Is a city makeable?
Jakob Kolding, Untitled
Is a city makeable? Can you use a mathematic formula when designing a city? Artist Jakob Kolding asks those questions with his collages. He occupies himself with questions about citymaking and environmental planning. How did urban developers design a city on their drawing table? And how is a city being used in reality? Who uses the city? Kolding looks at the city from the view of the users.
Jakob Kolding grew up in the suburb Copenhagen Albertslund, a completely designed living environment and a textbook example of modernist town planning. In his works Kolding reflects on the planned city: I’m interested in the ideas and ideals behind these suburbs and other related ideas as well as the whole notion of more or less planning an entire town from nothing.¹
Almere was designed on the drawing board as well. Everything is taken care of: places to live in, to go to school to, to work at, and to spend your spare time. The new town centre is a concentrated construction of everything that a centre needs. The drawing board comes with problems: a drawing can be scaled properly, but reality requires quite different dimensions. The models of town planners do not show the reality of life, and not everyone in a city meets the expectations of the designers.
Instead of focusing on the designed city as a physical fact, Jakob Kolding is more interested in the way in which people live in this environment. People who live in planned neighbourhoods and cities do not transform into the pre-sketched – standardised – residents, but seek their own way in it.
In collages, Jakob Kolding confronts the images of the designed city with the ways of life of its residents. He puts these collages up as posters within the city. The poster that he made for De stedelijke conditie / The urban condition refers to Almere, without limiting itself to just the local context. The questions regarding the planned city or suburb are universal. Within the museum he builds fragile wooden constructions on the floor, thus giving his collages a three-dimensional shape.
Annick Kleizen
1. Jakob Kolding, "A short introduction", unpublished text
Jakob Kolding, Untitled
Jakob Kolding, 1971, Albertslund, Denmark
Contributions
CiskaComments
Eva
Jaap
