YEOVILLE EXTRAVAGANZA - ARCHITECT'S DREAMS
Many of digital communication technologies have become cheap and easily available through the internet, requiring merely a screen and connection to operate. This screen has rapidly altered our use of social environments (much as the telephone and television had done previously) and with advancing social networking websites will continue to challenge physical interaction. Yet within these environments of collapsed boundaries between public consumption and private expression, devices can still be deployed to offer new social realms for other forms of engagement.
Internet cafes in Yeoville are a local example of such spatial developments, especially with regard to long-distance diaspora communications in which immigrants from across Africa are in constant dialogue with family and colleagues over personal and commercial matters. We might imagine designing spatial interfaces for these dialogues in which people want to be seen demonstrating cooking, arguing wedding arrangements, choosing materials for production, convening tribunals, but also in some instances needing to remain hidden, withholding current identities and conditions, managing secretive and illicit activities, confessing betrayal.
The current set of internet cafes simply inhabit shops or rooms in buildings with cabins or desks in semi-private formats (even as many also carry other commercial activities). Architecture might begin to draw on some of these arrangements as parasitic spatial strategies of fully utilising host spaces to grow and conduct activities. These strategies could further develop as metaphoric displacement (the space becomes what you say you want it to do), incompleteness (evolving adaptable forms and spaces in response to decreased building life-cycles), material mimicry (defensive disappearance or conversely radical display) and functional hijacking (stealing other local uses) in order to fully realise a lost or completely new set of urban opportunities. Becoming attachments, pods, billboards or hidden corridors that not only infiltrate the area but also spread innovative shared public realms for spontaneous expression that will be constantly renewed.
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Market of Associations
Garrett:
"I started from a specificity of Yeoville, the intensity and diversity of its associational life. Some of it is public, some of it, because of informality and fear, violence and xenophobia, might want to remain semi-private. So I imagined a market of associations. The alterning of levels and areas allows for streets to be created. These streets create thresholds of privacy that can be accessed as you move through the individual ‘stalls’: fom the public street, to the semi-public to the semi-public to the semi-private."
Download Yeoville Extravaganza Market of Associations
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Four Facilities for our Time
Kevin Goncalves:
"I wanted to convert Rockey Raleigh into a wireless wifi hotspot. The facilities would serve the Yeoville/Bellevue residents. My challenge was to spatialise a wireless street. I responded by providing extreme facilities. Not merely for the sake of being extreme, but because the internet – which may be described as a separate, parallel “universe” – is a space where we, as people, unleash our alter egos, as we do in theme parks or when under the influence. This observation may be validated by the hyper-personas which interact in these realms today in Yeoville."
Download Yeoville Extravaganza Four Facilities for our Time
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Street Extravaganza
Jivan Kavita: "The proposal is part of an annual street festival in Yeoville that celebrates unity and cultural diversity. The intervention consists of three parts of Rockey-Raleigh street where the major events of the festival would talke place. The first part is a link between Kin Malebo, the famous Congolese restaurant, and Times Square, a concentrated area of bars and restaurants. The investigation into 'La SAPE' began there. 'La SAPE' is a society of Congolese men who parade the streets of Brazzaville in extremely expensive and fashionable suits. It is more than just a fashion parade..."
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Movie Market
"The movie market should be seen as a dream palace, a building which encourages direct interaction yet embodies escape and fantasy. A temporary relief from the mundane world of work and survival, an a brief connection into another realm. Movie: allowing people to re-connect with home through the use of a screen. Market: a public place, acting as a catalyst, allowing people to connect face to face, stimulating direct contact."
Download Yeoville Extravaganza Movie Market
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Zulu Hat
Michael Cornwell:
"I re-imagined Yeoville through the medium of the screen, to link people, thoughts and ideas - in a time when communication occurs at an intensively rapid speed. My intervention does not involve mass regeneration of the existing urban fabric but rather an addition which harnesses the communicative energy of the public. I have imagined a circular shaped screen which hangs in the middle of major intersection on Rockey-Raleigh Street, in order to charge street corners with activity through the use of low-tech devices.
The purpose is to document the memory of the city at a particular moment in time, through current thought, ideas, concepts and opinions in order to showcase the collective public attitude. This is achieved through an interface ranging from small interactive monitors on street poles to the cellphones message services. The interactive circular screen is used as:
Forum – an engaging medium to express and view opinions
Psychogeography – A system for people to tell stories and map out areas of interest and add reviews and opinions
Urban Canvas - Documenting the movement of the street by capturing the frequency of pedestrian and vehicle movement.
Message Wall – Inspired by the existing message wall, people can upload and download digital information such as classifieds and organise information according what they are seeking."
Download Yeoville Extravaganza Zulu Hat
