Output details
35 - Music, Drama, Dance and Performing Arts
University of Exeter
The walker-architect: ambulant interventions as built environment
Description and rationale:
This is a Practice-as-Research project exploring a way of thinking about walkers and other itinerants, not only as users, critics or fleeting dreamers re-imagining the city, but as active contributors to the built environment and its development. Resulted in multiple interlinked outcomes across six countries.
Approaches and strategies:
Comprising walking experiments, physical interventions, public engagement activities, papers and articles, the research imperatives for the project were:
1. Is walking really enough, theoretically or practically? Can we take our walking a step further? Not simply to pass through, but to change, to adapt, to leave and to take, to detourn and to transform.
2. How might 'walking culture' contribute to architecture? When does the walker become an architect? And conversely, when does architecture go on a walk?
Outputs and evidence:
In line with Exeter's policy of interweaving practice and scholarship, the outcomes of this project are both performance-based and articulated through scholarly and other media.
1. 'Mis-Guided' (2008), coauthored with Wrights & Sites (Hodge, Persighetti, Smith, Turner), BBI Festival, Switzerland. Architectural interventions; 'Tourist Mis-Information Centre'; artworks and talks; derivés. Hodge was lead representative in stakeholder discussions.
2. 'Fragile Spaces' (2008-2009), coauthored with Wrights & Sites. Exeter R&D.
3. 'Longshore Drift' (2009), coauthored with Persighetti. Six-hour drift launching 'Living Landscapes' conference, Aberystwyth.
4. 'The International Festival and the City Space' (2013), co-authored with Turner, Ghent.
5. 'Before I compose a piece, I walk round it several times, accompanied by myself' (2012), solo-authored exploration of Paris walking, the built environment and compositional tactics. Performance Research (17:2).
6. 'Ambulant Architectures' (2012), 100km walker-architect experiment coauthored with Wrights & Sites, 'Sideways', Belgium.
7. 'The walker-architect: disrupted walking and the city' (2012), solo-authored paper, Hellerau, Dresden.
8. 'The Architect-Walker: Manifesto and Manifestations' (2013), coauthored with Wrights & Sites for On Walking conference, Sunderland.
