_urb_

A Little Help from Her Friends

2009-11-03T14:23:00.002+08:00

So it turns out this weekends winter wonderland was a cooperative effort between Mother Nature and Mother China, as reported in the Guardian.

And in this Times Online article from February there is a video showing the rockets in action.

See Previous:
Strange Weather

First Snow of the Season

2009-11-01T16:04:00.001+08:00

snowman 2, originally uploaded by o d b.

First snow of the winter season here in Beijing. And I'm stuck at work. On a Sunday to boot. yay!

Edible Architecture 4 - Cantilever Cake Taste Verygood

2009-03-23T18:20:00.002+08:00

Well…at least I hope they do…
From my friend and colleague Nozomi we are blessed with this picture of two incredible cake versions of the famous CCTV/TVCC buildings in Beijing. The buildings are designed by OMA of course but I don’t know who designed the cake versions. Surely it was a truly inspired baker. Possibly with a structural engineering background because that is quite some cantilever….or should we call it a cake-ilever?
Hmmm…maybe not.
I would love to see pictures of someone slicing this cake—I wonder if it comes complete with a demolition drawing package? Without some practice, or at least a little forethought, I can imagine a major wedding disaster: “Poor Suzie got smothered under her wedding cake when Bob didn’t follow protocol for dismantling the sucker. Took ‘em the rest of the night just to shovel her out! I guess they’ll never forget their wedding night…har har har….”

If you’re a sucker for all things food and architecture, please check these out as well:
Edible Architecture 3
Edible Architecture 2
Edible Architecture 1

p.s. Don’t call it a comeback. Not yet at least.

HIATUS

2009-02-05T22:33:00.007+08:00

Hi Everyone,

I have decided to take a break from blogging for a little while in order to regroup, reboot, and do some other things because I find blogging intensive and all-consuming, especially with a full-time job on the side...hehehe. In the meantime I hope you enjoy the archives and please feel free to leave comments, as I will be keeping up with them, or drop me a line from time to time.

I will not leave you with high and dry...here are some of my favorite pictures from a recent trip to Linyi, PRC for Chinese New Year:

p.s. I might look happy in that final pic but because of my actions at the time I paid a price later. I have learned a lot about my body and its dietary limits from being in China. Formerly I would have just accounted my (then) forthcoming discomfort to a bout of food poisoning (or the Chinese equivalent of Montezuma's revenge), but as every good Chinese person will tell you:

Never eat hot sweet potato in cold wind.

URB-Links 01

2009-02-01T00:24:00.005+08:00

Hi Everyone,

Shinian Kuai Le, or Happy Chinese New Year!
Sorry for the week long absence from posting but I have been on holiday for CNY since last Saturday. I hope to have some pics from the festivities on my Flickr page soon so all of you can take a gander. It's a very interesting holiday for me to witness as a foreigner and I really enjoy all of the traditions--the food, the firework, the family time, etc. It's truly wonderful.
With a new year also comes new traditions. This is the first in a new segment here on _URB_ - a weekly links update on things that I have found interesting in relation to the themes that we tend to explore here. So the links will be organized topically.
Without further adieu...

GEO-MIMICRY
The big event in geo-mimicry this past week has to be BIG's new masterplan for Zira Island in Azerbaijan. Will it really be a zero-energy resort and a "sustainable model for urban development"? That remains to be seen...but what we do know for certain is that the project's form is derived from Azerbaijan's famous 'Seven Peaks.'

PHREE_Urbanism
Although this is not exactly urban, the fact that the rainforests are regenerating themselves on abandoned farmland is pretty great news. But in the end tt actually does have something to do with urbanization however: "small holdings...and much larger swaths of farmland — are reverting to nature, as people abandon their land and move to the cities in search of better livings."

MEGASTRUCTURES
Io9 features a great gallery of megaSPACEstructures--apparently where we will all be living in a few decades. My favorite? Probably the first image apparently supplied by NASA--it's a great mix of 2001, Paolo Soleri, and an LA suburb.

MEDIATION
The Architect's Newspaper's editorial by Julie Iovine encourages architects to expand their professional capacities and become "designers of options, instead of icons." She also mentions a forthcoming book called Architecture Depends which sounds really great.

'BOTTOM UP' PROCESSES
Limewire creator Mark Gorton is looking to bring an open-source approach to urban planning through open source city models, increasing the capacity and complexity in online trip-planning, internet based planning forums for communities, and introducing para-transit and other smaller, more adaptive, and more responsive public transit systems. Sounds exciting!

BLOGGING
Become a WHEREblogger!

Rural Studio 2

2009-01-23T12:00:00.003+08:00

Forrest just sent me a series of comic book inspired panels describing the design and construction process of the Glass Chapel and is graciously allowing me to post them here on _URB_. It is a great set of images giving us a glimpse into the multifarious collection of tasks required by Rural Studio participants--conflict negotiation and mitigation, junkyard pulls, laborious construction techniques, on-the-fly detail design, community immersion, and of course--having fun! Check out the flickr set to look at the images in more detail.
Forrest also sent me the following two pics--the first of me in SubRosa and the second, quite amusing pic of my father whispering sweet nothings to me via the pipe of confidentiality I referred to in my previous post on the Rural Studio.

aqua.URB.anism || NY Moon WATER Issue

2009-01-22T13:03:00.002+08:00

Interactive Map of the Water Systems of Manhattan, via New York Moon

The current edition of the New York Moon, “an internet-based publication adhered to the lunar phases of the real waxing, waning moon,” is dedicated to Water:

It billows in the lower atmosphere; it falls in drops or sheets or buckets or cats and dogs; it is drunk; it is sprayed over the breadbasket fields; it is peed; it slices down sluices, levels locks, tumbles through turbines in hydroelectric dams, courses through cataracts and rumbles over Mosi-oa-Tunya tunneling out its gorges; it vaporizes; it is cried; it fills the vast fields over which tankers and pirates zoom and under which manta rays skate; it gives and sustains Life (see, Fertile Crescent, primordial ooze); it also takes it away (see, Ophelia, Kursk); it is composed of three atoms — Hydrogen, Oxygen, Hydrogen; it envelops Dead Sea bathers, bears away bits of Venice and serves as boundaries to be crossed only if the intention is to helm the Ship of State past the treacherous waters of the shining Cyclades. It runs off.

Thus states the opening page of the issue. A few of the issue’s articles demonstrate the delicate balance between water and urban areas. “The Sick Waters of Voronezh” gives a first hand account of the intimate relationship between a Russian city and its water supply throughout history.

One of the amazing features of the issue is an interactive map of the “Water Systems of Manhattan” demonstrating Manhattan’s natural hydrology with overlaid maps from 1865 and today.

Beneath New York’s lattices of concrete, iron and landfill lie dozens of organic waterways. Using data from an 1865 sanitation map and contemporary satellite photographs, this projection depicts Manhattan as a vascular organ, whose obscure operation has had a powerful bearing on the fate of the city…Created for the department of sanitation, the map was a reminder that natural water systems, entombed beneath modern accumulations, hidden from view, could still have monumental effects on the functioning of city life. Indeed, structural engineers and city planners continue to consult the Viele map as the authoritative survey of Manhattan’s water systems.

Other interesting articles include a story which casts Wall Street as a waterlogged version of Pompeii and a proposal to extend IKEA’s flatpack/fabrication logic “beyond the limits of conventional architecture to the biological construction of fauna inhabiting the watery zones surrounding the city.”

note: found via BLDGBLOG.

See Previous: Water Worlds

Rural Studio || Road Trip

2009-01-22T10:00:00.003+08:00

Flickr Set featuring pictures of my trip to see the Rural Studio, Hale County Alabama

My father and I sat out early on a brisk Friday morning and headed west towards the neighboring state of Alabama. We would drive for a couple of hours before we reached our first destination, the sleepy college town of Auburn, where we waited in one of the only open coffee shops for my good friend Forrest. No, it is not a joke (as my mother initially thought)—I really went to Alabama to meet my friend Forrest (Fulton, not Gump). Ironically the place was called Cambridge Coffee House and I believe the intention, through its name and crimson interior, is that it would remind us of Cambridge, Mass. and the institutes of higher learning found there. Ironically, I say, because it was in Cambridge Mass that Forrest and I first met each other about five years ago where we would bond as fellow southerners. The bond continued to grow as we found ourselves strangely living in the same cities through the years—Cambridge first, then New York, and most recently in Beijing where we both found ourselves working in late 2007. In August 2008, just before the Olympics, Forrest left Beijing to pursue other ambitions which took him full circle back to Alabama.

