Archive on the Small Constituent Elements of a City – Group A

ARCHIVE ON THE SMALL CONSTITUENT ELEMENTS OF A CITY

Group A

Kang Dahyun (Department of Design)
Lee Hyunwoo (Department of Fine Arts)
Jeong Song (Department of Architecture)

From visual and architectural elements such as windows and doors, collect images from various elements of the city and find out symbolizing elements which keeps the city working well.

Main contens of group collaboration

Detailed schedule

(1) Seoul (Pre-meeting)

May 17 Prehension and general research on visiting place
May 20 Preliminary research, gathering opinions from team members
June 20 Setting up detailed plan - Finding and organizing common research theme
June 24 Setting up detailed plan - Specifying the research contents and organizing detailed schedules for site visits

(2) Nantes
Sunday, June 30
All members visited Château des ducs de Bretagne.
All members visited Cathédrale Saint-Pierre-et-Saint-Paul de Nantes
All members Meeting - Team members of Éloge du pas de côté Setting up basic plan, general understanding of the site and arrangement & modification of the course of the project
Lee Hyunwoo and Jeong Song visited Arts Museum of Nantes.
Jeong Song visited Botanical Garden.
Jeong Song visited Cimetière La Bouteillerie.
Kang Dahyun boarded Nantes en petit train.

Monday, July 1
All members visited The Nantes Saint-Nazaire school of fine art.
All members visited Galerie Paradise.

Tuesday, July 2

All members visited The Nantes Saint-Nazaire school of fine art.
All members visited Fablab Platforme C, SAMOA.
All members toured near Bd. Saint-Aignan.

Wednesday, July 3

Kang Dahyun, Jeong Song toured near Rezé.
Kang Dahyun, Jeong Song visited The Chronograph.
Kang Dahyun, Jeong Song visited Cimetière Saint-Pierre.
All members group meeting with The Nantes Saint-Nazaire school of fine art (The first on-site review of the work progress)

Thursday, July 4

All members visited Unite d’havitation.

Friday, July 5

Kang Dahyun visited Place Graslin, Machines of the Isle of Nantes.
Jeong Song visited Passage Pommeraye.
All members, group meeting with The Nantes Saint-Nazaire school of fine art(The second on-site review of the work progress)

Saturday, July 6

All members group meeting with The Nantes Saint-Nazaire school of fine art - Complement to the work
Kang Dahyun visited Château des ducs de Bretagne, Museum of Urban and Social History of Suresnes and Botanical Garden.
Jeong Song visited Machines of the Isle of Nante

Main contents of individual work

Kang Dahyun
Theme | Finding graphics hiddenin the city - Archiving manhole covers
Activities | On the 'Road' where tourists and residents meet, archiving the image of the manhole covers which are graphics that can only be found by walking and mapping them into a detailed map.
Major Achievements | Through the image of the manhole covers, which are also the signboard of various facilities companies, we look for the city's unique graphics of an attractive city.

Lee Hyunwoo
Theme | Finding formative language in the Nantes landscape
Activities | Objects discovered while walking around Nantes - graffiti on the lamps and floors are transferred to paintings to discover and visualize a special formative language.
Major Achievements | I found differences from Korea in architecture and floors, and found interesting shapes and expressions, etc.

Jeong Song
Theme | Discovering small parts that pass through in daily life easily
Activities | Archiving objects that have permeated into daily life. These things are no longer special to the residents of Nantes,but I discover them through the eye of a tourist. So, I look back on daily routine that is often overlooked and show Nantes through it.
Major Achievements | Discovering traffic lights, doors, handles, chimneys, fire hydrants, mailboxes, flower pots, rain trenches, trash, and crosses, etc.

Methods of field activities

In this study, the research was carried out groupwise and individually and at the same time, through meetings with participating faculty members, the approach to the research contents was diversified so that stereoscopic research was conducted. This study was proceeded with the method as follows.

