space on the run
from the mobile research institute 1st manifesto
Centre for Research Architecture
Programmes in Research Architecture, Goldsmiths College, University of London
As for the eye of the architect it is no more innocent that the lot he is given to build on or the blank sheet of paper on which he makes his first sketch. His subjective space is freighted with all too objective meanings. It is a visual space, a space reduced to blueprints, to mere images – to that world of the image which is the enemy of the imagination. – Henri Lefevbre
-excerpt:
The cabbie is a man of the street, rooted in and not above it. His is a sonorous urbanism. The knowledge scripts the city as a non linear score comprised of multiple notes, capable of generating a variety of compositions. The cabbie composes the city as he moves through it, calls it out in order to memorize it. Someone we hail, he is a listener, a speaker; the cab is a mobile architecture premised on the conversation , a roaming and familiar soundmark humming its way through the cities streets. Taxi shelters function as physical portals where groups of cabbies, much in the spirit of an old boys network meet for tea and bacon sandwiches to verbally exchange information about the days’ traffic, trials and tribulations. The more poetic dimension invoked by the spatial practices of the knowledge re invigorate impoverished Cartesian, perspectival conceptions of space, suggesting tactical encounters with the city are as much about experiencing the rhythmic echoes of its bustling urbanity than they are about its pictoral enframing.