Early on in our relationship I learned that Forrest was an alumnus of the renowned Rural Studio program of Auburn University. Not only that: he had constructed, along with three other classmates, the Glass Chapel that had long been my favorite project of the program! So for a long time I had been intending to make the pilgrimage from Georgia to Alabama to get a firsthand look at the RS projects. This was the day that dream was finally going to become realized. Forrest eventually arrived and after general greetings the three of us set out once again for Hale County, the epicenter of the Rural Studio program.

The Rural Studio was started in 1991 by Samuel Mockbee and D.K. Ruth, professors at Auburn University, to provide students an opportunity to get a unique educational experience combining construction experience through design/build projects and community activism. Mockbee, a well regarded regionalist with partner Coleman Coker in the 1980s, would give up private practice to found the program and “dedicated his life, as a teacher and as an architect, to the goal of providing 'shelter for the soul'. His inspirational and authentic architecture served to improve the lives of the most impoverished residents of rural Alabama” through the Rural Studio. RS is renowned for its activism and community building, and its progressive, empirical approach to materiality and fabrication. In the Rural Studio, innovation comes through extreme forms of experimentation and pragmatism. Materials are formed and reformed through techniques of recycling, reconstitution, unusual combinations, and atypical selection, the latter often due to availability. Walls are made up of carpet and cardboard; buildings are clad in license plates and windshields; apertures are created out of beer bottles. When normal materials are used, such as brick or CMU, they are exploited to create textures and patterns rarely seen before. But I’m getting ahead of myself. This is a story about a road trip.

Hale County is a three-hour trek from Auburn along long, flat stretches of highway that cross the southern portion of the southeastern states of the US. A highlight of the trip, besides noting minute variations in topography and foliage, was passing through Selma, AL, the tragic starting point of the Selma-to-Montgomery March (wikipedia). As we crossed over the Edmund Pettis Bridge, the site of the “Bloody Sunday” tragedy in which law “enforcers” attacked the marchers with tear gas and billy clubs on their first attempt to march to Montgomery, the car grew incredibly silent, and no one would say a word until we reached the other end of the historic town center. I can not speak for the others but I know I was overcome with the weight of history and the promise of a new future.

After another hour we reached the Super Shed in Newbern, AL, the home base of the Rural Studio program and the site of its endless explorations. The Super Shed is basically a giant roof, the likes of which you see on virtually every farm in the southeast, under which are built a series of small buildings for the students dormitory. According to Forrest the concept is based on Jefferson’s design for the UVA Lawn. The Super Shed also serves as the studio’s dormitory and workshop. Many of the program’s most extreme experiments are tested here first, in mockups and the students own housing. Highlights here include the cardboard wall house and the cylindrical brick shower building.

Then it was a short trip down the road to an abandoned house whose lot has been transfigured through a series of earthworks by the studio. Here we found one of the highlights of the entire trip. Subrosa is a subterranean cylindrical space made out of concrete and open to the sky which you reach through a long narrow concrete tunnel. It is one of Sam Mockbee’s last designs and it references the Greek and Roman myth of sub rosa and pledge to secrecy. The structure was constructed after Mockbee's death by his daughter. The oculus in the center of the space is filled with a sculpture made of steel rods and discs which resemble a field of reeds. In the floor is a small pond and on one side of the cylinder is a niche. In the niche is a bench where you can sit and converse indirectly to your neighbor through a tube that starts on one side of the niche, circles around the cylinder, and finishes on the other side of the niche. Sitting back to back my father and I whispered to each other through the tube feeling a little like two kids holding tin cans connected by a thread.

Moving on from there we arrived at the Newbern Fire Station, one of the more recent RS projects and a handsomely constructed building. It consists of a series of wood and steel structural modules clad in metal roofing on the north façade and translucent plastic and wood louvers on the south façade. A little farther down the road in Greensboro we found the Hale County Animal Shelter, a Shigeru Ban inspired barrel vaulted roof sheltering kennels below. In these two projects we clearly see one of RS’ consistent design tropes—the shed roof with dynamic profile.

From there we progressed deeper into the rural areas to Masons Bend, a small dirt road which featured many of RS’ early projects, such as the Butterfly House, the Hay Bale House, and the Lucy House. It also featured Forrest’s creation, the Glass Chapel. The Glass Chapel features one of the most iconic images (for me) of the Rural Studio, a glass façade made out of “1980s GMC sedan car windows salvaged from a Chicago scrap yard.” Its other distinctive tectonic feature is a series of rammed earth walls “containing local clay, cement, and a small amount of water.” The rammed earth is a beautiful material, orangy-red from the local clay, and with a texture like velvet. The only disappointment is that it was a little derelict from lack of maintenance and its usefulness in target practice to the locals. Forrest looked wistfully at his creation and said “there are so many things I would do differently now.” But to me the ambition of four young college seniors—to use a rarefied, labor intensive construction method (rammed earth) and an innovative, never-seen-before material (windshields)—was remarkable and the finished product something to be proud of.

In the end it was a great day—we got to see some inspiring architecture and some beautiful countryside. Unfortunately there are so many projects we were not able to see, including some bathrooms at a park that Forrest said were really great but we could not seem to find despite my dad’s new GPS system and our best intentions. It’s so awesome to see people thinking and working in an original, resourceful, and ad-hoc manner, and doing so much good through design.

PHREE_URB 06 || ECOMETROPOLITANISM

2009-01-21T16:31:00.012+08:00

Via Archinect I discovered EcoMetropolitanism (EcoMet), and exciting and provocative proposal for a new form of urbanism by Mari Fujita and Matthew Soules of Vancouver. Obviously I find it exciting because it is a concept that is intimately connected to the PHREE_Urbanism concept I have been proposing in my last few posts.

HYPER-LOCAL

Fujita and Soules proposition consists of seven points to make Vancouver a more wild and exciting place through an intensification of Vancouver’s already existing unique relationship between nature and urbanism. I really like this concept of the hyper-local—finding what is truly native to a place and exacerbating it.* This seems to be the Fujita and Soules’ MO for this and other projects. In Fujita’s blog I found an excerpt of a paper she submitted to the ACSA discussing the notion of several types of urbanity and needing to address places with more specificity, and going so far as to declare Vancouver as a verb and a new –ism. Fujitas declares that Vancouverism is the model of density and diversity within a livable framework. EcoMet, for Fujita and Soules, is a supped-up, accelerated, version of Vancouverism—a Vancouverism on anabolic steroids, if you will.

EcoMetropolitanism Vs. EcoDensity
Hyper-locality involves contending with not only the ecologic specificity of a place but also the regulatory specificity as well, and EcoMet seems to be a direct response to Vancouver’s EcoDensity zoning system which was just put into place last year. According to the Vancouver’s EcoDensity website claims that

Part of the City of Vancouver’s response to these challenges is a new initiative
called EcoDensity. The program will be designed to create greater density
throughout the city, and do it in a way that lowers our impact on the
environment; ensures the necessary physical and social amenities; and supports
new and different housing types as a way to promote more affordability. (1)

I personally do not know much about the EcoDensity initiative except that it sounds nice as an idea. But Fujita and Soules use EcoMet as a critique of the new program: "It's very much a critique of EcoDensity," says Soules. "There's many different ways in which density can occur, but EcoDensity makes no specific claims really about what form density will take. So EcoMet is an attempt to be more specific about what kind of density can occur." (2) Another way that they directly respond to Vancouver's regulations is by taking Vancouver's existing view cone regulations and invert them.

The following is a description of EcoMetropolitanism straight from the horses mouth, Mathew Soules’ website:

EcoMetropolitanism is a joint research project by MSA and FujitaWork that seeks
to understand, articulate, and visualize possibilities for the hyper dense,
super diverse, and radically optimized cities of the future. Cities in which the
vibrancy of the metropolis is amplified by ecologically designed architectural
environments.

