““The pseudoscience of city planning and its companion, the art of city design,
have not yet broken with the specious comfort of wishes, familiar superstitions, oversimplifications, and symbols, and have not yet embarked upon the adventure of probing the real world.” ”
Has an urban planner ever mapped a city by the users everyday experience? Have they ever considered our sense of safety being challenged by an object casting a dark shadow? Do they ever wonder what path we choose to take on a sunny day versus a rainy one? Do they ponder how a university campus looks like during the summer? The Chicago Pattern Project deliberately forms an anti-modernist stance in focusing on the experiences of these “insignificant” non-mappable moments in the city.
We embrace the present, the small and the personal through drawing attention to the experiential as well as non-visible, data and history driven information. Thorough translating our own personal experiences of public spaces we use on a daily basis, into abstract snapshots of subjective complex information, we create abstract patterns. Through these patterns and the walks we invite you on, we aim to intrigue you to explore, we encourage you to see and re-see existing moments of your environment.
TIME - A Dynamic Experience
The experience of place is in constant flux. The seasons, time of day, weather patterns, and people that we encounter or do not encounter on our path impact our perception of the environment. Reflecting upon the data collected from ethnographic research it became clear that the artifacts would need to address this phenomena. The shadows cast by an object become of higher importance than the object itself as they attempt to capture the ever changing nature of time and place.
PERSPECTIVE - A Dynamic Experience
The project aims to engage viewers from a variety of vantage points and to encourage movement that unveils additional layers of information and understandings of the artifacts. Interpretation shifts based upon the viewer, location and time of day. The installations interact with and alter the surrounding city fabric.
