Five Cities: Glasgow

The Five Cities workshop was run as part of the Architecture International Summer School 2015 in conjunction with the University of Strathclyde and the Inner Mongolian Institute of Technology. 

Inspired by the book ‘Invisible Cities’ by Italo Calvino, in which a fictional Marco Polo describes his journeys to 55 fictional cities to an ageing Kublai Khan (each of which it transpires is a version of Venice), the workshop challenged the way in which visitors can understand a city by focusing on the following theme cities:

Host City- Lost City- Merchant City- Garden City- Sin City.

Each group was given the task to spend a day in the Merchant City area of Glasgow, recording spaces, buildings and incidents which could capture the essence of each of the Five Cities. Finally, a multimedia presentation was prepared consisting of sketches, plans, video, images and sounds to tell the story of the city to the review panel.