The project takes its departure from Vancouver as a city
with a specific and provocative relationship between dense urbanism and natural
environment. The EcoMetropolis can be understood as an accelerated Vancouver. In
building the EcoMetropolis certain performative strategies are instrumental:
Expanding upon received ideas of density to account for broader systems and
populations, inverting and redeploying Vancouvers view cone system, intensifying
programmatic diversity, maximizing building envelopes and creating productive
ecologies inside building interiors. (3)

The Seven Points (all text and images via The Tyee)

Point One: Make EcoMAX
Measure not just simple human density but also plant and animal life and diversity.
Point Two: Invert the View Cone
EcoMet proposes Urban Habitat Cones, Urban Agriculture Cones, Density Release Cones, and Mixer Cones to view our newly exciting city.

Point Three: Intensity Use
Fujita and Soules re-imagine Vancouver's downtown tower-on-podium template to serve much richer and more varied purposes: wildlife corridors slice through the commercial space at ground level; bridges and platforms host bird habitats and micro-agriculture.
Point Four: Exploit Co-Existence
Don't just make a "green roof" that no one can see or feed from; design it as a source of animal food and human entertainment.
Point Five: Broaden Structure
EcoMet augments structure and infrastructure's extant function of supporting humans by capitalizing on their potential to service the city's expanded population.
Point Six: Maximize Envelope
Take the dull, predictable condo tower envelope and fold it, warp it, substract and protrude until you come up with a visually exciting and highly interactive architecture: all those new ledges and crevicess will allow plant and animal integration.

Point Seven: Ecologize the Interior
Soules and Fujita suggest mainstreaming Vancouver's time-tested "interior agriculture" (a.k.a. grow-ops) into new crops--say, hydroponically-grown tomatoes-- that not only provide a source of fresh local food but could also generate a colourful "living wallaper" and other aesthetic qualities for the inhabitants.

Sleep Dealer

2009-01-15T20:06:00.004+08:00

The images above are stills from Sleep Dealer, a film by Alex Rivera

Robotic construction workers in New York remotely controlled through outsourced operators in Mexico.

A renegade fighting wars in countries he has never been.

A migrant worker who sells her memories of growing up in an undeveloped country to wealthy thrill seekers who do not actually want to experience their adventures first hand.

These are the roles of the three main characters of Alex Rivera’s new film Sleep Dealer, which discusses important political issues like globalization, colonization, immigration, and outsourcing in a futuristic sci-fi setting. I just heard about the film today via an interview with Rivera on Wired. The movie looks amazing—and it has already won some big awards at film festivals such as Sundance.

The movie discusses the same issues that urbanists are also discussing these days—urban migration, network culture, connectivity, situated technologies, urban computing, globalization, etc. One interesting point is that to achieve the futuristic, dystopian look he wanted he had to look no further than places that already exist. The photographs of Edward Burtynsky, the border conditions between US and Mexico (depicted in a still from the film above, which Rivera and his team did nothing to alter for the film), and the markets of Mexico City offered visions and settings for the film.

River says that the film is about connectivity, virtual and real, and whether increased connectivity will bring with it more hope, more justice, or more alienation. As he says, it is up to us to decide which direction it will take.

Check out the interview below:

PHREE_URB 05

2009-01-13T23:48:00.025+08:00

GUIDELINES FOR A 'PHREE' FUTURE

Well, here it is, long overdue--the expanded version of the Guidelines for PHREE_Urbanism. I hope you enjoy. Please feel free to leave any comments, complaints, and suggestions you have.

1. From “Towers in the park” to “Tower IS the park.”

Le Corbusier - Plan Voisin

MVRDV - Gwanggyo Centre, Korea
Daniel Libeskind

I think the title of this one pretty much says it all—in PHREE_Urbanism the modernist concept of towers hovering over and/or around a civilized park (best epitomized by Corb’s famous perspective view showing a luxurious terrace from which the ‘primitive’ nature is to be contemplated) has been superseded by an attempt to turn the tower into a wild, unkempt vegetal structure (that same luxurious terrace now becomes a place to inhabit that ‘primitive’ nature). This narrative excludes FLW’s Broadacre City, an agroUrban conception that is only now, 70 years later, becoming a seriously considered approach to urban design.

FLW's Broadacre City - Decentralized, Democratic (according to FLW), AgroUrban

Minsuk Cho/Mass Studies

Park Towers are now all the rage but I want to draw special attention to three pioneering figures whose vanguard designs introduced us to the idea long before it’s recent popularization: Emilio Ambasz, Edouard Francois, and of course, Ken Yeang.

Emilio AmbaszKen Yeang

We should also throw a nod towards Vertical Farming here as well.

2. Fill the Void aka Green is the New BlaNk

MAD proposes to fill one of the largest urban voids in the world, Tian'Man Square, Beijing

Patrick LeBlanc Vegetable Wall

Have a blank wall on your house? Do it Patrick LeBlanc style and grow some plants on it! Have a boring asphalt roof above your head? Grow a garden! Have an empty lot in the alley next to you? Throw some seeds in it! Through tactical maneuvers such as guerilla gardening (1, 2) and seed bombing today’s PHREE_Urbanists are taking back the streets and alleys and returning them to Mother Nature. Joni Mitchell would be proud.

Hellboy II - Forest Elemental

This strategy reminds me of one of the most striking scenes in Hellboy II: when the giant forest elemental is shot by Hellboy and transmogrifies into a spectacular verdant knoll in the middle of Brooklyn.

3. If you can’t beat them, DESIGN them.

Vicente Guallart - Shanghai Expo pavilion
Greg Lynn - Intricacy

I’m not sure if it is floral inspiration or some sort of flower envy, but architects and designers are more and more often using plants and animals as their muse. Of course we have a soft spot for mimetic design (1, 2, 3, 4) here on _URB_, so we don't mind that architects are designing structures that mimic daisies (see Public Farm post), trees (Guallart), or even venus fly traps (Lynn). In fact, we encourage it. Below is one of my recent faves, a hexi-sexy geometrical riff on a flower by Plan B Architects.

Orquideorama / Plan B Architects + JPRCR Architects

4. Eat Your Home.

Fab Tree Hab - Mitchell Joachim, Javier Aborna, Lara Greden

Planting roots takes on a whole new meaning as homes of the future must be grow themselves. Fixity and stability, characteristics we looked for in a house during the humanist era, are things of the past—now it is all about dynamic flexibility and emergence. To those European architects who used to make fun of our stick-built American homes I can now say “Hey, it was just a part of the evolution baby…that’s how we rolled. And now we’re going to roll hobbit style.” The best part about it? If you get hungry you no longer need to run to the market, just grab some fruit from the ceiling.
“But I’m not really into fruits and veggies” you say. I know. Me too! That’s why I built my guest house out of ginger bread. It tastes great AND it’s biodegradable!

For those carnivores out there, if we can grow ears on the back of a mouse I’m sure it will be no time before scientists create a self-generating, self-replicating bovine protein that can become building blocks for a ‘carne a casa’. Just look at this In Vitro Meat Habitat found on Mitchell Joachim’s blog. A ‘slab of beef’ takes on a whole new meaning.

In-Vitro-Meat Habitat (Damien Hirst, anyone?)

Note: I actually wrote this last part before I wrote last week’s piece on bioengineering, but now I can think of at least one more thing for bioengineers and architects to explore together.

5. Start a Flood.

Micah Morgan - Park Space

Water has been reenergized as a performative design element in PHREEU. Rethinking the role of hydrological infrastructure as a civic space, such as the concrete creeks in LA and Houston, the increased use natural wetlands in landscape design, and the water-logged parking lots of Micah Morgan’s thesis at Rice University are further examples and opportunities for what I have previously termed aquaUrbanism.

