Site Stories: explorations of urban spaces through drawing and animation (25-29 April 2022)

(Original titel in Danish: Stedet Fortælling: undersøgt gennem håndtegning og animation)

The workshop Site Stories challenged the traditional technical-engineering and more factual understanding of the materiality of an urban space with an artistic, fictional, and bodily-sensual perspective! With the aim of engendering a poetic and imaginative sense of place we encouraged bachelor students in architecture and urban design to pay extra attention to the stories revealed in surfaces and details in a number of selected urban spaces and historical building sites. The pedagogical purpose of the workshop was to teach students to start experimenting with their understanding of materiality, and to begin to fantasize about how humans are sentient bodies and narrative beings, as well as to strengthen students’ future understanding of how to design urban spaces. But – importantly – we also aimed to provide a space for students to make their own surprising discoveries and explorations on site thinking, to delve into different drawing techniques and to discover the potential of animation as a valuable design tool in the creative design process.

Inspired by the books Site-writing: The Architecture of Art Criticism and The Architecture of Psychoanalysis: Spaces of Transition written by our guest lecturer; Professor Jane Rendell from the Bartlett School of Architecture (UCL) in England, the overall structure of the workshop was divided into five phases: 1) The Material, 2) The Emotional, 3) The Remembered, 4) The Dreamed, and 5) The Imagined. The first two phases focused on drawing techniques. Here students explored working with smaller drawing paper and vignettes, with paper larger than themselves and frottage, as well as with different retelling opportunities through bricolage and collage. In the final three phases, students worked with animation. With the help of the two award-winning animators; Michelle Kranot and Uriel Kranot leaders of the ANIDOX at the Center for Animation, Vizualization, and Digital Storytelling at VIA University College in Denmark, our students reinterpreted ways of telling and analysing an urban site.

In the end, all the drawing explorations and animations were collected to create a joint exhibition and booklet.