bbpark: parking day

2019

PARK(ing) Day is an annual urban intervention where artists, architects, designers, and activists temporarily reclaim parking spaces, transforming them into micro-parks and public installations. The goal is both critical and playful: to challenge how much of our urban fabric is devoted to cars — and to imagine what else that space could offer.

For our contribution, we were initially drawn to the idea of a full-scale camera obscura: a single, immersive darkroom where the outside world would be projected inward. But the constraints of build time, daylight, and light-proofing led us to different, but related concept: a gallery of pinhole cameras.

Rather than one image, we constructed a 6 x 3 grid of pinhole cameras, each projecting a miniature, real-time view of the street onto individual vellum screens inside the structure. Visitors stepped out of the urban environment only to have that environment presented back to them, recontextualized through these ephemeral windows. The effect was both playful and poetic: a wall of soft, inverted glimpses of the world just outside.

The structure itself was a minimal, plywood-clad box with a façade perforated by 18 circular apertures facing the street. Using inexpensive magnifying glasses as lenses, we were able to collect more light, allowing for a larger aperture diameter and clearer projections — all visible even under the ambient glow of daytime. Inside, each image was fine-tuned via small, telescoping projection boxes we fabricated off site, allowing us to focus each vignette independently during install.

By physically separating visitors from their immediate surroundings and re-presenting the world through handcrafted optical devices, our installation encouraged a subtle perceptual shift. It asked: What do we overlook when we pass through space on autopilot?