E-launch of NEWcastle: a new dialogue website
Launching on the Northern Architecture site this month is a new website called NEWcastle. This is the result of a long-term project for the web by American artist laurie halsey brown, supported by PROJECT and their Talking Artist Award, and by Northern Architecture. It is designed to promote dialogue between the architectural community and the users they design for.
http://www.movinginplace.net/NEWcastle/index.php
‘NEWcastle’
Architecture has a profound daily effect on us: our lives are influenced via the homes and work places that are usually designed by ‘invisible’ architects whom we rarely have the opportunity to communicate with. How can we have more power and a voice in the architectural process that we are so deeply affected by?
‘NEWcastle’ gives us this opportunity to contribute to a dialogue. Masquerading as an Estate Agent site by re-working the language, strategies and mechanisms [such as Virtual Tours] common to these sites, NEWcastle ‘sells’ the importance of dialogue between architects and users.
Add your voice to a dialogue with the architects and users of ten properties in the North East.
Fascinated by the relationship between people and places, the artist laurie halsey brown* visited Newcastle in 2004 and became intrigued by the city’s overlapping layers of architectural development. Through a Talking Artist Award from PROJECT**, gained with the support of Northern Architecture, she returned to the city in 2005 to map the relationship between designers in the city and the people who were the users of those places. She interviewed ten architectural practices about recent projects in Newcastle, Durham, Sunderland and Hexham. She also interviewed people who lived, worked in or were neighbours to these buildings.
This work has now generated a new web site - NEWcastle - which is intended to generate dialogue between the public – the users of architecture – and the architectural community itself. ‘NEWcastle’ creates the perception of an Estate Agent site; but allows us to engage and interact with it at the same time. Visitors can read the conversations that took place about the ten projects, and can go on Virtual Tours of each of the properties. There are five residential properties – mostly city apartments – and five office or public buildings, ranging from an arts centre to business units. Themes are pulled out from these conversations and visitors are invited to create dialogue regarding the themes or come up with themes of their own. Visitors can also read the artist’s weblog which she kept as she journeyed round the city in August and September.
With many thanks to the contributors:
Stephen Miller (Bill Hopper Architects)
Clive Albert (Malcolm Fraser Architects)
Tim Bailey (xsite architecture)
Peter Wesolowski (Newcastle City Council)
Phil Lloyd/Ces Maddison (Purves Ash LLP)
Jenny Gillatt/Tim Mosedale (Mosedale Gillett)
Peter Walker (Dewjoc)
John Burns (MacKellar Architects)
Dean Thody/Eric Carter (Napper)
David Coundon (Red Box)
*laurie halsey brown is an intra-disciplinary and hybrid practitioner from New York presently based in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Her present artistic focus is as a mediator between architects and the public realm in order to facilitate dialogue, heighten awareness of the daily experience of architecture and empower the user towards establishing their voice in how architecture is designed.
**PROJECT - engaging artists in the built environment - is funded by the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE) and Arts & Business (A&B), and managed and delivered by Public Art South West (PASW).
‘NEWcastle’ is third in a series of net.art works that use commercial strategies to ‘sell’ alternative ideas about architecture, space and place. These works are components of larger intra-disciplinary projects, with ‘NEWcastle’ as a component of beingthere.v3.n/g created to further dialogue between architects and users based in the Newcastle area.
Artist e-mail: lhb@movinginplace.net
31st August 2006
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