Pearls for the city
Bosman Patrick
Patrick Bosman and Kathrin Schuster of interna have been trained in conventional architectural practice. However, Patrick will continue his studies with a masters in "Immediate space" and Kathrin is currently pursuing her doctorate focusing on implementing interdisciplinary spatial theory into design processes. With the founding of interna in 2023, they combine their shared interested in seeking ways to make spatial perception and the way humans experience the world more widely accessible. They both love to discover weird, unloved, unseen or leftover spaces, to give them new meaning or just the acknowledgment every else denies them.
Pearls for the city was born from the idea of developing a tool for participatory design processes that allows for an intuitive, low-threshold and therefore more realistic type of collectively designing and developing space. This tool aims to enable the measuring of existing structures and therefore be of use to analyze living/housing/urban conditions. On the one hand the status quo can be checked and recorded, on the other hand the development process can be visualized and tracked. Our long-term goal is to create a standalone design tool through further development, that should be able to integrate the ideas and realities of different people and support participatory processes. The differently colored and shaped pearls represent the components of a city. The combination of different elements in the shape of pearls creates places in the shape of knots. The arrangement of places and spaces in relation to one another creates emotional spaces. The sculptural network of pearls shows how places are created from blocks and how they are connected to each other. The sculpture is not just a three-dimensional translation of the map, but translates the existing network into a three-dimensional structure in order to analyze and understand the status quo.
Through several rounds of observation and evaluation, we hope to find the fundamental elements of urban space, the “pearls for the city”, which we then want to offer for humans to experiment with their own definitions of utopia, eventually being equipped enough to willingly transform their own urban habitats.