Interior edges: Risk

This paper looks at the one week Risk project run by the Interior Design Department at Edinburgh College of Art, that involved first year students from nine disciplines in the Design School. Using Mark Wallinger’s State Britain project as inspiration it looked at how walls and barriers have been created historically in our cities and engaged the students with thinking about where those walls are now. It challenged them to represent and respond to what they perceived were todays barriers.
In 1513 the Flodden Wall was built enclosing the city of Edinburgh. Part of the wall still exists around the art college, but the majority has been lost and inhumed within the expanding city. The brief of the project was for students, working in mixed disciplinary groups, to walk the boundary of the wall and record what they found today. They then represented their responses in a series of cardboard box vitrines. Students also made their own individual vitrines representing what they felt their own risks and barriers were.
The project culminated with the building of a wall across the sculpture court of the art college, made from the boxes. It was in place for only a few hours before being destroyed. The project focused on how interior spaces are temporary, yet are influenced by what has gone on before in and around them. From a pedagogical perspective it looked at students from varying disciplines working in three dimensional space creating a real life interiors intervention of truly collaborative proportions.