Echo City was curated and developed by Jeremy Till, Director of Architecture at the University of Sheffield, was an "urban register" describing Sheffield at a variety of scales from 1:1 to 1:10 million.
Till drew together a team from Sheffield including Martyn Ware, founder member of the Human League and Heaven 17; Ian Anderson of the internationally acclaimed graphic design studio The Designers’ Republic; the cross-disciplinary art collective Encounters; and Tim Etchells (artistic director of acclaimed experimental theatre company Forced Entertainment) and photographer Hugo Glendinning.
The “urban catalogue” was assembled in the four side rooms of the British Pavilion, the composition of light, sound and images in each room reflecting urban experience at a particular architectural and social scale; either 1:1, 1:100, 1:10,000 or 1:10,000,000.
The central room was a dynamic interactive space where visitors were able to create their own version of Sheffield – an Echo City. The 1:1 room was an installation of found objects from a project in the inner-city neighbourhood of Sharrow, initiated by the art collective Encounters; 1:100 featured architectural projects by Sauerbruch Hutton, Studio Egret West and Hawkins Brown, and Mecanoo; 1:10,000 was a literary and photographic journey written in the streets of Sheffield by writer Tim Etchells and photographer Hugo Glendinning; and 1:10,000,000 was Martyn Ware’s soundscape projecting Sheffield's relationship with the world at large. The central exhibit was an interactive model developed by Jim Prevett which invites visitors to reconfigure urban elements at a variety of scales from the surrounding rooms. Till commented:
“Architects tend to focus on the 1:100 and in this eschew the dynamics of the other scales and the rich interplay between them. Their main loss is an understanding of the settings for social and political life.”
Jeremy Till, curator of Echo City at the British Pavilion, 2006
