The Map Room: Exploring the Fort as Time Machine

'The Map Room’ presents Portsmouth, its ring of forts and fortifications as a constellation of stories.

"Narration shapes and simplifies events into a sequence that can stimulate the imagination, with its understanding comes the possibility of the story being retold – verbally, pictorially or spatially"
- Nigel Coates in Narrative Architecture, 2011.

Exploring the fort as a time machine, each map weaves together past, present and future through its narrative and spatial ideas. The authors are spatial narrators and physical novelists who challenge the notion of map. The work presented is tactile and situated, far removed from its digital creation.

Together these maps aim to stimulate debate and understanding of future possibilities for our city and its structures. As such it is appropriate that they be displayed as pop-up events that themselves re-vitalise and re-imagine historic venues.

This is the first in a series of ‘pop-up’ exhibitions within ‘hidden spaces’ sometimes inaccessible to the public. By the presence of the exhibition, it encourages us to physically or virtually explore both work and space.

Produced and curated by Nicola Crowson & Tina Bird Wallbridge from selected works by students from their master’s studio ‘Future Architectures’ (2020/21) of Portsmouth School of Architecture, University of Portsmouth. The juxtaposition of the artwork and the historic fabric of the buildings allows a transformation of the reading of both.

"Heritage buildings are best appreciated with culture injected into them, a dialogue between the speculative and the historic architectural fabric."
- Deniz Beck

Here the map room reimagines and reawakens the soul of the unused attic space of Store House 9 within the Historic Dockyard.