6. Get a Pet.
Soon to be seen in classifieds:
WANTED: SWF in search of PUS* for protection against free-ranging zoo animals in adjacent superblock. MUST be big, strong, and ferocious, but cuddly and pettable. Grizzly Bears and Lions preferred. Cats and Dogs need not apply.
*PUS, now unheard of in the classified section, will soon be a commonly seen acronym of the classifieds section meaning “Pets of Unusual Size”
All jokes aside, as Stefano Boeri wrote in “Down from the Stand,” increasing the biodiversity of our cities means experimentation with the cohabitation of different animal species. How this cohabitation occurs is still in question.
Is it through a Jumanji style rewilding of our cities? Perhaps abandoned areas of shrinking cities are turned into experimental zoos: Can you imagine performing a Matt-Clark inspired deconstruction on parts of Detroit to create interesting spaces for wild animals throughout abandoned pancake slab structures and then constructing a Team X/Archigram inspired elevated walkway (surrounded in glass like those used in aquariums to be sure) winding through this forgotten quarter to produce one of the most amazing psycho-geographic-zoological experiences ever??!? The aforementioned City Zoo project by Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today is an example of this kind of proposal.

City Zoo - Tomorrow's Thoughts Today

Or is it through an increase of agrarian livestock in our cities? This is the more likely scenario as it is actually happening. According to a recent NPR segment the American Planning Association has fielded more questions about changing zoning codes to allow chickens than any other issue over the last six months. City life resembles Front Studio’s Farmadelphia proposal more and more every day. We no longer have to move out of town to Green Acres, we can bring Green Acres to us.

Front Studio - Farmadelphia

Bioengineering + Design

2009-01-07T10:30:00.006+08:00

Joanna Aizenberg via Harvard Magazine

Like tiny flowers, micro-florets created in Joanna Aizenberg’s lab open and close in response to changes in environmental moisture. These structures, their action controlled by a hydrogel “muscle,” can be used to catch and release tiny particles.

In the latest issue of Harvard Magazine there is an article about the exciting new field of bioengineering which is being explored in an incredible multidisciplinary directive at Harvard University. Bioengineering is “the application of engineering principles and techniques to address problems in biology and medicine” and is a synthetic practice bridging the fields of biology, medicine, engineering, physics, materials science, chemistry, and computer science. In the article’s intro bioengineering achievements include

constructing an artificial liver, altering bacteria to make hydrogen fuel directly from sunlight, [and] determining how the geometry of damaged heart cells leads to coronary disasters.

Notoriously absent from the list of schools and disciplines involved in these new pursuits is the Graduate School of Design (GSD) and the disciplines of architecture, landscape architecture and urban planning and design. I feel that this is a loss, particularly for architecture, but also for bioengineering. In this post I will offer some thoughts of why I think this.

CREATIVE COLLABORATION
Interdisciplinary collaboration is one of the promises of attending the GSD, particularly among the three disciplines which operate under the school’s academic umbrella. Unfortunately this promise does not extend much beyond the walls of the school. This is not entirely the school’s fault—it is endemic to both the Harvard graduate system and of architecture and design schools in general I believe (in my eight years of design education at both Georgia Tech and the GSD I had only two classes which afforded opportunities for design collaboration outside the normative ‘design’ disciplines). But while I attended the GSD I had one opportunity for this type of collaboration between the GSD and the SEAS in a studio taught by Sheila Kennedy as part of her Portable Light Project. And it was great. The collaboration between architects and engineers from the SEAS forced us all out of our comfort zones into thinking about design and applied technologies in ways we had not before.
The article in Harvard Magazine discusses how combining biology and engineering it combines ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ sciences; the former is focused on quantification and prediction while the latter is focused on description. Architecture can benefit from both of these approaches and provide something unique at the same time.
So from a pedagogical perspective it would be very exciting for the students. This new form of creative collaboration would offer a new approach to both emerging and already familiar problems. It also represents the increasing complexity and convergence of design, science, and engineering disciplines and the need to find new forms of practice to confront the full range of topics that architecture and urbanism must contend with today. So it prepares architects who are well equipped for the collaborative forms of practice required today.

BEYOND BIOMIMICRY
As I have mentioned before, architecture has always been a mimetic practice. Biomimicry has become a hot topic among architects (as well as engineers) and is represented by an attention to biological forms and processes, exhibited by such firms as Emergence and Biothing, among others. Getting involved in the new interdisciplinary field of bioengineering would place architects directly alongside other fields also exploring these interests. People like Joanna Aizenberg, a materials scientist developing new materials inspired by biology. One of her explorations is the development of a “nanofur” whose hair-like projections change properties in response to humidity. According to the Harvard Magazine article, “the ability to change in response to the environment is one of the properties that make biological materials more useful than artificial ones.”
Computer scientist Radhika Nagpal is also inspired by biology. She looks to “understand living processes and then looks for ways to apply those guiding principles to the design of computer systems and programmable structures that have the properties of living organisms.” In a similar vein, scientists like Edward O. Wilson demonstrate that there is a lot to learn about our own civilization and our cities by examining the social organization of other living organisms such as ants.
Both of these explorations could be invaluable to architecture, and in fact there are plenty of architects who are studying these same things. So why are we not being more proactive in working directly with these other disciplines exploring the same issues, developing applications for this work in architecture and urbanism?

At the same time, I think that teaming up with the emerging bioengineering field can inspire us to move beyond mere biomimicry into something even more interesting and productive. Rather than merely mimicking the forms of biology and nature, if we could synthesize architecture, biology, and engineering the possibilities are endless. Pamela Silver has been investigating ways to engineer organisms to produce useful elements, such as hydrogen fuel. “By redesigning bacteria to produce hydrogen or other useful elements from the sunlight, she would like to turn them into ‘living solar panels.’” Iwamoto Scott’s Jellyfish House is an architectural example of how we could use bioengineering technologies to rethink the relationship between architecture, engineering, and environmental/natural systems. The possibilities are endless.

Iwamoto Scott - Jellyfish House

CYBORG URBANISM
Moving beyond biomimicry might also bring us closer to the type of Cyborg Urbanisation proffered by Matthew Gandy, an urban geographer with the Royal Academy of Arts in the UK. Matthew Gandy states that “If a cyborg is a ‘hybrid of machine and organism’ then ‘urban infrastructures can be conceptualised as a series of inter-connecting life-support systems’. By blurring the boundary between body and machine, as well as nature and culture, the concept of cyborg offers insights into the ‘networks that enable bodies to function in the modern city’ and how we might understand wider processes of urbanisation.” In Gandy’s lecture last year at the GSD he described our progressive understandings of the metropolis—the organic metaphors we used in the late 19th Century to the mechanical metaphors we used in the early 20th Century, and claims that understanding the city as a cyborg offers a new vocabulary for understanding urbanization. The work of many bioengineers, fusing organic and technological sciences, could deepen our understanding of what Cyborg Urbanisation is and its potential.

CONCLUSION
In the end the question that would probably need to be answered for people to want to invest in this type of collaboration is why is it necessary, what is there to gain from the joining of design and bioengineering? Material science, social organization, transcalar engineering, biomimicry, these are but a few of the potential areas of research that designers could benefit from by joining the interdisciplinary field of bioengineering. Creative approaches to problem solving, the development of new areas for research and application of materials and processes, a history of combining ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ sciences, the opportunity to think about bioengineering at larger scale of application and influence, and an invested interest in environmental and social concerns are things that architects could bring to the table. Most importantly, it is hard, in my opinion, to distinguish between the biological, social, and environmental influences on the world, on cities, and on individuals—they are all intricately interwoven. Doesn’t it behoove us to all work together?

Architecture of Mediation

2009-01-02T10:30:00.005+08:00

I was recently asked to contribute a piece for an upcoming issue of Urban China on Creative Industries edited by Ned Rossiter, Bert de Muynck, Mónica Carriço. The result, "An Architecture of Mediation", is now available online at orgnets. I believe the full issue, which I am really looking forward to reading, will be available quite soon.

The piece discusses "architecture as mediation" as a potential third position situated between disparate poles of architectural practice: complicity with the processes of globalization on the one hand an a reactionary critical regionalism on the other. In the article I tried to provide a theoretical background for this strategy (how it has emerged from these polarized conditions) and a few projects by Chinese architects that I think exemplify this strategy, including the work of Standard Architecture and Wang Shu, whose Hangzhou Academy of Art campus I have discussed previously. I have to admit that the piece was written quite hastily and the thoughts behind it are still nascent but hopefully promising. I think there is some resonance between these ideas and Mark Collins' post Iteration City.

