Peephole

A peephole is a small opening in which someone may look. Peepholes are commonly used in doors for people inside to look outside with the security of not having to open the door. It is often that glass peepholes are fitted with a fisheye lens in order to provide a wider view from the inside without much visibility from the outside.

Peepholes

"We are in a strange part of town: unknown space stretches ahead of us. In time we know a few landmarks and the routes connecting them. Eventually what was a strange town and unknown space becomes a familiar place. Abstract space becomes concrete place, filled with meaning."

This quote really sums up my three visits to Ancoats. When I first visited I got lost, had no idea where to go and only stumbled by it with no idea what I was really looking for. The second time I was focused and knew exactly what I was looking for and was a bit more familiar with the area. The third time I knew where the main places were withing the area, where to take my friends and how to get there, as the quote reads.
When I re-visited Ancoats for the third time I managed to find 5 more peepholes that I had not already discovered, making that 15 in total! One of which had been removed, we were slightly confused as to why this may have been or what we could have viewed through it until... A man in overalls came over to us. He was very friendly and started asking us if we knew what was meant to be there, I instantly explained I was actually researching into Dan's work and hunting for peepholes. He then went on to explain to me that he in fact had worked for Dan whilst installing these peepholes as he could not manage to drill all the holes himself. This one in particular that was missing originally showed a view into the church that stood before us but unfortunately the road leading between the two had been dug up a few times and each time the cables had been cut and it was proving too costly to replace each time. He recommended viewing the church as it was beautiful inside so suggested to us to go knock on the doors of the church and said that security there were very friendly and would let us have a look inside. Unfortunately there was no reply when we knocked. I did ask the man if he would possibly let me ask him a few questions about the peepholes whilst my friend videoed it so I could include it on my blog but his response was only if he'd have had a shave and wasn't in his overalls.. bless!

Charka

A charka is one of the oldest known forms of the spinning wheel. It can be used on a tabletop or on the floor. It works by a drive wheel being turned by hand, while the yarn is spun off the tip of the spindle. The spinning must stop in order to wind the yarn onto the spindle.

The charka was both a tool and a symbol of the Indian independence movement. It is small, portable and ideal for spinning cotton and other fine, short-staple fibers. Mahatma Ghandi brought the charkha into larger use with his teachings. He hoped the charkha would assist the peoples of India to achieve self-sufficiency and independence. This led to the charkha being used as a symbol of the Indian independence movement and included on earlier version of the flag of India.

Cotton

This image portrays how I imagine cotton thread in the mills.



This led me to think about the cotton spinning process and the use of spinning wheels. This relates well to my research into portraying information in a circular shape.

http://visual.ly/radial

This visualization gives an overview of the whole citation network. The colors represent the four main groups of journals, which are further subdivided into fields in the outer ring. The segments of the inner ring represent the individual journals, scaled by Eigenfactor™ Score. In the initial view, the top 1000 citation links are plotted. Line size and opacity represents connection strength.

The lines in the centre of the circle remind me of threads of cotton. This links nicely to the cotton mills built in Ancoats during the Industrial Revolution.

Layla Curtis

67 Degrees South

Real time images of the Antarctic landscape, transmitted from a live webcam installed at an Antarctic research station 67 degrees south, are projected onto a miniature screen inside a snowdome in the work 67 Degrees South.

A snow globe is a transparent sphere, usually made of glass, enclosing a miniaturized scene of some sort, often together with a model of a landscape. This remided me of another way of 'peeping' into something.

Visit: http://www.laylacurtis.com/work/project/33

How to make a snowglobe: http://chemistry.about.com/cs/howtos/ht/snowglobe.htm

Layla Curtis

Traceurs: to trace, to draw, to go fast is a collection of twenty black and white films, created using a thermal imaging camera, which capture a series of moments in which traceurs (practitioners of parkour) come into physical contact with the urban fabric. The camera, which sees the world in terms of temperature rather than light, makes visible the glowing white heat residue transferred from hands, fingers and feet onto the surfaces that the traceurs nimbly leap onto, run across and spring off.
The films are screened simultaneously as part of a multi channel video installation.

Images of this project can be found on: http://www.laylacurtis.com/work/project/24

Layla Curtis

Lunar Hemisphere Tracings, 2009

Ink on tracing paper, 60cms x 60cms each

Information is Beautiful

This is another example from http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/ that interested me. For some reason the circular representations of information have really caught my eye.

Information is Beautiful

This is a really interesting way to present facts and information.

I found this blog quite helpful in informing me about the peeps: http://theshriekingviolets.blogspot.com/2011/07/ancoats-peeps-dan-dubowitz-and-presence.html

Ancoats Peeps

My second visit to Ancoats meant I was much more focused on what I was looking for. I managed to find 10 peeps in total around the area and felt this was quite good as when I was researching on the internet I found comments from people who could only find 5 or 6 in total. They were quite easy to find once you knew what you were looking for. Peeping through some you could see parts of machinery, into old mills, brick walls and some were just completely black. I found it quite fun and a bit like a treasure hunt trying to find these mysterious peepholes and began to consider how I could present this information.

