Paloma Strelitz

The New Picturesque

'Look. A single GPS coordinate is just, well a point on a plan; or rather, a very small circle on a plan - it gives you the module of order but nothing more. But two coordinates give you at once an inter-coordiantion, therefore a rhythm and there, with the module you have the germ of a building.' - John Summerson (mis-quoted)

Apollo 13's image of earthrise transformed our notions of the environmental landscape we inhabit. How does seeing the world through a digital and technological framework affect our understanding of the built environment?

Radiating outwards from St Paul's, London's spatial envelope is still determined by a view-management framework that is predicated on the observer's vantage point from an approximate eye level of 1.6 metres. These conditions are being superseded by the New Picturesque, enabled by technology's unprecedented views on the landscape and infrastructures that operate at the extreme limits of scale.

This project investigates sites of contemporary finance and remaps the City and its digital infrastructure, revealing a networked condition where data and capital together create new urban forms. You are here now: the ubiquity of personal computing and geo-spatial data suggests the possibility of a future mode for envisaging urban experience and the evolution of build form based on GPS co-ordinates. In this mode the New Picturesque explores a world mediated by a view of technology where distinct boundaries between the physical and digital are increasingly blurred.