A permanent participatory exhibition design for the Farrell Centre. The Urban Rooms are spaces where visitors can reflect on the city of Newcastle and Tyneside as it is now, and, through interactive exhibits and events, make their voices heard in shaping how it might change in the future.
They focus around three themes or actions—Plan, Build and Participate.
“Plan” centres on Farrell’s Newcastle City Masterplan, the model of which stands in the centre of this room, around which are displayed maps of the city from the sixteenth century to the present.
“Build” uses the centre’s own building as a case study for an exploration of the architectural process, from drawing board to the materials used in its construction. Installations and activities bring to the fore planning’s long standing role as a proposition for (urban) change.
“Participate” features a range of displays and activities which invite visitors to reflect on how we use and understand the city. “Mapping Tyneside” captures the invisible networks and connections between the places that are meaningful to us. “The People’s Plinth” brings together objects that tell stories about the city. “Greetings from Tyneside” asks us to look at how we see ourselves and our city, and how we might describe it to those on the outside.
The Urban Rooms are also where the centre holds its live programmes of talks, workshops and community forums, which together with displays, objects and activities, offer a vital platform for new and diverse ideas and perspectives around the future of Tyneside and of city-making more generally.
The design language used for the urban rooms takes cues from the temporary structures and graphics that represent change in the evolving city. Scaffolding has been rubbed down and arranged to form the plinths and furniture. Storm board, made from recycled plastic and usually used for hoarding, forms the shelves and furniture panels with sandbags giving the structures ballast.
Bespoke oriel window scaffold caps have been 3D printed to add an ornamental twist to the structures, the same oriel windows that form the corners to the urban rooms. Differing hazard stripes form the visual language: orange and white is participatory (magnetic walls), yellow and black is timeline, and blue and white lead you to the Rosetta stone interpretation panels, realised in broken plasterboard.
An exhibition that has been designed to evolve as the city around it does.
Photography by Jim Stephenson