Ancoats Peeps

After re-researching I came across the website: http://ancoatspeeps.com/

After my first visit I had never even noticed these brass portholes attached to buildings, they actually looked like parts of the buildings. The peepholes allow you to look into another world, a scene or piece of history. It is not known exactly how many peep holes there are or their exact whereabouts.

I found this 'Map of the Peeps' on the website 

The story behind the creation of the 'Peeps' is that as Ancoats industries moved out of the area and buildings were being bought for regeneration, the Ancoats Urban Village Company held a nationwide competition to create a public sculpture as part of the regeneration. Artist and architect, Dan Dubowitz won the commission but when arriving in Ancoats stated that the area did not need a sculpture as "the whole area is a sculpture in a way, a visual beast” and that "Ancoats needed something subtle you would stumble across. It needed something about the whole area and the identity of the area that people could be involved in." This is how the idea of the peeps was formed. Dan was particularly interested in the existing derelict buildings and wastelands opposed to the new developments. Each peep was installed on a building site and became 'features' of Ancoats.

Ancoats Adventure

"As individuals we invest meaning into space in the creation of place. Coding and de-coding the environment in ways which are personality significant. Our experience of the world in which we live is given structure through the systematic development of meaningful places we encounter... it is important that the means of experiencing, creating and maintaining significant places are not lost."
E. Relph - 'Place and Placelessness'

After pulling apart the brief I hoped that visiting and experiencing Ancoats and 'de-coding the environment' would provide me with a focus, something I found meaningful and significant about the area. The day we decided to visit Ancoats for the first time it happened to absolutely pour it down, on our way we took refuge in Pizza Hut for some food in hope that it would calm down so that we could actually go and get some decent photographs. Thankfully it stopped and after being directed thw wrong way and getting lost we stumbled across Ancoats. Wandering around we weren't too sure what to focus on, every building seemed deserted and run down. We did however come across the occassional business and offices still running within the area. This led to us focusing more on the contrast between the old and new buildings within the area and the regeneration of Ancoats, quite a few have been converted into apartments. After what felt like hours of walking round in the freezing cold we decided we had taken enough photos for now and left.

Evaluating the photographs we took however didn't really give me a focus point or any inspiration. The only interest I had was on the idea of old, deserted buildings but didn't really know where I could head with that. I felt I needed to try research a bit more for something that captured me about Ancoats and re-visit.

Substation

After researching so much into Ancoats history I thought I had best look into the site we were to re-design and occupy, the substation. I couldn't find much information by researching the substation itself so hoped that visiting the area would give me a better insight. However, when I visited the area I was rather disappointed by what I found. For some reason I expected it to be a lot larger than it turned out to be, its size suprised me. The building itself was quite well kept considering most of the buildings in the area were detereorated and run down. It was quite difficult to get photos of the building as you could only see two sides of it, which only one was actually reachable as the other was fenced off. I found it a real shame that we can't actually enter the substation and get a feel for the interior.

Regeneration of Ancoats

- In June 1989 Manchester City Council made a section of Ancoats into a conservation area and a number of buildings became listed.
- By 1998 it was estimated that 80% of business floor space in Ancoats was vacant.
- In 2000 the government accepted the £250m New Islington Project which was to redevelop a section of area between the Rochdale and Ashton Canal.
- 2003 saw the first major residential development of the MM2 Apartments which was a former ice cream factory. The apartments are Italian inspired and built between Great Ancoats Street and Henry Street and also Jersey Street and Redhill Street.

Sankeys

Located in what used to be a soap factory in the Victorian Beehive Mill on Jersey Street, Sankeys was originally opened as Sankeys Soap in 1994 by Andy Spiro and Rupert Campbell. They were considered quite naive to be opening a club/live music venue in the heart of the most rundown area in Manchester. It was not a place that people would be walking by on a night out or even probably during the day for that matter. After almost going bankrupt after 6 months the club managed to take off until closing in 1998.

However, in 2000 David Vincent re-opened the club and got it back on it's feet again winning Event of the Year in 2003 with a huge warehouse party. By 2006 David Vincent had left the club due to a rift in management and Sankeys Soap was once again closed.

David Vincent had however not given up on the place, he opened a new space in the Beehive Mill, dropped the soap part and joined forces with original owner and founder Andrew Spiro. They are both now considered as national heritage along with the club after its achievements up until now as it was recognised by a national museum for a club being culturally significant to a UK city and also crowned No. 1 in DJ Mag's Top 100 clubs in 2010.

As Ancoats is currently well known as the area hosting the famous club Sankeys I feel this is an important factor to consider in my research and the idea that it becomes alive at night, it is the spirit of Ancoats' nightlife.

