Workshop｜Creative Design City Nagoya 2009

Creative Design City Nagoya 2009

From Now On:Envisioning Nagoya’s Future on the Large Scale and the Small

International New Designers Workshop

D Team: Newspaper

Fieldwork:

Osu and Imaike and Kakuozan areas

Proposal Summary:

Title: Nagoya Naruheso Shinbun (Nagoya Naruheso News)

A simulation of development of the city on surface of the newspaper Excavation of personal memories on “the house one used to live”

The newspaper is not an innovative paper medium. But we believe that paper holds an inherent power. We’d like to formally consider the difficulty of transforming existing things at the same time as we convey Nagoya’s charm utilizing an historic medium: newspaper.
In order to construct a new building in an urban area, an existing building needs to be demolished. As an exercise, we created a newspaper edition (Naruheso News No. 0), a duplicate of a real newspaper published on November 26th, 1906. We equated our newspaper to a city, deleting some existing articles to give us empty space to work with. We inserted articles of our own making, based on interviews with Nagoya residents. In the process, we noticed how difficult it was to create a new format within an existing layout (or cityscape). This challenge differed completely from the difficulty of facing a blank page.
We had interviewed the townspeople, asking about memories of their family lives. Even though they were stories from the past, the unique thing about the medium of a newspaper is that these could be made to sound like contemporary happenings. Thanks to this characteristic, memories of the city of the past can be transplanted into the city of the present.
The newspaper page we made as a simulation of a newly transformed city was not particularly beautiful. But it represented the city as it is. Nagoya has undergone incessant transformations throughout its four hundred long years, and we expect this transformation to go on forever.