Chris Lees, Akward Orchid, 2005.


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What is your definition of ‘spatial narrative’ found in fiction or history? Does it capture an essence of Mexico City, whether sublime or trivial and insignificant? Can you communicate this by designing a visible, tangible story-telling object or space? Your definition and interpretation does not need to be clear from the beginning. Trust your intuition and try to explain it through your work.

interpret
The aim of this project is not the creation of new fictions but the attentive reading of an existing fictional portrayal of Mexico City and its subsequent translation into a physical object/installation (y2) or the design of a small building (y3) sited in London. We are interested in raising issues of transference of meaning, perception, materiality and representation, which could set guidelines and references for the development of your work throughout the year. The materiality you give your selected narrative might derive from either your Mexican source or your London site, or explore materials/processes you always wanted to work with and never had a chance.

reveal
Y2
The embodiment of your selected Mexican narrative(s) will refer to a real site in London. The choice of site will derive from a space implicated in the narrative—perhaps a real location in Mexico City—for which you will find an equivalent in London, in terms of scale, function or significance. Your 1:1 intervention will be site-specific but could also be presented at the Bartlett. It could be minuscule or expansive, a private depository of investigations and thoughts or an object inviting public interaction. Gesture will not be a frozen artefact but an entity that changes through time transforming into different states according to its story-telling powers. The act of making the piece can also be seen as part of the story, merging process and the finished object into one. It will be a material drawing imagining and recounting an aspect of Mexico City in London, site-specific and interactive: it will analyse and diffuse, illuminate and obscure, soothe and surprise, conceal and reveal or order and bewilder.

Y3
The staging of your selected narrative(s) will take the form of a scaled architectural proposal for a real site in London. Like Y2 students, the choice of site will derive from a space implicated in the narrative—perhaps a real location in Mexico City—for which you will find an equivalent in London, in terms of scale, function or significance. Your design will describe a small scale building: a house, a shop, a small gallery, a workshop, a pavilion or a café. Similar in scale to a house, your project will not be entirely domestic, but will interact with its immediate surroundings or the city.
Your design will investigate architecture’s ability to carry and communicate spatial narratives. From your selected Mexican account you will be called to identify one or more protagonists which will act as the user(s)/inhabitant(s) of your building. Alternatively the building itself might take the role of the main protagonist. You will develop and represent your design through model-making, aiming at a large scale performative model made out of finely crafted parts.
Gesture will not be an static building but one that changes through time transforming into different states according to its story-telling powers.

Does your building have a centre or can it be linear, unfolding in time? Does it remember a remarkable incident by representing it in its constituent parts, celebrate the insignificant and the everyday, or re-enact rituals whose meaning is forgotten? Does it remain static or does it change periodically or unexpectedly? Is the design a finite configuration? Or does it transform reflecting the ebb and the flow of the city, the weather and traffic? Could it shift by inviting participation of external users? Is it a place to escape, to hide, to meet, to be alone, to look, to be seen, to remember, to forget, to play, to sit, to lie down, to listen, to read, to learn or to exchange?

From this first project and until the end of the year we would like you to keep a trace of your thinking process in sketchbooks.