Abstract
Cities are inseparable from their built form, with skyscrapers acting as a metonym for the urban fabric itself. These vertical figures serve as both the image of the city and the canvas for the application of secondary and tertiary applied identities. Vertical surfaces of cities become a layered canvas for self-expression, opportunism, commercial chance taking, and conscious city branding through the application of advertising billboards, branded building wraps, graffiti and large-scale artworks. The power and influence of these surfaces declares different territories for trade, consumption and social classes, splintering the notion of a specific place through the generic commodification of the urban visual space - a Heineken or Cartier advert is the same in Johannesburg or Durban as it is in Dakar or Tokyo. The consumerist city is now a global condition. This depositing of applied value onto our urban environment disturbs our relationship with an understanding of the built fabric in our cities.
In his book The Urbanism of Exception (Murray 2017), Martin Murray states that symbolically, verticality has meant that the developed and developing world is spread out into a fragmented patchwork that severs territories into separate and discontinuous layers. This practice of layering produces landscapes that resemble an extended ‘territorial ecosystem’ of externally alienated, but internally homogenised, enclave spaces located next to, within, above, or below each other (Murray 2017:131). The layering of the building skin and resultant ‘thickening’ of this surface space further emphasises the sealed, isolated nature of the internal environment.
Architect and artist Gordon Matta-Clark exposes this condition in his work by sawing and carving sections out of buildings to reveal the interior, things never meant to be seen. The artist Dan Graham (quoted in Bernstein, 2017) states that “Matta-Clark saw his ‘cuts’ as probes . . . opening up socially hidden information beneath the surface”. This approach by Matta-Clark was an attempt to recover lost and neglected parts of the city and open them up for public enjoyment and co-creation. My proposed project employs a similar methodology to Matta-Clark’s ‘anarchitecture’ – a destructive investigation to expose and interrogate the physical and symbolic construction of our consumerist city. This site for the Major Design Project thus becomes the built structure, the applied branded surface and the thickness of the space between and through internal and external velums...
M.Tech. (Architecture)