Urban Eureka

Eureka moments happen outside the classroom, so what happens when the classroom is also taken outside? Will new ideas spark? Will more out of the box thinking occur outside of the ‘box’?

The Urban Eureka exhibition, debuting at the Brighton Biennale in 2022, is a learning and knowledge sharing experience that travels through the streets of Brighton. Years of education were ‘lost’ during the pandemic, with the traditional classroom thrown out the window we now have the opportunity to turn the city into our classroom, so we’re going to take it!

The professions and world of work are constantly adapting and progressing rendering our out-dated classrooms and oversized lecture halls unnecessary within the everyday learning environment, resulting in the classroom being thrust into the community. Experiential learning will foster the minds of our future students creating an innovative, future thinking generation of graduates. The Anarchists, the students who emerged with a different educational experience after the coronavirus pandemic are back with an addition to the education system to push students out of the mould that they are being forced into.

Each of the exhibition characters (creativity, imagination and curiosity) will be found at different sites across the city of Brighton. Each with their own personality and distinct attributes inhabiting existing structures in unexpected ways. The process of designing these follies becomes part of the exhibition itself with a focus on utilising creative skills. The repetition of this process at future biennales, responding to the architecture in different cities and using your creativity and imagination to design highlights the importance of flexing these skills and transferring these processes to other areas of learning. 

Out of this comes the production of a series of architectural characters, all with a unique language and individual interaction with a particular existing site around the country. These characters will catch your attention and make you wonder, the exact use of them being interpreted by the commuter, child and dog walker.