Sep 6, 2005

XAP

First real day of school yesterday, one new teacher, quite a few new classmates and a new project. So far it all looks really promising.

Taken from this years program of the XAP studio:
"We are ... no longer tied to the same geographical locality. Private cars and efficient public transport makes it possible that we no longer have our home, our work and spend our free time in the same place (same city). The city as a phenomenon as well as the hierachical division between city suburb and landscape is being dissolved and replaced by an urbanity who's range is measured and defined by the radius of action of the individual.
...
The general discussion of the year is the connection between and the consequence of an architecture and urbanity understood as a duration over time rather than a physical/geographical extent"

So, we're gonna deal with the exiting fact that historical city centres are loosing importance as people has become more mobile. The city is no longer the large village it used to be, where you lived and worked in the same neighbourhood as your friends and family.
Rather than defining oneself through a geographical area, you create and constantly evolve a web of particular places, physical and virtual, and the routes and connections between them. Thus time comes into play - time from place to place, time of day when you go where, to work, on the net, time of year...

I'm really looking forward to work with time, a really difficult subject imho, and very relevant. If any of you dear readers have some suggestions for litterature or websites that might be interesting in this context, please don't hesitate to put them in a comment.