The Arts at the University of Virginia is dedicated to building on innovative research and fostering inspired expression that equips us for the future.
Berenika Boberska | Fallow City Project February 26 - March 26, 2010
FALLOW CITY
Fallow City Project is an intervention in the typical fabric of suburbia, in the
monoculture of private spaces and cultivated dreams.
Taking the current crisis of the suburbs as a chance, and the most extreme
situation of Detroit as its site, the project aims to develop new scenarios
and new typologies of structures for the emerging fallow cityscapes. The
interventions propose more playful and public ways of using or mis-using
the suburban forms.
Similar to intensive monoculture farming, suburbia is an overstretched
production of property, creating a thinness of space, use, ideas. A fallow
season which releases the city from this productivity creates an interruption
where unusual uses and forms can flourish.
The crisis of the suburbs has up till now been invisible, always un-dramatic
and un-seductive as a design problem. Yet this is the most prolific of urban
landscapes, massive in its effect and most in need of ideas.
The Fallow City Project begun as a Design Laboratory at the University of
Virginia—bringing together a team of students from the departments of art,
architecture, landscape architecture, electrical engineering and chemistry.
Ideas and structures were tested and played out through physical models,
stop-motion animations and narratives. The proposals were assembled
together to construct a Collective Model of a near future suburb of Detroit.
Berenika Boberska
Professor Dean Dass, McIntire Department of Art
Professor Craig Barton, School of Architecture
Professor Cassandra Fraser, Department of Chemistry
Professor Mool Gupta, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
DESIGN TEAM
Berenika Boberska
Eric Schmidt
Daniel Ballard
Sonia Brenner
Jessica Brown
Alexa Bush
Rachel Callahan
Sarah Cancienne
Jack Cochran
Patrick Costello
Beckett Fogg
Jeff Garrett
Lauren Gilchrist
Leila Harris
Jinhui Huang
Vikram Iyengar
Avery Lawrence
Barada K. Nayak, Ph.D.
Emily Nelson
Fatima Olivieri
Renee Pean
Seth Porcello
Shelley Schwartz
Rachel Singel
Kelley Skinner
Sarah Tisdale
Eric Wong
Guoqing Zhang
Essays by
Robin Dripps and Peter Waldman
box with 7 19 x 24 in. sheets folding to 10 x 6 in.
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