The Architect-Walker : A Mis-Guide

Walking is how we engage with the built environment. Artists have made urban walking into a discipline. Wrights & Sites go further, acknowledging the active role we can take and offering tactics, philosophy and examples to the engaged urban walker.

The Architect-Walker is Wrights & Sites' anti-manifesto for changing a world while exploring it. It is a tool for playful debate, collaboration, and intervention. A few suggestions and observations from the book include: Build something, however small, that is not allowed; Un-pave your garden. Make a hedgehog run under the fence; Crawl more; Protect what gaps you can. They aren't empty. They aren't yours; In a group and in bright sunlight, carry sticks and timbers. Only pay attention to the shadows you are casting; Find empty niches waiting to be filled with memorials to unacknowledged women; Architect-walkers make alliances with sinkholes and dazzle. When the sun's reflection from a skyscraper melts the streets: that moment; When enough people dance a new dance of place, it becomes a different place; Carry a small bell for ringing on the hour to restore local time to the streets; Hang a red rope between two brass stands in front of a random space. Unhook it and usher people through; Ambulant architects are irresponsible: conservationists of edgelands and fetish affordances, authors of fake planning applications, leavers of gifts and chalkers of fake hobo symbols. Formed in 1997 in Exeter, UK, Wrights & Sites are four artist-researchers (Stephen Hodge, Simon Persighetti, Phil Smith, and Cathy Turner) whose work focuses on people's relationships to places, cities and walking. They use disrupted walking tactics as tools for playful debate, collaboration, intervention and spatial meaning-making. [Subject: Walking, Performance Art]