Ideal City. 2007 - 2009
Taking the late 15th Century Italian painting View of an Ideal City, as his cue, Nils Norman has created his own dream of a central London landscape. This part utopian, part dystopian vision of the city incorporates all the more nightmarish and absurd elements of the surge in Culture and Regeneration strategies, together with older more unfashionable ideas from the 60s and 70s of community-led, ecologically sensitive, self-built city design.
Many cities across the world are being reconsidered through the lens of “hipsterization strategies” – placemaking for a new creative class of artists, musicians, and designers. Developing areas and neighbourhoods are envisioned as safe havens and playgrounds for creatives and hopefully tourists. Public art projects are tools to revitalize urban areas from Liverpool to New Orleans. An antidote to these strategies are represented here by the artist in the form of the self-built ideas from the 60s and 70s.For example, the early adventure playground is coupled with the recycling and reuse of existing street furniture and buildings to solve future ecological problems that many cities will eventually confront, such as scarcities of water, shade and organic heat absorption.
A series of 18 panels depicting a continuous fantasy cityscape. Using drawings of research material from the local area and Adventure Playgrounds.
Commissioned by Art on the Underground, London Underground, 2007.
Exhibited
Piccadilly Circus Underground Station, central ticket hall, London, UK. 2007 - 2009