For more infortmation on Sankeys history visit : http://www.sankeys.info/info/history/

Little Italy

A large number of Irish settled in Ancoats and it was recorded that by 1851 half of the men in Ancoats were Irish. However it was during the 19th Century when mass immigration from Italy to Ancoats occured and led to the creation of what became known as Ancoats Little Italy.

Between 1865 and 1900 thousands left Italy (mainly farming peoples) and settled in Ancoats, outnumbering the amount of English and Irish living there. They became known as the pioneers of the modern day British ice cream industry.
Ancoats was in the parish of St. Michaels, one of many Roman Catholic Churches in the area. In 1888 it was realised that a society needed to be formed for this community and the Manchester Italian Catholic Society was formed. The most popular calendar event for this society was what became known as the 'Festa of the Madonna of the Rosario', this was a procession that began at St. Vincent's convent (which has now closed down) so it now runs from the St. Michaels Roman Catholic Church.

More information can be found on: http://www.ancoatslittleitaly.com/

What interested me the most in discovering this piece of Ancoats history was the establishment of the ice cream industry and the imports of Italian food as it is well loved today. This may be a possible route for my research.

Ancoats

I began by just researching generally into Ancoats to get an idea of where it was, what it meant to Manchester and what it's history was.

As an overview Ancoats is considered to be the 'worlds first industrial suburb' and is considered one of the key places where the Industrial Revolution kicked off, a birthplace. However it suffered from an economic decline during the 1930's and intense depopulation after World War II. Despite this during the 1990's it's industrial heritage started to be recognised and considerable investment and development into the area began a regeneration.

The development of Ancoats was due to a demand in housing and suitable sites for new textile mills. The first cotton mills were built in Ancoats in 1790, Murray' Mills were the predominant mills situated next to the Rochdale Canal and Union Street (now known as Redhill Street). the more industrial the area became the denser the area became populated. By 1851 its population had reached higher than towns such as Bury and Blackburn. This led to house splits and letting cellars out, the public health became a major concern as a survey showed that half of the homes in Ancoats had no plumbing which led to a great fear of cholera. The lack of public buildings and parks within Ancoats was also a concern considering the number of people occupying the area, there were no parks and few churches.

Alongside cotton another industry within the area was the manufacture of flint glass.One of the buildings in Ancoats, the Flint Glass Works still currently exists and has been converted into serviced offices.

Palimpsest

The final word I had picked out of the brief was 'palimpsest'. I had come across this in my previous studies so had a vague idea of what it was, a manuscript/parchment that can be cleared of its original documentation in order to be re-used.

I wasn't too sure how this related to the project so thought there must be more to it, re-researching it I found the same descriptions as what I already thought, that it was a manuscript/parchment to which the original writing is effaced/erased ir order to be used again. So I therefore thought about how this could be translated in terms of buildings and interior design. As interior designers we remodel urban fabric in order to create meaningful interventions in existing buildings and spaces. So we in fact take a space that was originally used for something else and re-use it to create something new. This is how I interpret the use of the word palimpsest for this project.

Raconteuse

Within the brief it states 'You are the Raconteur/Raconteuse'. So I decided to find a definition of what one was to be able to understand what was required of me for this project.

A raconteur is a: - narrator
                           - storyteller
                           - someone who tells anecdotes in a skilful, witty and amusing way

This led me to decide to research into the history of Ancoats itself and the possible stories and past it has to tell.

Genius Loci

In Roman religion 'Genius Loci' was known as the protective spirit of a place. It is often depicted in religious iconography as a figure holding a Cornucopia or a snake. It was common that religious sacrifices would be made to the genius. In contemporary usage it refers to a locations distinctive atmosphere or spirit of place rather than a guardian spirit. Genius loci is considered as an intelligent spirit or magical power that is either part of the land or bound to it.

In reference to design, Alexander Pope made genius loci the important principle in garden and landscape design. A priori, archetype and genius loci are primary principles of Neo-Rationalism.

Usage: "Light reveals the genius loci of a place"

The idea of a spirit as something that is invisible and cannot be seen particularly inspires me especially this suggestion that light can reveal it. It is something that is hidden and requires the use of light in order to see it.

Genius Loci

"We are about to embark on another 10 week unit called Object and Place. Our site is a electricity substation building, our location is Ancoats. Over the next 10 weeks we will be developing concepts to occupy this space, however before we develop ideas for its occupation we need to discover and explore our building and its context."

The title of this project is 'Genius Loci' otherwise translated in Roman religion as the protective spirit of place. We have been set a one week intensive project in which we must research the surrounding area around the substation, Ancoats and produce a response to our findings. We must create a presentation that communicates our findings, history and observations.

I decided firstly to deconstruct the brief and really try to understand it properly before reseraching anything into Ancoats.