Every House on Langland Road – the production of archival, architectural and artistic spaces

摘要

This article describes an Arts Council England project, undertaken by the author and a photographer, to examine spatial and temporal relations between an art project, its subject and its audience. The project explored and documented the architecture of a modernist 1970s housing estate, Netherfield, designed by a group of four architects for the new city of Milton Keynes. The estate has not aged well and the visual remnants of what had been an ambitious and idiosyncratic housing scheme were to be photographed and juxtaposed with the original architectural drawings. The photographic process contributed to a more complex series of perspectives which included the archival history of the estate and its surrounding new city, the people who live there and my own reflections on a council estate childhood. In turn, these perspectives are set out in this article in terms of the spatial and temporal realms in which they are, and continue to be, produced. Loosely conceived in terms of Lefebvre’s triad, these realms are traced through the estate’s historical narrative from plans to buildings which then converge in the eventual art work. The gallery is seen as an assemblage of multiple connections drawn between various productions of archival, architectural and artistic spaces.