Chora/Raoul Bunschoten
(1955)
Great Britain
/Netherlands
  

 

 

 Raoul Bunschoten studied architecture in Switzerland and the United States. While teaching at the Berlage Institute and the Architectural Association in London from 1983 to 2001, he founded Chora, in 1994. Originating from a research laboratory, Chora is a place where forward-looking thinking and practical action are combined. Chora is developing the concept of dynamic planning and is developing an interactive web based tool kit, called the “Urban Gallery”, to orchestrate this. It is organized around four principal factors: a database, prototypes, scenario games, and action plans. The Urban Gallery includes workshops sessions organized in urban centres like Copenhagen re conceived as scenario games, based on dialogue between participants. These dialogues are intended to give rise to prototypes, and new urbanistic concepts revealing the requirements and a better understanding of the site potential. Chora-Project-Development has formulated concrete urban prototypes: a study of the outskirts of Linz, in Austria, 1994-1995; urban renovation of East Manchester, 2000; Aarhus Horizon in Copenhagen, 2000. It stresses the need to understand these complex dynamic situations, and construct active maps from them, as well as operational models, and prototypes (Liminal Bodies). Chora is currently working on two commissions: the organisation of the Future Centre of the Rijkswaterstaat, in the Netherlands and a masterplan for Homerton, a district in London. Raoul Bunschoten and Chora are, in particular, the authors of Public Spaces-Prototypes, (2002), Metaspaces (2000); extended Chinese version, 2004) and Urban Flotsam(2001).