Held at the American University of Sharjah, Sharjah, UAE March 2017

Participants -  first year architecture students

 

Through a series of scripted walks, the place of the city is revealed through chance encounters, overlooked spaces and the unexpected. Over a three-week period, students completed several walks experiencing the city and landscape with all of their senses. Drifting with the script, following sounds, smells, paths, people and shadows. The objective was for students to gain an understanding of how walking can be a valuable sensory gathering research tool. Walking through the city allows a particularly unique type of engagement with the urban space and permits one to experience the city at its most personal level.

 

Students compiled documentation in their field notebooks, generating an experiential and spatial map of the walk. The map serves as a journey, a narrative, a sequence, a process and an action. It is a transformative document of the urban landscape. The exercise asks how we learn to see our environment and how we develop a means for cataloging referential information for future use.