Continued...
The abstract panel, Fig 6, is a visualisation of the social theories implicated. In this sense the 'slice' is estranged from the established realities, if only because of it's theoretical existence.
The inception of the 'slice', a, occurs in St. David's park, intervention into a post ravaged reality. Three dimensional departures occur at the beginning of the end in this free space. The formality of the manicured park is taken over by random growth (nature is chaos) before the 'slice' takes on a hard lined minimalist abstraction through the block structure. The slice is not separate in physical form from the base reality of existing fabric. Where crossings between old/streets and new/interstices occur, between circulation systems, two dimensional disjunctures occur. Disjunctures become, theoretically, modern day hieroglyphs: markings of a chaotic sociological situation. The departure between the two realities creates a scarring; a separation. Functionally, this bleeding from the slice creates confusion. Confusion gives birth to caution. Calming is achieved between pedestrian and machine. Where crossings occur between pedestrian flows / axis [ie. horizontal and vertical] disjunctures lead the eye astray. The axial strength of the core slice is thus weakened by ground based deviations. The slice / pedestrian interstices serve to open the block structures horizontally (x) and vertically (y), making the block more accessible to useable development: virtual venues, frontages, arcades, volumes: a framework for incremental certainty over time.
The representation of the procedure is not meant as necessarily a physical model. Its more like a narrative. There may or may not be objects to define venues, they may be more like mythical understandings, sometimes represented through objects. Its not meant to be a plan, having an effect on activities, although it could well become so in time. Its a play on meanings that become revealed, if allowed to. It certainly can't appear suddenly in built form, its a device to elicit meanings not to dictate ownership and retrograde lies.
Whilst the slice is both associative and dissociative (associates with the block structure whilst disassociating itself from reality) it aims at achieving a state of ahistory. Although it is created at a point in time (in which we think we live), it transcends time /space parameters and can therefore be seen as a mirror of 'human' rather than merely 20th century society. In this sense it becomes a collective memory; of things hoped for and things feared, of inception and of departure.
If it is a deconstruction intervention, the 'slice' can only truly live as an experimental polemic: realisation in physical form may contradict the essence of the desired objective, although functionalism is not disbanded entirely. By remaining as a scroll (drawing) or a narrative, it achieves the timelessness and spiritual ephemerality that it sets out to do. It remains as history unbuilt or as always representative of the 'moment'. The slice therefore represents the true nature of a society in decline, engaging the last moves of the end game and portrays the true essence and fabric of the city (any city, for collective thought, in the human sense, is universal) without the sweetness and light usually por(be)trayed. Everything, including design, eventually succumbs to that which governs time and space - decline / entropy.
But the framework thus intimated is arguably a powerful device that might instigate a different paradigm for the forward view of the area. The sense of uncertainty eliciting a developing realisation that the cadastral/retrograde/historicist outlook, encapsulated in current planning instruments, is not the only one and indeed may be an undue constraint on the area's ongoing narrative.
Fig 5 : Battery Point Deconstructed
Lines & Junctions