Here is an excerpt from the article:

This irreconcilable opposition between progress and resistance, globalization and regionalism, avant-garde and arriere-garde, is the transitional space within which the architecture of mediation seeks to operate. Practitioners such as Wang Shu and Zhang Ke of China, Alejandro Aravena / ELEMENTAL of Chile, Hashim Sarkis of Lebanon, and Airoots in India, are all examples of this emerging position. It seeks to mediate between a number of dichotomous states – a project’s intended scale of influence, i.e. its global and local effects; the conflicting interests of participants, both explicit and implicit; top-down and bottom-up planning systems; formal and informal design processes; and rural and urban contexts, just to name a few.
...
Mediatory architecture is a complex undertaking and involves an expanded vision of architecture. It is a multi-disciplinary mission which involves communication, media, research, conflict management and design agency. It requires architects to be inventive, adaptive, responsive, opportunistic, active and reactive to complex scenarios. Alejandro Aravena’s concept of ELEMENTAL as a ‘do-tank’ reminds us that action is a necessary condition of mediation. Finally, mediatory architecture requires architects to negotiate the conflicting interests within particular situations.

See Previous:
Wang Shu's CAA 1
Wang Shu's CAA 2
Iteration City : More on Bottom Up

PHREE Accolades

2008-12-31T23:51:00.004+08:00

....Speaking of Jason King and his blog Landscape + Urbanism, I am delighted to find out that PHREE Urbanism made his year end top twelve for "New Idea for 2009". Thanks Jason!!

Now I'm feeling a little pressure...

Happy NYE and PHREE Update

2008-12-31T23:12:00.004+08:00

Hi Everyone,

Just a quick note here to say:

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

I know I have been lazy the last couple of weeks in providing posts and updates. I'm going to have to blame that on (a) holiday down time and reconnecting with the fam, (b) playing with and researching my new toys, and (c) my parents who, upon my arrival in the US for the holiday, promptly put me to work installing wood floors and flat screen TVs and the like, an apparently endless task. It's been a lot of fun though--haven't done much manual labor in the last few years and it reminds me about the responsibilities of being a full-fledged adult, something it seems I've been avoiding.

A short update on PHRWEE: thanks to Jason King's response to the series and his knack for editing acronyms, we have dropped the W and changed the name to PHREE (pronounced FREE) which is a lot catchier and likely to become the IT buzzword of 2009. PHREE Urbanism baby--that's how we'll roll in Twenty-Oh-Nine. BTW, while I am attempting to provide a synoptic view of the PHREE Urbanism movement, you should follow King's prodigious blogging output in order to see it unfold in real time.

I will be continuing the series in the next day or two, although I might slip something else in first, just to keep up the sense of anticipation...a dramatic pause, if you will.

In the meantime, have a great 2009!

PHREE_URB 04

2008-12-27T20:02:00.007+08:00

DESIGN STRATEGIES :: Overview

Finally, here it is. The moment we've all been waiting for. Throughout the past few posts I am sure you have been asking yourself "Geez, this Post-Humanist_ReWilded_Eco_Ethical_Urbanism stuff sounds really neat. How can I become a PHRWEE_Urbanist?" Well, here you are: The Top Six PHRWEEU Design Strategies.

1. From “Towers in the park” to “Tower IS the park.”

2. Get a Pet.

3. Fill the Void aka Green is the New BlaNk

4. Eat Your Home.

5. Start a flood.

6. If you can’t beat 'em, DESIGN 'em.

Over the next few days I will go through these strategies one-by-one, providing more in-depth descriptions, case studies and references for each.

PHREE_URB 03

2008-12-24T14:16:00.010+08:00

History + Theory 102

Bank of England, designed by John Soane, Aerial view by Joseph Gandy

Today we will be looking at Owen Hatherley’s “Living Facades – Green Urbanism and the Politics of Urban Offsetting,” in MONU’s Exotic Urbanism issue. It is a great article that takes a rather cynical viewpoint of the recent sustainable design efforts. His article is important for two reasons—to caution us of the appropriation of PHRWEEU imagery by governments and corporations to provide a positive public representation of their ‘eco-friendly’ actions (if they even exist in the first place), and to remind us that the history of “green” design goes back farther than most of our historical amnesia will allow us to remember.
Hatherley begins with an allegorical recount of the completely shocking and grotesque story of Josef Fritzel. It turns out that part of Fritzel’s positive public image was reinforced by the fact that he built and maintained his very own… roof garden!! In this introduction Hatherley succinctly summarizes the issue of using a green veneer as a political strategy (the Trojan 'Green' Horse of Strategic Engagement):

Although it is obviously crass to extrapolate from the life and inclinations of this inhuman character to the wider issues of ‘green’ urbanism, it does suggestively make a certain connection. On the surface we have a sign of civic-mindedness and environmentalism, and on the inside…we have an unimaginable barbarism.

Bank of England,designed by John Soane, rendering by Joseph Gandy

Hatherley then goes on to remind us that the concepts of green roofs, living facades, and vegitecture are not actually all that new. He points out that green roofs and living facades have actually been around since the days of Romanticism. He describes how architects during the Romantic period would design new buildings “as if they had always, already been overtaken by undergrowth, fronds, weeds cracking cement and stone. John Soane…commissioned the draughtsman Joseph Gandy to render his new Bank of England…as a crumbling, overgrown relic.” Hatherley then gives us an abridged history of how these concepts have infiltrated and evolved in architecture and literature over the last couple of centuries, including J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World, John Foxx’s The Quiet Man, and the exotic jungles of Brazilian LA Roberto Burle Marx, placed in direct contraposition to the hard-edged concrete edifices of early modernism.
From Hatherley’s article we can easily postulate a couple of questions Contemporary PHRWEEU practitioners will have to contend with as this burgeoning discipline defines itself. How is PHRWEEU different from these historical examples? How can it differentiate itself from the co-opted versions demonstrated in Hatherley’s argument of the political offsetting of sustainable design?
As for the questions about political offsetting, I think Hatherley makes a strong argument for rethinking the role of the ‘green’ in ‘green design.’ When speaking about the living facades now in vogue, Hatherley suggests that

this is a remarkable transparent semiotic strategy, wherein by sticking natural materials onto a building’s façade, the impression is given that it is somehow in tune with nature rather than a hugely expensive, unsustainable waste of energy and resources. It is by no means clear that renewable technology itself is so picturesque.

It reminds me of a recent comment on archinect which offered a critique of MVRDV’s latest competition winning entry regarding the weight of the soil and planting, the additional strain it will place on the buildings structure, and invoking Buckminster Fuller’s approach to highly efficient, materially minimal structures. These arguments bring up another question for PHRWEEUrbanists: in the end, which approach is more sustainable?

MVRDV - Gwangyo Power Center, via Bustler

For the question about history, I would argue that what is different with the new PHRWEEU compared to the architectural fantasies of the Romantics (which would later inspire Speer’s theory of the ruin-value of architecture) is that what is now sought are strategies of immediate nature, immediate wildness, and immediate ‘ruination’ (for the last point listen to Libeskind describe his latest skyscraper for New York). PHRWEEU is looking to coexist with the natural world and encourage positive productive benefits through increased diversity, instead of allowing ruination be a state that is returned to after we obtain our use-value from a structure and abandon it to entropic processes.

Tune in later this week for more from PHRWEEU. Until then, I look forward to hearing comments, criticisms, questions, and suggestions from all of you.

Best Wishes and Happy Holidays!

PHREE_URB 02

2008-12-19T10:01:00.007+08:00

Theory 101

While you can find a plethora of treatises regarding sustainable design, the more extreme form of PHRWEEU is an emerging phenomenon. Still, Post Humanist Rewilded Eco Ethical Urbanism is exhibited in many recent articles, projects, and competitions, which I am sure that you are all familiar with--probably much more so than me. There are two articles that I particularly want to discuss to provide a background of PHRWEEU: Stefano Boeri’s “Down From the Stand: Arguments in Favor of a Non-Anthropocentric Urban Ethics,” published in the first issue of New Geographies, which discusses a lot of the ideas floating around and the issues involved; and Owen Hatherly’s “Living Facades – Green Urbanism and the Politics of Urban Offsetting,” published in MONU’s Exotic Urbanism issue. In this post I will discuss Boeri’s article.

