Carola Moujan

Score for an Edge

How can we set the stage for meaningful encounters with a site in becoming? Develop affective, sensorial and spatial relationships with what is yet to be? This piece takes Chapelle Charbon’s edge qualities (raw, opaque, hostile, dull) as a base, inviting novel interaction patterns in response to the site’s negative affordances. 

Score for an Edge is divided in six phases. Infrastructure elements (represented in black and grey) such as urban morphology, street layout and landmarks determine the spatial extension of each phase, while sensorial qualities of façades and materials, presence of vegetation, and noise level (in light blue) condition their perceived duration. 

Design interventions (represented in dark blue) aim at playing with perceived duration. At a local level, they counteract opacity, hostility and dullness whenever possible, without modifying urban infrastructure. As a whole, they compose a choreography of sensations, actions, and paths.

 Interventions happen on three levels:

• surface interventions (texture and overflow), on walls and sidewalks.
• surface perforations (see through), to increase porosity between the two sides of the edge;
• street furniture (pause and glimpse), to mark stops, trigger paths, and offer perspectives into the site’s future, past, and present.  

Biography

Carola Moujan is a designer and researcher working across disciplines. Her practice-based research explores entanglements between spaces, bodies, beings, matter and code. She holds a Ph.D in design from Sorbonne University. She teaches digital design and design theory at École Camondo – Les Arts Décoratifs and École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture Paris Belleville (France).