'The work
I've done so far on producing the People's Panorama has already proved of great
interest. Although I knew the
streets that make up High Street 2012 as a visitor – the Whitechapel Gallery,
the old Atlantis site by the Bell Foundry, the living bridge and so on, the
time I've spent walking along the street for this project means I'm getting to
know it in much fuller way. From my own experience and distant memories of
lectures at architecture school, the occasional visitor often misrepresents the
relationship & relative position of elements spread along a long
thoroughfare, and I now feel like I've got a much better sense of the street,
its rhythm and tempo.
The
diversity of buildings is remarkable – in period, style, scale and
function. I might not have given
much consideration to many of them in the past, but looking at each one
individually means I'm getting to know them all a little and am seeing
interesting or intriguing details & relationships that I would have missed
before.
Looking at
the parts of the panorama completed so far, I'm really struck by the way this
wide range of buildings produces a fluctuating roofline to the final image … it
seems almost like we're in a canyon, but here the line rises and falls dramatically
to reveal glimpses of the city beyond the road, whether that's at the junction
with side streets, or more tantalisingly, in the small gaps between buildings.
From a
technical perspective, the sheer scale of this project means I've come across a
number of issues in how to effectively describe these building façades as a
single panorama, when such a view doesn't really exist in reality. Relative
position & height of neighbouring buildings, buildings that address the
street at different angles, street clutter, distant towers and traffic. And
then there's the weather … but I don't need to tell you about that, right?!'
Jon Spencer
Jon Spencer
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