virtual reality, frozen in time, to look at within a frame but not to engage with physically. This romantic notion of the landscape as a pure, natural, pristine, unchanging space prevailed in the new Irish nation’s sense of itself. Meanwhile, there was little identification with urban Ireland, in so far as it was not seen as being an intrinsic part of an extreme and limited definition of the Irish identity. The result, in the Irish urban context, is a kind of perverse policy of ‘laissez faire’; a complete disengagement with the public space and public realm in general, other than as a place to be used for practical activities and transportation.
This piece, titled Look out!, consists of an antique golden frame that originally framed a still-life painting but that is now framing a film. The film shows the ‘before and after’ life of a man-made urban landscape designed by Urban Agency architects for Copenhagen's new harbour front in Denmark. Look out! seeks to create awareness about the importance of ‘looking out’ at our public space and urban landscape not solely as a place for contemplation, but also as an active place for recreation, exchange, interaction and, to a greater extent, an engine for social and economic regeneration.
Today, more than ever, the urban landscape needs to respond to the challenges of modern urban living. It can no longer just be looked at like a ‘still-life’ painting or used as a service network, but needs rather to be rethought, reworked, reorganized and re-sculpted to celebrate ‘life’, and availed of as a true democratic space for all citizens.
https://vimeo.com/133665137
