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evans

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The City Shaped: Policy Mechanisms as Spatial Generators V1
current
Publication

currently looking for a launching pad Type: Research and curation
Status: work in progress
People: Amy Evans and contributors

website coming
The City Shaped is an independent architecture and urban design journal exploring the urban fabric as a socio-political playground shaped by policy, data, and collective agency. Originating as a research, architectural, and installation project funded by the Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship in 2020, the journal continues this work in a collective form - operating as a community platform for young professionals, academics, and critical urban thinkers.

The first edition, Policy Mechanisms as Spatial Generators, examines the reciprocal relationship between policy and space. It investigates how policy decisions directly materialize in urban form, while also asking how spatial generators - such as data on movement, traffic, shade, noise, temperature, and occupancy - can operate inversely as advisory tools to inform future policy. Thus, reversing the power dynamics and enabling citizens and designers more agency. Through an open call and curated contributions, the journal positions design and analysis as mechanisms for influencing governance.

Harper Street
01-26 
Extension and renovation 

Location: Melbourne, Australia
Type: Architecture and interior design
Status: completed
People: Amy Evans
Builder: Ben Ellis
Client: Ben Ellis

Photographs coming soon
Renovation and extension of a terrace house, on a tight urban block.
The City Shaped
01-23 
Architecture and research project


Reciepient of The Marten Bequest Scholarship 2020 Location: Melbourne, Berlin, Barcelona 
Type: Research, curation, installation
Status: completed
People: Amy Evans

The Marten Bequest Reciepients
A body of research and installations investigating how cities are formed through regulatory, spatial, and socio-political forces. 

The City Shaped: Melbourne
Other Spaces
Hospital
Self Portraits
Plattenbau
Vague Terrain
Tracing Berlin
An Architectural Testing Ground
Urban Platforms

Other Spaces
03-22
Online Exhibition

Presented as part of Melbourne Design Week 2022, an initiative of the National Gallery of Victoria Location: Internet
Type: Exhibition design and curation
Status: Completed
People: Amy Evans and contributors
Graphic Design: Zenobia Ahmed

www.otherspacesexhibition.com
Other Spaces is a virtual exhibition which explores the potential of terrain vague within our cities. The architecture theorist Ignasi de Solà-Morales describes the concept of terrain vague as, “external places, strange places left outside the city’s effective circuits and productive structures”, these spaces include, “industrial areas, railway stations, ports, unsafe residential neighborhoods, and contaminated places.”

The exhibition curates ideas, proposals, and critiques that look specifically at temporary interventions to activate or make use of urban wastelands to question the life cycle and future of our urban environments.

Self Portraits
11-22
Album launch concert

Private Commission Location: Silent Green, Kuppelhalle, Berlin
Type: Scenography and Installation
Status: Completed
People: Amy Evans
Musician: Turi Agostino
Photography: Camille Blake
www.turiagostino.com
Turi Agostino composed and recorded the tracks for his latest album in Brisbane, Kuala Lumpur, and Berlin through intersecting time periods and terrains. As such, the scenography reflects this journey through a play of light, which adapts and reflects the tone of each track. The site-specific sculpture and scenography responds to the gathering of memories over time from these three distinct terrains, while also interacting with the light.

Hostpital
07-22
Residency Showcase
International Artist Residency Location: Konvent Zero, Cal Rosal, Spain
Type: Installation
Status: Completed
People: Amy Evans
www.konventzero.com
Taking the nearby city of Barcelona as a conceptual starting point, Hospital tracks, layers, and records time through the movement of light within the former hospital of a fourteenth-century nun’s convent in Cal Rosal, Spain.

Through an intimate analysis of Barcelona’s urban fabric, four aspects of the city were extracted and three-dimensionally portrayed in a site-specific installation within the former hospital: layers, time, density, and light.

The modern city of Barcelona is built upon layers of history. Across the city, the tops of Roman pillars pierce the modern pavement, while sections of medieval walls are preserved as relics beneath the ground, creating a layered cross-section that reveals the passage of time.