Boeri writes:

The support for a non-anthropocentric ethical outlook implies the application of a new idea of urbanity, seen as humanity located within a spatial context where cohabitation with the kaleidoscope of life is sought not a preordained hegemony of power. This implies an equal distribution of conditions linked to social mobility, experimentation with the cohabitation of different species, and building a different relationship with the components of the natural world. We need to think about an urban politics based on inclusion, which protects principles and values that affect the future of the whole planet and its ecosystems.

Boeri then goes on to describe three potential strategies for this new urban politics: re-naturalization of urban spaces, cohabitation with various animal species, and finally, to develop a new understanding of human relations which learn from these ideas of bio-diversity and bio-politics and deal with issues of globalization and increased diversity and social mobility. The first two strategies sum up what a lot of the projects that have inspired the idea of PHRWEEU—projects like Farmadelphia by Front Studio and City Zoo by Liam Young (Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today).

A key concept of Boeri’s article and these recent projects is the idea of rewilding, from the field of conservational biology. Wikipedia defines rewilding as “passive and active activities intended to result in the reintroduction of extirpated or once-native species back into natural landscapes.” A more extreme version of rewilding is called Pleistocene rewilding, the subject of a recent WIRED article. According to WIRED, “Today, the idea that you can use those same animals, or modern analogs like elephants and Przewalski's horses, to restore an ancient ecosystem is called rewilding, and it goes far beyond conservation. In theory, we could re-create conditions that last existed when mammoths walked the earth and the environment was healthier and more diverse.” Many PHRWEEU designs are looking to do just that—restore urban environments to their natural states by re-introducing flora and fauna to those ‘blighted’ areas.

Boeri’s last strategy is important to keep in mind—let’s make sure that the new PHRWEEU does not distract us from working to reduce the inequalities and injustices that still exist within the human race.

PHREE_URB 01

2008-12-19T09:02:00.006+08:00

What Humanism means to me is an expansion, not a contraction, of human life, an expansion in which nature and the science of nature are made the willing servants of human good.

John Dewey, What Humanism Means to Me

There is no denying the fact that we are entering a new design epoch. We have seen the zeitgeist, and it is green*. While just a couple of years ago you could still claim to not be interested in sustainable design these days those words would be considered blaspheme. Over the past several years a steady stream of design conjecture has given rise to a new design paradigm which attempts to recalibrate the (not so) delicate (im)balance between us (humans) and the rest of the world (everything that is not us or produced by us, but more than likely is probably consumed by us); an attempt to place us within the ecosystem rather than over it.
This demonstrates a much different attitude towards the world and our place in it than has previously been exhibited. According to John Dewey, the great American philosopher, humanism means bending nature to our will. This attitude prevailed during the last couple of centuries and has gotten us to the sorry state of affairs we have arrived at today. Global warming, peak oil, environmental degradation, mass extinction; the list goes on and on. Artists, architects, landscape architects, and urbanists have been rising to these challenges in a methodology that goes over and beyond mere sustainable design. Much like the radical shift in thought from a geocentric to a heliocentric model this means a displacement of humans from the center of the design and development ethos (or at least a sharing of the center?). Over the next few posts I will look at the theoretical underpinnings and various strategies of this new movement, which I am calling:

POST HUMANIST REWILDED ECO ETHICAL URBANISM
(PHREE_U)

More catchy than “sustainable”, right?

*Why green? Why not blue, or white? Are vibrant blue skies and crisp white snow capped peaks also not important?

Mines || The Last Frontier?

2008-12-11T23:18:00.012+08:00

Diavik Mine, Canada, via NPR

It's hard not to look at a photograph of a mine and get inspired. Well, maybe mortified as well, but, yes, somehow strangely inspired. Maybe it is the megastructuralist that lies within...I mean, look at these images of Diavik Mine in Canada, featured in an NPR article today. They look like a land_art-megastructuralists wet dream: a massive earthen superstructure just waiting to be infilled, modulated, and plugged-in. Actually, if you flip through Justus Dahinden's Urban Structures for the Future, many of the projects resemble the mine's not so subtle topographic deformations (both innies and outties). Take Chaneac's Crater City for example. It is basically a series of man-made mines served straight up.

Chaneac's Crater City (1968) via Athens 9

Of course the catastrophic transformation of the earth's surface that occurs as a result of mining's processes are awesome, surreal, and sublime. NPR's article says that to create the Diavik Mine they "had to drain a lake and then build a 2.5-mile dike in order to create an open-pit mine." I am reminded of John McPhee's passage in Assembling California which describes the rapid progression of mining technology in California, from pan handling to hydraulic sluice mining, and how drastically it transformed the landscape:

As the mine tailings travel in floods, they thicken stream beds and fill valleys with hundreds of feet of gravel. In their bleached whiteness these gravels will appear to be lithic glaciers for a length of time on the human scale that might as well last forever. In a year and a half, hydraulic mining washes enough material into the Yuba River to fill the Erie Canal...Broad moonscapes of unvegetate stream-rounded rubble conceal the original land.

The NPR article says that "The Canadian government has stringent environmental controls and required precise details about how the mining will affect the wildlife and the countryside. Diamond companies also have to show how they're going to close their mines safely even before they're open." (emphasis mine) That is an interesting fact for artists and architects interested in intervening on such a large scale. Land Artists such as Robert Smithson come to mind, as well as Landscape Architects such as Alan Berger's Drosscapes and Shlomo Aronson's Negev Phosphate Works. Smithson once said that

the world needs coal and highways, but we do not need the results of stip-mining or highway trusts...art can become a resource, that mediates between the ecologist and the industrialist.

Mirny Diamond Mine, Serbia, via Reformers and Puritans

How else can we envision the use and renewal of the industrial process of mining? I'm interested in learning more about this, so if you know of any interesting examples please let me know. One thought that comes to mind relates to my earlier comments about megastructures. Since there is actually a lot of mining and quarrying takes place in urban and suburban areas, can we envision the possibility of creating new geographies of domestic occupation?

Herbert Bayer, drawing of Mill Creek Canyon

Herbert Bayers' drawings for his Mill Creek Canyon earthwork offer a poetic vision of the prosaic operation of cut-and-fill tht could offer a solution. How about taking the excavated earth and create new urban topographies? We could vastly increase our inhabitable surface with this technique. Take a look again at the Diavik mine photos--each step in that mine is 100 feet tall, tall enough for a 7-10 story building. Start by constructing a habitable mountain from the refuse as the mine is excavated and then once the mine is tapped, fill it in and create a light-filled subterranean city. In the end maybe it would look something like this.

What Buildings Make You Want to Jump?

2008-12-11T22:48:00.005+08:00

Ever wish that buildings would just move a little more? Instead of picking up a gun why not just come at it with the parallax attack? Do like the traceurs and turn buildings into your own artful obstacle course and maybe that will do the trick. I know parkour has been around for a while so I'm not introducing anything new, but the video I just found on JDS' blog of people jumping all over PLOT's Mountain Dwellings in Copenhagen is pretty entertaining so I want to share it with all of you.

It also made me think that maybe architects should join other professions and come up with a new useless statistic, say an annual "Top Ten Buildings that make you want to Trace, Climb, or Jump."

So now I ask all of you: What buildings most inspire you to jump, crawl, climb, tace, run, walk, or dance on them?

EcoCity Policy Study :: China - United States

2008-12-09T23:14:00.003+08:00

Source: Green Leap Forward

From ecocity media I learned that the US and Chinese governments are teaming up to do a ten year study on EcoCity Policy, or Ten Year Energy and Environment Cooperation, as they call it.

Part of the agreement includes the creation of strategic EcoPartnerships between US and Chinese corporations and academic institutions:

Building upon the announcement made at SED IV, the United States and China signed the Framework for EcoPartnerships under the Ten Year Framework, aimed at developing new models for energy security, economic sustainability, and environmental sustainability in both countries. The following seven initial EcoPartnerships were announced:
- Energy Future Holdings Corp. and China Huadian Corporation;
- Denver, Colorado, USA, Ford Motor Company and Chongqing, China, Changan Auto Group Corporation;
- Wichita, Kansas, USA and Wuxi, Jiangsu, China;
- Floating Windfarms Corporation and Tangshan Caofeidian New Development Area, Hebei, China
- Port of Seattle, Washington, USA and Dalian Port Corporation, Liaoning, China;
- Greensburg, Kansas, USA and Mianzhu, Sichuan, China; and
- Tulane University and East China Normal University (ECNU).

