(click on above image to view transects)
 
The transect excercize began with the premise that seeing the city as an organic construct -- as interaction of life with matter -- is a means to understand its true complexity (for unfortunately our daily habits and familiarity with it nurture only half-truths). Understanding living complexity through vivisection - the isolation of the limbs, the organs, tissue, and support organisms of the city as a means to see their contribution to the whole -- can serve as a powerful tool for urban analysis. Such an analysis attempts neither a political nor an artistic construct, since any "cut through life" is by definition empirical, and based on experienced fact.

 

 

Transects
 

In order to enhance their perception of Gibsons, and to become attuned to the physical, social and associative aspects of the community, students were asked to "cut a slice" -- or a section -- through an area of Gibsons.

The transects -- of 100 metres wide, and anywhere from 500 to 1500 metres long -- allowed students to become intimately familiar with an area of the town and its hiterlands. Through this one-week exercize, students were to unearth the chances, the collisions, the coherences, the paths, and the identities of the area and represent these elements in evocative and meaningful ways. It was intended that the transects begin to develop a taxonomy of urban conditions that would become the basis, or the foil, for thinking in subsequent exercizes.

(click here or on above image to view transects)

 
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