Paul Greene
Schematic /City
08 Sep 2019 – 30 Dec 2022
“ For those who pass it without entering, the city is one thing; it is another for those who are trapped by it and never leave. There is the city where you arrive for the first time; and there is another city which you leave never to return. Each deserves a different name….” Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities.
Cities are planned and accidental. Design co-exists with something close to chaos.
There are the solid plans for streets, freeways, parks and utilities. There are clear plans for the subterranean city. Ambitious plans for the buildings themselves. Yet more plans/schematics for the devices and products within all those structures. Devices to regulate our comfort and our needs. Mechanising our desires, calibrating our aspirations.
So architects’ plans transmute and transmigrate into places to work; to be entertained, to haunt, to sleep, to get cured, to eat, to learn, to raise a family possibly, and, inevitably, to die. There are spaces defining the human processes taking place within, and other buildings refined by the activities of their occupants over time.
The chaos is interesting too. Shadowing and stalking all this planning are the unforeseen aspects of the city. The inadvertent and incidental, the accidental and even disastrous. The space beneath the bypass, the vacant lot, that gap between the wall and the disused kiosk where the weeds live, the burnt-out building. The legion of the unintended, the inveigled, the interposed: all smudges on the pristine blueprint. Graffiti, vandalism, the broken window, the broken life. Other unplanned gestures and interventions. Irrepressible flora and fauna too, often microscopic. Day and night. Arriving and departing. No timescale, no rhyme nor reason. Acts of God.
Cities are always on their way to being something else. Within the eternally moving moment, Greene’s work in Schematic City explores that sense of mutation or migration.
“A migrational or metaphorical city thus slips into the clear text of the planned and readable city.” Michel De Certeau, “ Walking in the City.”
Greene uses 3d software to generate all the source material for the Schematic City series. Multiple images are then coalesced and composited in Photoshop. No photographs are used.
A key tool blends plan and perspective projection views on the same picture plane. Greene also mixes daylight and artificial light and, crucially, combines the literal and the schematic in novel ways.
Day combines with night, multiple vanishing points and varying perspectives collapse the experiences of a city into a series of single arresting moments. This is not necessarily the way we experience a city but it is certainly the way we remember it.
Paul Greene
