Parallel Cities ll LONDON ------ NEW YORK CITY
Parallel Cities is an evolving body of work investigating the parallels between the two global cities, posing the questions: How do local, everyday scenes of these cities speak to larger trends affecting the future of cities? How can designers find opportunity amidst a narrative that seems on its face to dictate the "zombie urbanism" of gentrification and the flow of global capital? What are the new (and overlooked traditional) design methods that can allow designers to operate and flourish in these contexts?
Through workshops, discussions, and exhibitions Parallel Cities participants speculate. The work and activity of Parallel Cities takes as a starting point an intensely hybrid approach. This hybridity manifests in several ways, including a hybridity of disciplines, where Interior Architecture and Design methods are combined with aspects of Art, Urban Design, and Architecture as type of nascent Interior Urbanism. Process and making are crucial to this approach, particularly the overlapping of craft techniques with digital and analogue media. For instance, combining digital modeling and parametric design with drawing and physical models, to uncover the relationships between bodies, networks, and spaces of the city.
Urban sites, as territories of psychogeographic and social situations, are paramount. Not just an exercise in forensics, Parallel Cities takes discoveries of the workings of as-found urban scenes as speculative acts of design. These territories can be mapped as data, but physical involvement and strategies of drifting, chance, and immersion in situ are also crucial.
Parallel Cities ll Alessandro Ayuso <Westminster University, London> Alison Snyder <Pratt Institute, Brooklyn> William Haskas <Plusfarm, Brooklyn>