Pin Lane Digital reconversion of a street

Pin Lane is a small street in Plymouth, Great Brit-ain. Pin Lane is located in the heart of the old Plym-outh, not far from a beautiful harbor. As part of the assignment 'Invisible Architecture' Christophe De Jaeger and artist Nick Ervinck carried out an inves-tigation into the less visible features of this street. What is typical for Pin Lane is that the street is a passage for cars and hurried passers-by. The street is largely shaped by "dead" walls, back sides of buildings and a parking lot, which seems lost in the street. We see the back of a bar, the back doors of houses leading to staircases, an empty space where a billboard once hung, wooden pallissades behind which materials were stored, exhaust pipes for stoves and small aban-doned gardens. The absence of banks and illumina-tion contribute to the additional 'unsociableness' of the place. People never stand still in that street, they always move because their is nothing to do or to see. Nevertheless the street also has beautiful features. It has, for example, a challenging outlook. It goes very quickly up the hill and ends on some stairs that bridge the gap between the side streets. Along both sides of the street one can see platforms situated at differ-ent heights. Pin Lane also has very old, beautifully weathered walls on which typical weed plants grow. Launching a virtual version of the street in order to re-discover its value, starting from its existing features and show how the street ‘could’ become lively and beau-tiful in the future was the challenge of our project. We want to pursue our goal through a three fold virutal proposal.

Pin Lane is a small street in Plymouth, Great Brit-ain. Pin Lane is located in the heart of the old Plym-outh, not far from a beautiful harbor. As part of the assignment 'Invisible Architecture' Christophe De Jaeger and artist Nick Ervinck carried out an inves-tigation into the less visible features of this street. What is typical for Pin Lane is that the street is a pas-sage for cars and hurried passers-by. The street is largely shaped by "dead" walls, back sides of build-ings and a parking lot, which seems lost in the street. We see the back of a bar, the back doors of houses leading to staircases, an empty space where a billboard once hung, wooden pallissades behind which mate-rials were stored, exhaust pipes for stoves and small abandoned gardens. The absence of banks and illumi-nation contribute to the additional 'unsociableness' of the place. People never stand still in that street, they always move because their is nothing to do or to see. Nevertheless the street also has beautiful features. It has, for example, a challenging outlook. It goes very quickly up the hill and ends on some stairs that bridge the gap between the side streets. Along both sides of the street one can see platforms situated at differ-ent heights. Pin Lane also has very old, beautifully weathered walls on which typical weed plants grow. Launching a virtual version of the street in order to re-discover its value, starting from its existing features and show how the street ‘could’ become lively and beautiful in the future was the challenge of our project. We want to pursue our goal through a three fold vir-tual proposal.

Concept

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Phase 1 : “fine-tuning” the existing qualities of the street

Because the street runs on a steep slope, all platforms are on different levels. The different levels were bro-ken up along the street and were dressed up as small Babylon gardens. This idea takes into account the existing flora of Plymouth, for example Buddleia, which grows in abundance in the streets of Plymouth.

We replaced the non-social functions of the street by additional social platforms. Thus, the park-ing lot was transformed into a park with a pond and the wooden pallissades, which served as shel-ter for a neglected back yard of a restaurant, were converted into a wooden viewing terrace. Benches were placed on the different platforms. This street is no longer a passage for passers-by in a hurry, but an oasis of calm right in the old part of the town.

Opening up the spaces - break the walls

Creation of gardens

Phase 2 : residents turn the street inside

out and make it a lively, beautiful place

These interventions will obviously change the archi-tecture of the street. It will therefore be the residents and owners of properties in Pin Lane that change their infrastructure of the street. The functions of the front sides of the buildings are moved or copied to the rear. The street will look as if it were turned inside out.

Some buildings are shops, other buildings are restau-rants or apartments. These buildings are very attrac-tive on the front, they have beautiful facades and make publicity for their function. In our virtual version we outline what ‘would’ have happened if the functions of the buildings had been placed on the rear side.

People want a bedroom with a window overlooking the parks of Pin Lane, a fish restaurant opens a ter-race along the street, the shop at the corner of the street makes publicity in Pin Lane and is respon-sible for selling products in the street and so on.

Opening up of windows in the street Pin Lane + start economy

Phase 3 : Pin Lane becomes a perfect context for the integration of art

After the revival of social and economic functions of the street, we also seek to integrate art. This should enliven the street and transform it into a tourist attraction spot. We have dropped some surrealist ideas such as laying a submarine in Pin Lane or creating a running waterfall across the street. Ultimate-ly, we have continued to focus on the mere ‘re-styling’ of the functional objects in the street. The French rococo style departed in fact from a natu-ral form and went on adding a new style to it, namely the seed beads. For banks, the railings and lighting in Pin Lane we chose to use new 3D computer tech-niques in order to create a new style very much in-spired by the sea. One of the most inspiring fish spe-cies is Conger, a snakelike fish. We took this form as the basis for making the railings. One can discover seahorses embeded in the shape of the street lights. Murals set between the lush lists of the wall panels were typical of the rococo. They were obviously con-ceived for the interiors of buildings. Starting from the ornamentation of our new style we wanted to create a new wallpaper that can be actually used on build-ings outside. Here again we turn to the inside-outside relationship and we give a surreal look to the street.

Cancelled Surrealistic interventions

Interiors of Pin Lane visible form outside with wall papers

still researching for decoration typical for Plymouth