Six cities:
performativity / mediatization / narrative

Mark Dorrian

The Lighthouse Innovation Award will be used to collate and prepare for publication work by an experimental architecture and urbanism research workshop that I have conducted over the past six years. During each of these years we have focused on a single European city: in turn Venice, Rome, Lisbon, Prague, Gent, and Berlin. The material as a whole is structured by definite intellectual and operative themes. But at the same time it represents a sequence of very specific engagements by work evolved and produced in Scotland with real and highly contested sites in European cities, offering alternative models and approaches to conventional forms of urban planning and architecture.

Furthermore, the volume will serve as a report on a teaching experiment and as a contribution to the (at present much under-developed) debate about what it is to teach architecture today and what that can and should now mean. Thus, as well as presenting project-work developed in Scotland, the book will disseminate and publicise an approach to design teaching that has emerged within it. In addition to the images and texts documenting the projects, the publication will contain 5 interpretative essays by authors that include Andrew Benjamin and Alberto Pérez-Gomez.

Award given: £4560