cook-bracket-sample.jpg

Set of sample images from a range of photographers.

BREAKING INTO THE CITY Urban explorers' architectural posture

By Michael Cook

The activities and cultural contributions of self-described 'urban explorers' have become influential in how public and professionals view, imagine and act upon cities. Through risk-taking photography, urban explorers have popularized views of industrial and institutional ruins, of underground infrastructure ranging from Victorian sewers to hypermodern transport tunnels, and of city skylines seen from new condominium and office towers or from the rickety tower cranes erecting them. The influential aesthetics of urban exploration have shown up everywhere from major films and video games, to sanctioned tourist activities as in the Toronto CN Tower's Edgewalk attraction, to the public communications of utilities like London's Thames Water.

As hobbyists, and occasionally as artists and researchers (like this author) operating at the margins of professional practice, urban explorers rely on circumstance, trespass and active intrusion to experience and craft images of places that would otherwise be off-limits. Fences, locked doors, manhole covers and the physical walls and ground of the city are routinely described as barriers not only to personal experience, but to popular imagination and understanding of urban ecologies, histories and futures. Some academics have attempted to ascribe a more revolutionary content to these trespasses: as challenges to surveillance states, as admonishments of the consumer economy and social regulation, or as reappropriations of the ruins of deindustrialization; urban exploration has also been critiqued as immature, male-dominated, and as a selfish practice that has little ambition to expand public knowledge, access and authority over the places being 'explored'.

Arguably, the images themselves have been the most transformative aspect of the practice. In many of the most widely-circulated images, we find an enveloping portraiture of the explorer's body, imposed on structures and spaces and views in and on which it very clearly does not belong. Architecture and engineering have always had a complicated relationship with human bodies and with the 'human measure' (whether that of Heidegger or of Henry Dreyfuss); this is perhaps nowhere more evident than in the dense urban cores that offer the most engaging stage for explorers' photography. The subversion of dwelling and polis to the commodity efficiency of real estate and to the rational management of institutional security and public service provision has meant a proliferation of un-peopled architectures within cities, where the provision of social functions now produces anti-social space and structure.

Images of the human figure embedded in-tunnel and poised impossibly atop roof and scaffold re-measure those spaces, and bid questions about their reintegration into the city's human landscape. A delirious imposition of the figure onto skyline and sewer alike, urban exploration is an architectural posture, one that celebrates the beauty (and the scale) of architecture and engineering's technical achievements, while simultaneously rejecting the anti-ergonomic superstructure of the cities that they have built. Through images, the explorer's act of being present in unpresentable places suggests their potential to accept a public and to support the same politics of social care, responsibility and investment that accrue to other spaces (parks, neighbourhoods, schools, arts and culture facilities).

The article will be organized in two parts. Part A will expand the theoretical discussion presented above. Part B will present capsule discussions of five infrastructural places (Sewer, Crane, Canal, Power Station, Transit Tunnel): documenting the transgressive entry of urban explorers into these structures and the transformative influence of their presence and photographic accounts. Photographs by a number of well-known practitioners (including the author), along with screen captures and reproductions of public communications, videos and other media, will accompany the text.

BRACKET [takes action]

Housing Resistant Forms of Life

Housing Resistant Forms of Life

By Hamed Khosravi
Shared Grammars, Individual Desires: Participatory Planning and Slum Upgrading in Brazil

Shared Grammars, Individual Desires: Participatory Planning and Slum Upgrading in Brazil

By Gabriel Duarte
Open House

Open House

By Matthew Mazzotta
Mobile Loitering: public infrastructure for a highly gendered urban context

Mobile Loitering: public infrastructure for a highly gendered urban context

By Mariam Kamara, Elizabeth Golden
The Space of the Commons: Dheisheh Refugee Camp

The Space of the Commons: Dheisheh Refugee Camp

By Alison Hugill, Dan Dorocic
See that my grave is kept clean: ritual continuity & spatial resistance along Futenma's inverted periphery

See that my grave is kept clean: ritual continuity & spatial resistance along Futenma's inverted periphery

By Steven Chodoriwsky
A Subject of Action

A Subject of Action

By Albert Pope
Place de la Republique in Paris

Place de la Republique in Paris

By TVK - Trévelo & Viger-Kohler Architectes Urbanistes
THE IMAGE OF THE SQUARE: Redefining Citizenship by Design

THE IMAGE OF THE SQUARE: Redefining Citizenship by Design

By Samaa Elimam
Delirious actions: gender tactics in public space

Delirious actions: gender tactics in public space

By Serafina Amoroso

ELASTIC COMMEMORATION

ELASTIC COMMEMORATION

By Guy Königstein
Off the Wall

Off the Wall

By Katherine Jenkins, Parker Sutton
Cultivate Collective

Cultivate Collective

By De Peter Yi
FAS: Architectural Activism

FAS: Architectural Activism

By FAS- Foreign Architects Switzerland
What a body can do: the political as generator of a common spatiality

What a body can do: the political as generator of a common spatiality

By Lucia Jalon Oyarzun
Bronx is Up, WTC is down: paraphrasing Leonard Bernstein. A public service guerilla action for Architecture League’s Make a Difference in Two Days

Bronx is Up, WTC is down: paraphrasing Leonard Bernstein. A public service guerilla action for Architecture League’s Make a Difference in Two Days

By Austin+Mergold With James Bowman, Denise Ramzy, Sally Reynolds
Contested Energies

Contested Energies

By Stephen Mueller, Ersela Kripa
Spaces of Conflict

Spaces of Conflict

By Lori A. Brown
The Empty City

The Empty City

By Martin Sztyk
SLANTED MEMORIAL

SLANTED MEMORIAL

By Jin Young Song
Next page » Loading