Pitch

The basic premise of this project is quite simple: we plan to create an interactive walking tour of the Aller Park school, detailing the history of the site. This would be combined with an exhibition of our documentation and discoveries that cannot, for reasons of time and resource, be included in the tour proper.

The tour will be operated through the use of video cameras wired up to a server computer within the exhibition centre. When the cameras show movement in front of their lens, the computer will trigger a sound response, playing a recording of relevant facts about the site people are standing at. In addition to this, it will log the routes that people take to walk around the site, thus providing us with data and a ‘map’ of the tour, to see where people have chosen to go and in what order.

Part of what has piqued our interest in the building’s history is the incongruous architecture. It is only as old, if not less so, than the other buildings surrounding it; and yet its design is of a very traditional school building, in comparison to the much more modern-looking Lescaze designs of Blacklers and Chimmels. Why was this decision made, and why is Aller Park - almost uniquely – a traditional-seeming building in an estate full of modernist and art deco design?

Much of our research will be undertaken with the help of the high Cross House archive, which was itself the old house of the original headmaster of the foxhole senior school at Dartington Estate. A complete archive of the estate’s history has logged there, including old games reports and missives from all the staff at the schools. We will then collate this information and find a way to pas this on through the interactive tour and exhibition centre.