How to fabricate the ideal city
I’m looking at how to fabricate the ideal city, using a methodology that I’ve called the Tablescape. This is a form of architectural model making that employs found and repurposed materials to create fictive spaces that become a springboard for different forms of publicity. To fabricate is both to make and to fake, and the ambiguity of the word is key to my research. I am making, through the process of assemblage; I am faking, by constructing stories about the ideal city from these fragments.
This is not based on an abstraction. I grew up in a modernist utopia called Milton Keynes, an ideal living environment planned for 250,000 people on a large area of North Buckinghamshire. My research considers the possibility of vision in the public realm, moving between art, architecture and design. A testing ground for this is a project called City Club, an ambitious scheme to remodel and curate an area of Central Milton Keynes according to the utopian perspective of the city’s first architects and planners.
