South Facing

Installation maquette made entirely of city filler blocks (buildings that house large numbers of people to deal with urban growth)

In development, demand outstrips time – buildings and roads are thrown up at a rate compatible with need rather than design. Within most new builds, there exist segments in which ‘filler’ blocks culled from archives have been used. Even Shanghai’s exclusive gated communities, offering Utopic promises of bespoke design are not immune to the lure of pre-existing massing layouts. Cotterrell provides an entire city of ‘filler’ blocks – 1000 miniature towers, each between 25 and 35 storeys and capable of housing 750 people each. Clustered in 20 block arrangements, Cotterrell’s suburban ‘Utopia’ houses more than half a million souls in search of a centre. This dystopian vision was created by rapid-prototyping from the architectural designs for actual buildings in use and conforming to planning regulations in Shanghai. Printed in Resin, the originals are reproduced 1000 times in fine plaster for insertion into the gleaming maquette for extreme urban growth. The modular transport layout is routed in MDF to offer the geometric solution to traffic management. Spray coated it adopts the pallette of the model city and serves to frame the towers within its abstracted infrastructure. Occupying 12m2 the South Facing 4.3 confronts the audience with its vision of unchallenged repetition.

Materials:

Cast Plaster, Gesso and Machined MDF

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