Outside or Inside the City__Brief 2.0

My project is about the space that is inside the city but could be regarded as outside.

In the first term, I focused on a crossing and illustrated a certain walker’s trace and the space which was created by the other walking people in the certain walker’s perception.

Then I found that people who were crossing the street wouldn’t walk into each other just like a flock of sheep wouldn’t run into each other. And of course the trace of man’s walking looks mundane because there is little social communication during the walking. The man is like the sheep and the crossing is like the pasture.

As said in Space and the Architect by Herman Hertzberger, ‘city means space for trade, culture and entertainment and therefore the best possibilities for social exchange. The more people, the fuller the city, the better.’ But the people living in city have to face pressure, pollution, noise and so on, they always dream of getting out of the city. People need a place to ‘clear your head, take a break from networks and congestion’. They ‘ want to be alone’. We describe this kind of places as ‘nature’, that is partly because we don’t have to face unnecessary social communications as in office.

In Wheatfield-A Confrontation, 1982, by Agnes Denes, a pioneer of environmental art, two acres of wheat were planted and harvested in a battery park landfill in New York. The existence of both swinging golden wheat and static iron high building in the same frame showed strong contrast between countryside and city. The work not only shows the damage which people have done to the nature, but also reveal the citizens’ eager for the nature.

It is not difficult to figure out that there is similarity between a crossing inside the city and a pasture outside. So if we could regard the crossing as a place where we may relax and be alone in our mind, in another word, a new kind of ‘nature’, there are several ‘natural’ places hiding inside the city. I’m interested in these places as ‘City Pasture’ and try to find them out and draw them down.