Tunnel vision highlights homelessness (From Oxford Mail)

Tunnel vision highlights homelessness

2:48pm Monday 8th December 2008

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Architecture students have been working with Oxford’s homeless community to create a structure which tries to show what it feels like to live on the city’s streets.

A group of 28 students at Oxford Brookes University are in the middle of creating the interactive structure in the centre of the university’s Headington campus.

The nine-metre-long building, which is three metres high and wide, forms a narrow and enclosed pathway which its makers claim is symbolic of the journey homeless people go through in their lives.

The pathway has been made entirely from reused materials and will be adorned with quotes from some of the city’s homeless.

Josh Greig, a second year student in the department of architecture, has taken on the role of project manager for the construction.

He said: “We got our ideas by speaking to homeless people themselves.

“They told us their life stories, and what it was like to end up on the street.

“One man told me how after his wife died of cancer, he lost his job and ended up living in a tent in a wood.”

The students were given no money to make the pathway, which is being built using varying sizes of wood found in skips across the city Mr Greig said: “It’s changed what I think completely and it has had a big effect on all of us.

“Homeless people feel invisible to society. It’s their isolation and exclusion which we are trying to convey in this structure.”

The project was called Do You Understand Me? Raising Awareness of Homelessness in Oxford.

It was part of the development and emergency practice design unit on the university’s architecture BA course.

Melissa Kinnear, one of the course tutors who set the brief for the project, said: “The aim of this project is to make our students think about the real world and broaden their horizons.

“I'm very impressed with this project, especially the way the students have engaged with homeless people to convey the issues.”

Once it is completed, students and visitors to the campus will be asked to journey through the middle of the structure, which allows little room for movement due to its size and dimensions, to try to evoke a feeling of life on the streets.

The structure can be viewed by the public between 10am and 4pm on Thursday.

fbardsley@oxfordmail.co.uk

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