Scoring the City

Recomposing the City is honoured to have been awarded a Knowledge Exchange Fellowship, in partnership with John Bingham-Hall of Theatrum Mundi, from TORCH: The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities.

This fellowship provides £10,000 for the joint project Scoring the City, developed by Gascia Ouzounian of Recomposing the City together with TM director John Bingham-Hall. Linking to our ongoing interest in the possibilities of sonic urbanism, this experiment at the intersection takes inspiration from graphic scores in music as dynamic forms that could offer new models for the relationship between architecture, design practices, and social life: in other words, between scoring and performing urban space.

Over 12 months we propose to host 4 workshops in very different cities, with common challenges: London and Paris, two global cities needing to create flexible space to accommodate rapid economic and socio-cultural change; and Belfast and Beirut, cities marked by conflict needing to find common spaces across sectarian divides. These will invite architects and composers to collaborate to create scores for sites in transition that challenge the static nature of the architectural blueprint. The process will culminate in a publication of these scores and a launch event. Read more about the project here.

Scoring the City follows TM’s collaboration with Recomposing the City on the Beirut-London exchange workshop Urban Soundscape and the Politics of Memory and a subsequent Optophono edition, ‘Acoustic Cities: London & Beirut’ curated by Ouzounian and Bingham-Hall, with support from UCL Institute for Global Prosperity.