Specifically regarding EcoCities, the agreement states:
The United States, through the Department of Energy, and the People's Republic of China, through the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Construction, agreed to conduct an EcoCity policy study, strengthen capacity building, promote science and technology development, and design an EcoCity demonstration project under the Ten Year Framework;
(emphasis mine)

hmmm...I wonder how I can get on board to help design the EcoCity demonstration project...that sounds awesome!

Utzon

2008-11-30T15:33:00.004+08:00

Jorn Utzon, designer of the Sydney Opera House and recipient of the Pritzker Prize, passed away over the weekend. One of the 20th Century's greatest architects, who unfortunately was not able to build as much as we would have liked, will surely be missed. But his grace, passion, experimental nature, and sensitivity will persevere through his wonderful masterpieces.

Bagsvaerd Church, Jorn Utzon. Photo by Ole Robin via Flickr

28

2008-11-27T10:58:00.001+08:00

What are/were/will you be doing at age 28?

Some people* were making one of the greatest albums in the history of ROCK, pushing their creativity to the limits, expanding their craft, impacting the lives of millions of people for 40+ years….

….and all I’m doing is writing this shoddy blog…humbling...

*actually, George was only 25…and he wrote ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’!!! That’s like…rock god status material!!!

ECOTRANSITIONAL URBANISM

2008-11-25T00:24:00.010+08:00

Jorge Ayala, Aerial View

From Jorge Ayala, a student in the AA’s Landscape Urbanism Unit, comes a project exploring ecotourism in China’s Pearl River Delta. The project, like most work from the AALU, is beautifully illustrated, diagrammed, and modeled. The AALU has developed amazing techniques for representing the various complexities of a site’s urban and ecological phenomena, kind of like Ian McHarg on steroids.
It is great to see a studio focused on these issues for that region of China. One of the biggest issues confronting China is the process of 'rurbanization', due to the "New Socialist Village" mandate from Hu Jintao. There need to be more innovative scenarios for how this process can take place and be more beneficial to both the people and places that are effected by this transition. The LU's process of intense ecological analysis is imperative for creating a better understanding of how to intervene. The key will be how we come to understand the complexities uncovered and develop strategies for projection and intervention.

Here is Ayala’s project description:

ECOTRANSITIONAL URBANISM, Pearl River Delta, China

JORGE AYALA
The project, located on a 27 square kilometer island called Qi Ao located in the Pearl River Delta, has the potential to become a gateway for Hong Kong/Shenzhen due to its strategic location and the increasing passenger flows through it. The site is threatened to become another generic Chinese urbanization that spread across farmlands and rural life. Thus the signs of scarcity of water resources, deforestation, fish farming and industrial pollution are already present.
Based on the Landscape Urbanism emergent discipline, the city proposal seeks to establish an eco-tourism strategy that embraces the existing site and its natural energies such as tidal variations, local mangroves and seasonal rainfall to assure the viability and sustainability of the island.

On Ayala’s blog he publishes a fascinating discussion between two AA critics and himself, which simultaneously validates and questions the work of the AALU. I bring this up not to discuss the work of Ayala, which is obviously quite thought provoking and skillfully executed, but to further the discussion of LU and also some concerns that I have voiced previously here on _URB_. One critic, ‘Rob’, questions the special brand of formalism being developed in the AALU and his quote reminds Alexander Tzonis’ article “The Last Identity Crisis of Architecture,” (although one would wonder if he would still think it was the last 40 years later), when Tzonis states that “the misdirected central thrust of the academic community is responsible in the schools of architecture …for engaging students into a futile game of perpetuating and perfecting arbitrary…hows without questioning the whys of their discipline…”
I am not trying to say that the LU does not have good whys to go along with their hows, but one thing I would question in the end is the typically diagrammatic level of the final designs and how they actually operate in relation to the incredible data sets uncovered in the initial process. The data itself is developed into such visually stunning diagrams that I wonder if there is a tendency to suffer from a form of what Tzonis calls “paralysis through over-analysis”, leading to an inability to transform the data into productive interventions. To close, here is ‘Rob’s’ side of the debate (more detailed images of Ayala's project after the quote):

Much of the work of the landscape urbanists strikes me as essentially a formal game, which we designers play to amuse ourselves. That is, there is a set of rules (determined in part by the professional history of landscape/architecture and planning and in part by developments in contemporary European philosophy, particularly Derrida, Foucault, and Deleuze), a limited set of players, and a limited set of interested parties (those with sufficient training in the previously mentioned disciplines to appreciate the ways in which the actions of the players subvert the rules of the game). Most importantly, though, the game does not intersect reality (that is what a game is – an exercise which imitates but does not intersect reality). Typologies are generated, ecologies are analyzed, but cities are not changed, much less reorganized to accommodate ecological processes. The work of AALU typically strikes me as possessing only the formal characteristics of a diagram; data filtered through algorithms and passed off as innovative by virtue of its alien formal qualities. This is the return of the artist's obsession with form, robbed of their devotion to creating meaningful places. Meanwhile, the concern for ecology and process is reduced to a passing nod, a diagram that proclaims the designer concerned with ecology, without requiring the design to be altered in significant ways to accommodate that concern for ecology. Obviously, this concern could be allayed with further explanation of how "tidal variations, local mangroves, and seasonal rainfall" are embraced by the design. I worry, though, (based on previous impressions of AALU), that these (wonderful) concerns might only intersect the design when a set of data points is needed to generate a form, and fail to inform the design at a deeper level. While adapting form to data is an interesting exercise and, in the hands of skilled folks such as AALU, generates beautiful drawings and renderings, it merely exchanges one kind of formalism (the modernist variety) for another kind (the landscape urbanist variety). A better post-modern urbanism, I think, would be one that is concerned not just with adapting the forms of urbanism to data, but the processes - a much, much more difficult task...
(emphasis mine)

Material Formations

note: all images are the work of Jorge Ayala. A very special thank you to him for notifying me about the project and for allowing me to publish it here on _URB_.

_urb_ Updates :: 21 November

2008-11-21T11:57:00.000+08:00

Some of my photos of Wang Shu’s Central Academy of Art project in Hangzhou are featured in archidose’s A Weekly Dose of Architecture.

I also want to point out that the excellent post Iteration City was written by Mark Collins of Proxy, who is working with Urban Think Tank and the Columbia GSAPP Slum Lab. If you are interested in the issues brought up in the discussion you should check out more of their work and the publication Informal Toolbox about the work they are doing in Sao Paolo. Let’s hope Mark contributes more in the future!!

I wrote a piece recently discussing similar issues but from a different viewpoint called Architecture of Mediation for an upcoming issue of Urban China which I will post here once the magazine is published. For me mediatory architecture is a form of practice that seeks to negotiate the transitional space between diametrically opposed issues of globalization and regionalism, progress and resistance, first and third worlds, and avant-garde and arriere-garde positions. I hope to expand upon this line of thought in the future. What I find interesting about Proxy’s work in ‘critical urban areas’ is their use of advanced computational design and information management to innovate in this unchartered territory of practice and helping bridge the gap between spiked and flat descriptions of the global economy.

Iteration City, more on bottom-up

2008-11-18T22:59:00.012+08:00

[This post is in response to Elemental and Are we ready for bottom up?]

Can we, as architects, sitting on a peak of professionalism and 'expertise', meaningfully inject ourselves into bottom-up processes?

Our own vantage point suggests that we can, but the negotiation is fraught with contradictions and assumptions. Bottom up means complexity, diverse conceptions of space and use, contradictory motives, opportunism that can verge on the self destructive. To be bottom up is to forgoe the sense of morality and 'consensus' that architecture depends on - instead one must act opportunistically, to make alliances with other opportunists.

