Invisible Cities
Studio Invisible Cities was this year located in Cyprus, a complex and contested island, exploring the idea that architecture is contingent, and part of a broader and richer ecology.
Situated politically and culturally within the European Union yet geographically located near the states of Turkey, Israel, Lebanon and Egypt, the island has been and remains between west and east, with its strategic location making it subject to, over the centuries, occupation by a number of world powers, including Britain.
Philosophical thinking from the seventeenth century onwards cast nature as an object of study, a blank place to explore and a force to be controlled. During the British colonial period, the mediums of art, custom and language were used as instruments of 鈥渃ivilisation鈥 and, as late as the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, the British both violently and insidiously exported their particular brand of 鈥渘ature perfected鈥 through literature, landscape painting and garden design to the island of Cyprus, transforming its landscapes.
As Tiffany Kaewen Dang writes: 鈥楢s a discipline, landscape not only reflects social and political power relations as a symbolic aesthetic medium; it is itself an instrument and agent of power鈥. In this context, the studio asks: How can we begin to intervene within a contested Landscape?
Our starting point was to critique 鈥渓andscape as an idea鈥 within our local context in 糖心Vlog. We investigated key landscape types 鈥 garden, park, allotment, common 鈥 analysing their histories, the versions or visions of nature they espouse, and the politics and methods of survey and design that made them. Drawing on H茅l猫ne Frichot鈥檚 book Creative Ecologies we worked together to develop a set of counter methods for reading these landscapes to reveal hidden or latent ecologies.
The initial ambition behind the studio was to explore the notion that 鈥済ood architecture鈥 does not begin and end with a building, that informed decision making and design sees architecture as part of a broader and richer ecology. Working within Cyprus鈥 contested landscapes has opened up rich seams of possibility. In seeking to learn, rather than to solve, the range of projects and approaches that have emerged from the studio has been joyful and diverse.
View examples of work from this studio.
