Dunn, Nicholas Simon (2017) Night Moves:Dissolving Time and Space in the Nocturnal City. In: Sensing Architecture. Royal Academy of Arts, GBR, pp. 47-57. ISBN 9781910350737
Full text not available from this repository.Abstract
There is a long history of night travels as integral to ‘cultures of darkness’ (Palmer, 2000) - shady worlds of miscreants, shift workers and transgressors. Yet the night offers much to be enjoyed beyond vice. Night by definition contrasts day, summoning notions of darkness and fear. But another night exists out there, providing escape from daily routine. Liberation and exhilaration in the margins of the city is increasingly rare when the prevailing fluidity of consumptive experience has smoothed our time/space relationships with multivalent forms of commoditization (Bauman, 2000). Rather than consider darkness as negative, oppositional with illumination and enlightenment, this paper explores the rich potential of the dark for our senses. Where now for the secret, the contemplative, the quiet and subterranean? The question may no longer be what spaces we wish to engage with but when are they? The primacy of architecture is perhaps not its body in light but the itinerant, fleeting shawl of darkness that recasts our built environment and senses away from the visual. Beyond the eye of CCTV cameras and security measures, gestures of refusal to accept the accessible, banal versions of the urban landscape proffered by platforms such as Google Street View, appear evident in the visceral and insightful practices of urban wandering. This chapter uses first hand experiences of night walking in Manchester to engage with other forms of pleasure in the city outside the realm of modern illumination. The city beckons us into a process of becoming as it slides into twilight and shadows creep.