Studio Project
Overview
There is an enormous amount of information to assist with the recovery of Bronzeville across its various stages of development and change. This data exists in the maps of the Chicago School of Sociology, in works of fiction and poetry, in collections of street photography, in the archives of famous residents, in the myriad histories that have been written about its enormous contributions to American culture, in the testimonies of living memory collected by researched like Timuel Black, in interviews with Studs Terkel and the recordings of Alan Lomax, in the archives of historic newspapers like the Chicago Defender or Chicago Bee, and in the special collections of the University of Chicago, the Chicago Public Library, and institutions across the United States and Europe.
There are also abundant techniques and technologies for producing visualizations. Some involve the disciplinary conventions of urban analysis, planning, urban design, landscape and architectural practice. Some involve the discipline of cartography, psychogeophy, cognitive mapping. Some relate to the inventions of 20th Century and contemporary artists.
However, attempts to translate raw data about Bronzeville (which is often structural) into visualizations that communicate and interpret its history are fairly limited.
This project invites students to make some attempts.
Each step in the following process relates to one Studio Session, per the course Schedule.