Shored, My Ruin(ed) City

Our urban environments are an assemblage of histories and manifestations of ideas. Under the ambitions of progress, the consequence is a destructive and aggressive process of urban renewal that is indiscriminate in terms of what is lost in the pursuit of the future. Cultural assets are under attack and the imperfect planning leaves ruins of the institutions in our society that are significant to our identities. From libraries to ballrooms, ruins represent fragments that retain meaning through difficult, changing times. But these are now ever present in a digital field parallel to the urbanized one, creating a new soft city that is lived through digital space. Media plays its part in our consumption and understanding of the “soft city”, one that is portrayed through cultural media and archived artefacts/documents. Research from students and academics at the Birmingham School of Architecture and Design explore the fringes between this soft city and the real one, mining content from archives to physical events to reconstruct the destructive process of transformation in the Midlands, typically a post-industrial region with a fast-changing environment. We adapt the digital methods to bricolage the city using known, unknown and fictional fragments of the city and interpret how their role changes over time. Our compositions speculate on future visions of the city built on these ruined fragments.

Reconstructing the Social

Mike Dring (UK), Alessandro Columbano (IT), Miles Marshall (UK)

Birmingham’s ever-present motto “Forward” is enacted through ongoing regeneration, often with little trace of previous civic ideals. The proposal seeks to celebrate its role in the reconfiguration of the city, extending the spatial and structural qualities across the site, in doing so reconstructing social engagement as envisaged by the original architect, John Madin.

Grade Separation: Archive of Hockley Flyover

Anila Safeer (UK), Sebastian Smart (UK), Fei Luo (UK), Michael Conner (UK)

Birmingham is closely connected to the utopian ideals of mid-twentieth century planners and architects. The term “grade separation” refers to the separation of vehicular from pedestrian space. The road often overwhelmed the context. In an attempt to counter this, artworks were commissioned for the public realm.

PIXel Operation{s}

Alessandro Columbano (IT)

Instruments of pixel manipulation construct these faultless fictions, a technique which is also applicable in the process of image making or architectural storytelling. This performative lecture questions the significance of relocating pixels beyond reality, and the reading of urban identity presented to us from these operations.

Elephant; a Translation of Collective Identity

78 Studio: Adam Nuttall (UK), Louis Stephenson (UK), William Weston (UK)

As a studio, we question the usefulness of this shifting landscape to the people that inhabit it, in order to develop a place in which memories provide a sentimental backdrop to the lived experience. machine will facilitate connections with the city through active recording, archiving and reconfiguration of a ballroom, a fire-bombed pub, a rave venue, all with an innate relationship with the urban sound.

Collaborative Concrete with Gareth Proskourine-Barnett

Agnieszka Michalska (PL), Chen Liu (CN), Rowan Powell (UK), Kieron Sylvester (UK), Victoria Miller (UK)

Starting with digitized ruins of the Birmingham Central Library and the utopian ambition of Brutalist Architecture, Collaborative Concrete investigates the potential of the material as a digital .obj file — to be manipulated and reformed, providing a space to experiment, think and play.

Coventry: Self-Archive

Joshua Bright (UK)

This individual project explores a process of archiving the ruins of the city in an infinite digital space, documented from the fragments that have remained over different periods of the city.

Biography

Birmingham School of Architecture and Design is an interdisciplinary design community exploring the environment through the scales. Founded in 1908 and located at the heart of our rapidly changing city, the School hosts courses in architecture, interior, landscape, management, product, heritage and future living. With one of the most multicultural student bodies in the country, the School produces future design leaders, developing attributes to be ethical, entrepreneurial, and forward-thinking.

Credits

Curator: Alessandro Columbano (IT)
Developed by C100, an ongoing collaboration between Birmingham School of Architecture and Design and Birmingham School of Art. Project leads: Mike Dring (UK), Alessandro Columbano (IT), Gareth Proskourine-Barnett (UK) and Valeria Szegal (HU).