This week I started working on some important secondary elements of my design intervention. I began with some research into the cafe’s, restaurants, bars, and stores in and around Fort Lane. I looked at Fort Lane, Imperial Lane, and Snickel Lane because these are all important intersections within my design and I want to include and consider these stores in my event planning for the space.
My next step with this information is to identify their locations in a map in relation to the positioning of my design, research opening hours and start working a plan of the events I want to take place with this information in mind.
This week I also started some research into seating. Because I have decided to create a theater space as one of the curtain layout states, I have also decided to have seating. I did consider not having seating similar to the Pop-Up Globe performances, but decided that when having events such as film viewings, seating might be more appropriate. I also considered the experience of people in the theater space. One of the reasons I chose fabric was because it visually displays movement and I like how it challenges tradition ideas of thresholds and constraints of space. Having seating will give the audience a better sense of their presence in the space. By being lower to the ground they will notice the organic movement of the curtain against the static pavement, the feet of the public walking past as the curtain will be slightly raised off the ground, the movement of people outside of the curtain as they brush past, altering the space slightly. By becoming more static themselves, the audience experiences the movement around them.
With this said, I began to look at seating options for my theater space. I decided I wanted some that was easy to remove and also easy to store as the theater would only be a temporary space. From this I came up with two options: bench seats and folding chairs.
Having the bench would allow a slightly more communal feeling than singular folding chairs but I began to think about how everyone would be able to see with the benches being all the same height. I then looked at some bleachers.
I like this because it creates a vertical incline in the seating and makes it easy to view the stage/screen. Although this works well with the visibility, bleachers do not work well in terms of easy, compactable storage. I took the idea of inclined seating like the bleachers but looked at how I could make this more compactable.
This idea would include a series of multiple heights of benches that could stack within each other for storage. I liked this idea but then I realised that the benches that sit at the back of the theater will be extremely high off the ground and could be impossible or unsafe to try and sit on them. I realised that having height difference in rows wasn’t as important because f the positioning of the theater space and the natural incline of the lane. Because of this, I have decided to stick with folding chairs for the moment as they will be more stable on the cobblestone pavement and they are more compactable for storage. I will review this later on and see if I can come up with some better solutions. I also need to start considering a storage space near the installation as well.
In this weeks one-on-one some points were brought up about consideration of lighting for evening events and the way the curtain will be suspended in the space. These are on my list of things to start looking into, especially the mechanisms behind the suspension of the curtain as this is an important detail in my work.
Spatial Design by Ciara 