Matthew Architecture Gallery – Saltcity: Field and Work
Architecture, University of Edinburgh, 20 Chambers Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1JZ. 0131 650 2306Saltcity: Field and Work
The exhibition exposes architecture as a slow practice rooted in context, and addresses questions of Field + Work through a dramatically installed, scaled city model, which imagines the urban fields of the Bahia de Cádiz, southwest Spain, as multiple landscapes of production and potential, informing thoughtful, incisive design interventions. Photographs, drawings and films reflect on fieldwork and design processes. Project proposals are described more fully through models, drawings, sketches and film. Architectural design projects can operate as a critical speculative practice somewhere between fine art and pragmatic craft.
The Masters of Architecture programme 2006-2008 at the University of Edinburgh has been working with the dense historic fabric, la ciudad lineale, postindustrial territories and the metropolitan network of the Bahia de Cádiz, through fieldwork, research and design. Until 1884 Cádiz was a prime nautical meridian; a significant cosmopolitan pivot in the cultures of discovery and globalisation; a punta of Europe, Africa and the Americas; a testing ground of military and naval tactics and tools; a portal for flows of goods, people and ideas. It is a city of the south, a peninsular of the peninsular of Spain. It is not an island, it is set apart from yet tethered to mainland Spain, and historically perceived of as ‘other’ to Europe. It is a territory of unsure ground, defined by geological, geographical and hydrographic shifts and limits. Its Atlantic situation conditions it as a place of raw exposure salt, wind and light and fragile ecologies fish, beach ridges, wetlands.
Master of Architecture Cádiz studio 2006-2008 led by architect, Suzanne Ewing and artist Victoria Bernie.