SouthFacing 4:3

The site-specific installation South Facing 4:3 explored the ‘heroism within Shanghai’s dystopian reality’ as the city rapidly urbanised. It examined how the city’s insatiable demand for housing outstripped architectural design, resulting in the construction of massive ‘vertical villages’ using repetitive ‘filler’ blocks.

David Cotterrell created a colossal 12-square-metre maquette featuring 1,000 miniature towers. Each tower, standing 25–35 storeys tall, was crafted from rapid-prototyping of actual Shanghai architectural designs and reproduced in fine plaster. These towers were arranged within a modular transport layout made of MDF and spray-coated to match the model’s palette, framing the buildings within an abstract geometric solution for traffic management. Short films documented lone traffic conductors and policemen struggling to maintain order on Shanghai’s sprawling 10-lane motorways, drawing a parallel between them and Gary Cooper’s character in High Noon.

The exhibition’s title references a People’s Republic of China planning regulation mandating that new builds must face south. Historically reserved for Emperors, this rule was presented as a modern promise that ‘everyone is allowed to live like a King’ despite the resulting dense and repetitive urban landscape.

The work challenged viewers to confront a vision of ‘unchallenged repetition’ where exclusive gated communities promising bespoke design were replaced by pre-existing mass-produced layouts.