(1) Documents and data research (joint research)

•Review and analysis of documents and research data on policies such as connection among urban regeneration in Nantes, industrial complexes, discarded industrial facilities, and unused space.
•Preliminary research on the main base areas in Nantes
•Research and sharing ideas on the outcome of the final collaboration

(2) Field research

Field research on facilities and spaces considered as available targets among the targets of each region currently researched. Exploring local facilities and spaces, checking the site, photographing and recording features. Derivation of intersections with individual work results through analysis of Nantes' place-social-artistic context.

Kang Dahyun
Filming and recording of the main graphic images of Nantes. Appointment of the main base of Nantes and collecting images of manhole covers in the shape of the things nearby . After collecting, gathering the manhole images and mapping them onto an actual map, converting manholes into a monuments to create a manhole map. Analyzing what kind of graphic images are hidden in the future in Nantes through graphic analysis of the manholes.

Lee Hyunwoo
Collecting and observing objects. Recording them as pictures. Visualization study by framing and spliting screens

Jeong Song
Filming and recording objects specially approached to the tourists' eyes. Filming and recording objects frequently used by residents in daily life. Finding out the meaning of the objects that were archived later, finding differences from Korean objects and analyzing the reasons

Acquired data from field activities and the results

Through wide range of visits to the major tourism regions and residential districts of Nantes, the researchers sought to observe the city not only by the appearance as a tourist sites, but also as  residential areas.

Researchers visited areas such as Island of Nantes, Centre-Ville, Feydeau, and Rezé, the major areas of Nantes and collected and recorded images of nearby tourist sites and residential areas in photographs and location maps.

Kang Dahyun
I was interested in the manhole image, which is the image of the ground of the city, and I was able to collect images of more than a hundred manholes that exist in the city. Primarily, these materials will be archived through later editing and retouching, and can be organized into a booklet collecting images of Nantes' manholes.

Jeong Song
I was interested in the objects that the residents use in their daily lives. I collected arbage cans, cigarettes, flower pots, bicycle racks, doors, handles, rain ditches, post boxes, fire hydrants, street lights, traffic lights, roofs and chimneys. First, classify objects and analyze their designs. The result shows objects that have been permeated into everyday life through displaying overlapped photos.

Plan to use the results

Kang Dahyun
The results are made into an archiving book on the collection of urban manhole images through image retouching and graphic patterning. Nantes manhole archiving book could be suggested as a new type of tourist guidebook through a kind of monumentalization and mapping and a trip to find image of manholes could provide a new direction of walking tours. In addition, if there is a chance, it could be developed into a work of analyzing manhole images of similar cities in Korea such as Ulsan and Suncheon or those of major cities such as Seoul, Tokyo and New York as well as manhole images of various countries. Along with in-depth and academic analysis and research on the image of the manhole, I could find a way of developing this work as my own personal work.

Lee Hyunwoo
The results share the texture of the artist's work and at the same time they were replaced by objets that could exude the scent and color of a specific city Nantes. They bring Nantes' sentiment through painting, I discover aesthetic elements in the small elements encountered while walking along the street and also discover that it functions reasonably in the city of art.

Jeong Song
The results are classified into doors and handles, bicycle racks, fire hydrants, mailboxes, trash cans, flower pots, ditches, traffic lights and street lights. Retouching the photos of the objects, printing them on transparent films and overlapping them with photos of daily environments for exhibition. Visitors can imagine Nantes by looking at the objects that have been permeated into the daily life and be awakened to the importance of daily life through the process of comparing them with Korean objects.

Expected effects and suggestions

If we research and carry out this project in Korea and in schools, it is expected that the scope of research sites can be expanded from Nantes to Korea and then to the world. If you develop the theme taken in a small French town to Seoul, the range of archiving could be extended and it will be deeper and wider than the subject expected initially.

We had difficulty in this project due to a lot of confusion in the work in the beginning because the guidelines for joint work and individual work were not precise. In addition, there were many difficulties in setting the research theme whether we should research the city from an academic point of view or from an experiential point of view for exhibitions and individual work results. We hope that the feedback from participating faculty members would be a little more active.