This year the studio took the principle routes into Newcastle upon Tyne as its initial territories for investigation. These historic roads represent the entry points to the city both physically and metaphorically; being also the centres of successive waves of immigration which then ripple outwards as communities establish and then hybridise.
We began the year by tracing these routes on foot, walking in to the city along each of the roads, noticing the finer-grained social and spatial transitions and implicit thresholds, documenting both built fabric and atmospheres. Through the first semester we became Flâneur-detectives, uncovering narratives of past and present, experiencing ourselves slipping between living in the moment and in deep time, meeting shopkeepers and ghosts, and telling these stories using narrative devices or highlighting the everyday sublime with our interactions directly on the street(s).
With this rich experiential and experimental knowledge, the second semester projected us into a near future, in which the existing city is considered as a given, or a ‘second nature’ in Walter Benjamin’s expression. We proposed new layers of material history superimposed on the present, ‘incomplete’ interventions that allow communities to take ownership of and shape their built environment, micro-infrastructures to perform everyday lives and to create contemporary rituals of gathering, eating and drinking, making and exchanging.
Pilgrim Street
6th years: Oliver Garside, Will Niven, Besart Redenica
Shields Road & New Bridge Street
6th years: Priya Boby, Theodoric Hang Chi Cheung, Jesse Yuen Yee Ma
5th years: Sharon Sze Yan Chan, Jason Lok Hang Fung, Lyndon Jessop, Emilie Hakner, Catherine Sinclair, Alice Ka Wai Tsang, Katy Wing Tung Yuen
Westgate Road:
6th years: Leo Bourke, Srishti Dutta Roy, Marcus Pui Hong Lou, Christine Mottershead, Veronica Kit Ying Ng, Ben Staves
5th years: Silva Chi Kin Chow, Ashleigh Peacock, Arron Reed
