Model Making

This week, the Fenton Five is working hard on the model which is one of the crucial parts of the Fenton's installation.

Interactive Maps

The image above displays an interactive map which displays data in relation to life expectancy in each country whilst also providing information on population growth rate. The graph can also change in terms of which information is displayed and the user is able to navigate the different countries in order of life expectancy. This is an interesting way of presenting data both visually and digitally. To find out more visit the website.

Back to studio...

After visiting Fenton the five went on to collate all the data which had been collected that week and begin formatting the results in order to reach the next stage of our investigation, which will later on be presented in a form of installation…

Bad Ass!

After a long day of collecting data the Fenton Five grew increasingly hungry and were lucky enough to stumble across….‘Harvey’s Bad Ass Café’ where the five of us were able to experience some of Fenton’s finest - Oat Cakes!

We were also lucky enough to meet a man called Mike who owned the café, he explained to us a bit about the history of Fenton as well as the café, Mike led us down to the cellar where he told us that the café had been around for over 100 years and that since they moved in [4 months ago] there were various pots, mugs and plates which had been left there for years…..badass!

Fenton Fun!

Along the way we stumbled across various interesting symbols, statues, monuments, emblems and signs part of Fenton. Fenton’s own mottto: ‘Onwards and Upwards!’which perfectly encapsulates the spirit of the town represented in Fenton’s very own monument. The image on the left ‘The Fenton Crest’ is a shield which is divided up into four quarters, separated by a fretty cross.

 The pottery industry is represented by the vase in the top left and the bottle kilns in the top right. The coal industry is represented by the pit head wheel in the bottom left. In the bottom right quarter a sheaf of corn in front of a plough.

Data Collection

Last week the Fenton Five were out and about collecting data - filling out our individual surveys, conducting site analysis, understanding what Fenton is all about and a bit of chatting to the locals!

Ceramics: A Fragile History (TV Series)

A new series on BBC4 called "Ceramics: A Fragile History" has been documenting the ceramics industry in Britain. The second episode, aired on Monday 17th October 2011. The 60 minute documentary is described as follows:

"This second film charts the rags to riches-to-rags epic of Stoke-on-Trent, a city built on clay and the heart of Britain's once world-beating ceramics empire. On the back of the 17th century phenomenon of tea, pottery in Britain exploded into a cutting-edge industry and a source of enormous national pride. We meet the key characters responsible for putting British ceramic art on the map: from Josiah Wedgwood, innovator, artist and marketing genius, and Josiah Spode (who made it his life's work to invent a British version of Chinese porcelain and came up, aged 60, with bone china, which revolutionised the industry) to the great 20th century ceramicists Clarice Cliff and Susie Cooper. We see how demands for cheap labour since the 1980s have forced the closure of all but a handful of these great factories, leaving Stoke's crumbling overgrown ruins as our Pompeii. Contributors include AN Wilson, Neil Brownsword, Lucy Worsley, Miranda Goodby, Emmanuel Cooper and Matthew Rice."

The show is available to watch on the BBC iPlayer until Monday 31st Ocotber 2011 here.

1000 Singapores (Exhibition)

For the 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale (Architecture - La Biennale di Venezia) the Singapore Pavilion set out to offer a "glimpse of [the] country and its development through a 'physical slice' of [the] landscape" through 1000 Singapores - A Model of the Compact City. The premise for the exhibition was based around the following:

"Singapore is capable of housing 6.5 million people. Singapore occupies only about 710 sq km. Multiply that by 1000, and it is possible to fit the entire population of the world into a land area approximately twice that of Italy, equal to Texas, one-fifth of India, and one-tenth of China. 1000 Singapores - A Model of the Compact City is also about the thousand faces of a high-density city-state - a portrait of the diversity of the living environment and the people who live in it. Ultimately, if 6.5 million people may be able to live sustainably on 710 sq km, this can offer a powerful model for the compact city of the future."

The exhibition presented a physical model of the slice through Singpaore's landscape, with a selection of photographs and diagrams corresponding to the model.

The exhibition projected out of the main gallery
space due to the length of the model.

The information was presented in such a way that, despite the quantity of information on display, it was still digestible; with the relationship between the model and images clear without the need for any explanation. This was aided through the simple, reductive diagrams.

The simplicity of the space aided the reading of the
information presented.

Through the use of a linear, transversal trajectory through the entire city viewers were able to explore the changing physical/natural/urban/rural/built landscape and as such understand the city with more clarity (although admittedly through a reductive model).

Digital representation of the project.

The exhibition ran from 26th August 2010 to 21st November 2010 at the Ground Floor Gallery Istituto Proviniciale per I'Infanzia, with an accompanying book. The online catalogue of the research, include the digital representation of the model is still available to view here.

After a long day...

After a long day of hard work...The Fenton Five were ready to head back to Manchester...some more so than others!

A few supplementary points added to survey of tick sheets

Physical, practical and psychological aspects must be thoroughly treated and then enhanced with valuable layers through work on city qualities (both visual and pragmatic), which can root people in the space-----means city space perform well.

Physical:
(1)Safe
Street light;
CCTV;
Separated road of different functions or shared road;
Pedestrian’s priority (continuity of the pavement);
Consideration for bicyclist;
Warning boards and signs;
Window light at night;
Gate and fence;
Transition from public to private (semiprivate space for interaction);Car-free areas (St linked to the main road of Victoria Rd);

(2)Green
Gasoline used (number of cars);
Climate: humidity/wind chill (low buildings and trees alongside can reduce the strength
of wind)/solar heat/average temperature;
Lighting;
Litter bins distribution;
Bus station (How large is area that a bus station need cover?);
Plantations;

Practical:
(3)Healthy
Sedentary and moving activities;
Exercise space;
Noise;
Sunlight;
Proportion of walking/bicycling/public transportation/private car;
Pollution;
Proportion of the road-----traffic lane, bicyclist, pedestrianism (room for walking);

(4)Wealthy
Infrastructure, for examples: bench, plants, bollard;
Varied materials for city’s visualization;
Proportion of necessary activities and optional (recreational) activities;

Psychological:
(5)Sense of Communities
Average size of household, number of residents per hectare;
Community bulletins and boards and signs;
Advertisements for the public community area or infrastructures;
Communication among people on the public space;
The frequency of varied facades in the length of the road;
Human scale or traffic scale;
Street furniture that provides ”talkscapes”;
Unhindered sightlines;

(6)Learning
Artistic display (installations and temporary works for children learning);
Schools;
Educational institutions, for examples: exhibition, art gallery, theatre;