Above these layers, the modern city is shaped by light. Ildefons Cerdà’s masterplan placed the availability of natural light at the centre of its design. Yet this, too, has become buried over time. As the density of the city has increased, the amount of light available within its buildings has decreased.

The hospital, as an archetype, can be understood as a barometer of human density, measuring life and death within its walls. This installation, situated in the former hospital, records time through the tracking of light, while simultaneously creating another form of density through that act of recording.
Plattenbau
12-22
Residency Showcase
Artist in Residence, GlogauAIR Location: GlogauAIR, Berlin
Type: Research and Installation
Status: Completed
People: Amy Evans
Photography: Beatrice Lezzi
www.glogauair.net
Bruno Flierl, a German architect, and architecture critic stated that ‘architecture and society are reciprocally bound together…. Once created, architecture has the effect of either cultivating or inhibiting the communal practice of humans’ lives, their existence, and their consciousness.’

The City Shaped_Berlin is an ongoing project which investigates the physical shaping of Berlin’s urban and social fabric. Berlin’s built condition is inherently tied to the social, political, and economic fluctuations of the past two centuries. During the cold war, architecture and ‘urban planning proved to be one of the most important ways that both sides postured for dominance…’ (Ladd, 1997; Storm, 2001), where the physical fabric becomes material propaganda. Housing on both sides were used as avenues to express such dominance and power, while also physically controlling the ways their inhabitants lived. 

The Plattenbau is an example of such housing; directly translated as ‘panel building’, these buildings were almost entirely prefabricated off site. This building typology proliferated the landscape of the German Democratic Republic on a large scale, with 1.9 million state built apartments constructed in East Germany between 1972 and 1980. Neighbourhoods, such as Marzahn in Berlin, were built almost entirely with this type of prefabricated construction. The Plattenbau typology and its impact on the physical and social fabric of Berlin is explored in the installation titled Plattenbau.

An Architectural Testing Ground
12-22
Window Showcase
Artist in Residence, GlogauAIR Location: GlogauAIR, Berlin
Type: Research and Installation
Status: Completed
People: Amy Evans
Photography: Gonzalo Javier Morales Leiva
www.glogauair.net
Berlin’s urban fabric presents the social, political, and economic fluctuations of the past two centuries. These fluctuations can be traced through an understanding of the ways in which the city’s inhabitants were housed. From compact tenement housing to private villas in the outskirts of the city, extensive demolition, well-built modernist developments, and poorly built pre-fabricated buildings. 

This work traces these fluctuations through an understanding of the ways in which the inhabitants of the city were housed. Each drawing focuses on a housing model, extracting and laying information. 

The City Shaped: Melbourne
03-20
Exhibition

Presented as part of Melbourne Design Week 2020, an initiative of the National Gallery of Victoria Location: Brunswick Street Galery, Melbourne, Australia
Type: Research and exhibition
Status: Completed
People: Amy Evans, Conor Todd, and Eva Florindo
www.ngv.vic.gov.au
The City Shaped explores the idea of the city as a machine for cultural production through a series of images and sculptural objects. This exploration examines the relationship between human activity and the spaces of the city: the way in which human activity shapes the form of the city and, in turn, is shaped by it. Taking Melbourne’s Hoddle Grid as a testing ground, an analysis of each city block reveals individual spatio-cultural characteristics, which are reinterpreted in the form of sculptural objects.

Melbourne: Megacity?
04-19
Exhibition

Presented as part of Melbourne Design Week 2019, an initiative of the National Gallery of VictoriaLocation: Budd Street Gallery, Melbourne, Australia
Type: Exhibition and curation
Status: Completed
People: Amy Evans, Conor Todd, and contributors

www.ngv.vic.gov.au
A megacity is defined as a city with 10 million inhabitants or more. The population of Melbourne is projected to double over the next 40 years, from 5 million to 10 million people. This growth in population will be accompanied by a major growth in the urban fabric of Melbourne, and those in the design industries will play a central role in determining the type of city Melbourne will become. This exhibition presents ideas and propositions for Melbourne’s future as a megacity from an array of local designers, architects, urban planners and thinkers.