Surveying Paraisopolis, a hillside slum in Sao Paulo

Take the circumstance of the Brazilian favela, typical of the majority of unplanned urbanism in its dense, ad-hoc construction and lack of infrastructure. These are 'critical urban areas' - so named by the Sao Paulo architect Hector Vigliecca, who believes the stigma of the word 'slum' is one of the means in which these zones are marginalized. The favela of Paraisopolis, embedded within the fashionable Morumbi district of Sao Paulo, developed rapidly in the 90's, both because of its resilience to massive influxes of population as well as its ability to create a *credible* and even attractive lifestyle to many upwardly mobile citizens. Far from being a monoculture of poverty, the favela's of Sao Paulo are economically diverse - alongside the expected swell of the rural immigrants you can find bussinessmen and students, even the owner of Brazil's largest appliance producer. The favela is most striking in its phsyical characteristics more-so than its demographics - as all construction takes place in a legal void, ad-hoc construction, DIY engineering and chaotic spatial planning govern. The farbic, in its unceasing invention and novelty, can create flexibility and ineffiency in equal parts, unmitigated beauty as well as saddening neglect.

Scheme for Paraisopolis, Hector Vigliecca

Paraisopolis through time, satellite images. From 'Informal Toolbox'

Most bottom up processes are resilient - they self-heal, self-regulate. This is true from physiology up to eco-systems. Self-built slums have their own cycle of catastrophe and healing, usually brought on by over-building or land-slides. The wreckage of older homes becomes the foundation for the new - subsequent clearing and excavation can reveal several meters of construction debris creating a kind of artificial mound. Overbuilding can result in distaster, as foundations are not implemented to support it. The city is constantly being built up and falling down. Despite the density the hillside suggests, the slum sprawls - there is redudancy everywhere. A thin encrustation of building envelops the hill, implicitly hardscaping the terrain. Water runoff is an issue everywhere; sewers, if present, overflow into the streets and ground floors. Residents cope through a variety of mechanisms, including their own ingenuity. Networks of PVC pipes interconnect roofscapes, re-directing problematic flows to the next patch of land.

Statistical view of Paraisopolis, from 'Informal Toolbox'

Our colleagues Urban Think Tank like to think of the hill-side settlements as a hill of houses, a literal interconnected mound of construction. This mental slight-of-hand can be helpful when imagining this complex urbanism as an integrated whole - its articulation, as highly individual 'shacks', is misleading. Some slum dwellers live between several houses, moving through sliver courtyards between small homes, sometimes living in the inbetween spaces - one finds hanging laundry, children playing. Alternately, a grouping of houses can be knit together - an articulated exterior hides a highly integrated interior. These homes are most readily identified not by their morphology, but rather the gates that embelish their entrances.

So what is an architect to do in the face of this plurality and dynamism?

Slum 'upgrading', as it is understood by municipalities across the world, is about infrastructure. Sao Paulo has been extremely aggresive in introducing electrical metering, road construction, sewage channeling and other infrastructural efforts to alleviate the ill-effects of overcrowding and unplanned growth. These efforts were highlighted in a recent 'Global Dialogue', which brought together representatives from governments in China, India (Mumbai), Egypt (Cairo), Kenya (Nairobi). Sao Paulo's methodologies were hailed as the standard bearer for slum upgrading and each delegate seemed to suggest that it could serve as a template for urban remediation in their own locality.

But what about the space? Infrastructure upgrades invariably mean demolition, wich means relocation. Sao Paulo's response has been zero-degree public housing. Its unforunate, since it is the last stage in a herculian effort of social work which has produced the richest archive of information related to large scale slum inhabitation (for those interested, the city's online GIS system can be accessed at http://www.habisp.inf.br/gethtml/inicial/inicial.htm).

At the Slum Lab, we have identified three modalities of approaching the slum, each of which can be engaged in in parallel, continuing within the framework of opportunism. One can sense the need for preservation, albeit frustrated by the slum's insistence on continual self-transformance. We have engaged in attempts to record the spatial characteristics of the favela, through photo, video, 3d models and data sets. You can approach the slum as a researcher and look to formulate hypothesis and construct models. That is our preferred modality at Proxy - we are foremost interested in architecture as an informational medium. Finding connections between emergent morphology and the myriad variables of sociability, financing, politics and physical circumstance is a deep project, which is made more substantial by the availability of new data and more capable software (software that speeks specifically to the 'bottom-up'). Lastly, the slum is a place of architectural intervention and invention. It must not only act in unconventional ways, but it must do unconventional things. By necessity, infrastructure, community and sustainability invest projects with a moral compass while the challenges of geography frustrate normative designs. These are interesting places for creative minds to work and experiment - especially given the void of conventional practices - but it means coming to terms with 'bottom up', whether through grudging co-existance or synergistic opportunism.

Slum Growth Models, from 'Informal Toolbox'

The 'Informal Toolbox' is edited by Proxy and Urban Thank Tank, presenting strategies for slum upgrading and the discourse that accompanies these tactics. It is published by the Cidade de São Paulo. For availability, contact Mark, email: mark at proxyarch.com

Unremitting Gloom = Major Bummer

2008-11-17T18:31:00.000+08:00

Here I am, enjoying my Monday, getting my week off to a good start when I open up the China Daily website and discover:

UNREMITTING GLOOM AND CAPITAL FLIGHT AWAIT NEW WEEK.

Damn! That sucks! Well, here’s to looking forward to next week then…let’s just hope there’s something to be thankful for.

ELEMENTAL on Dezeen

2008-11-13T10:48:00.000+08:00

In a recent post I mentioned Alejandro Aravena’s group ELEMENTAL and their project for social housing in Chile. Dezeen just posted a series of images of the project on their website.

Along with the images is a nice short text, outlining Aravena’s concept of ELEMENTAL as a “DO-TANK”, rather than the typical “think-tank” that has become so popular in recent years (also known as LABs in some architecture schools). Of course architecture will needs more of both do-tanks and think-tanks and I think we will see a growing interest in self-initiated design and research projects in the coming years.

Here are Elemental’s three points (quoted from Dezeen):

To think, design and build better neighborhoods, housing and the necessary urban infrastructure to promote social development and overcome the circle of poverty and inequity of our cities;
In order to trigger a relevant qualitative leap-forward, our projects must be built under the same market and policy conditions than any other, working to achieve “more with the same”.
By quality we understand projects whose design guarantees incremental value and returns on investment over time, in order to stop considering it a mere “social expense”.

I think I mentioned before, but just in case I left it out, what I find fascinating about this project is the combination of top-down and bottom-up design systems. The Elemental housing initially builds a kind of existenz minimum series of row houses which create a framework that can be filled in as the inhabitants obtain the material and financial means to do so. The initial construction sets up an urban spatial framework as well as a solid material foundation for the expansion of the homes. This strategy seeks to counteract two of the main problems of traditional slum settlements—problems of super high density and over crowding, and faulty construction which leads to unsafe structures (easily collapsible and flammable).

Al Gore's OP-ED

2008-11-10T11:11:00.002+08:00

Al Gore's op-ed in the New York Times echoes a lot of my recent feelings regarding the economic and looming ecological crises we are facing today, albeit wrapped up in a much more eloquent and succint package than I could ever hope to achieve.

Opening with a great argument for change (word of the year!) and plea for a strategic investment in sustainable infrastructure, he follows with a five point plan (the packages pretty bow that wraps it up nice and neat) outlining his agenda.

Here are some of the juicy tidbits:

THE inspiring and transformative choice by the American people to elect Barack Obama as our 44th president lays the foundation for another fateful choice that he — and we — must make this January to begin an emergency rescue of human civilization from the imminent and rapidly growing threat posed by the climate crisis.
...
Here is the good news: the bold steps that are needed to solve the climate crisis are exactly the same steps that ought to be taken in order to solve the economic crisis and the energy security crisis.
...
Here’s what we can do — now: we can make an immediate and large strategic investment to put people to work replacing 19th-century energy technologies that depend on dangerous and expensive carbon-based fuels with 21st-century technologies that use fuel that is free forever: the sun, the wind and the natural heat of the earth.

I encourage you to read the rest for his 5 point plan and more great rhetorical skills.

Towards a GeoURBanism

2008-11-10T01:01:00.002+08:00

”The highways crisscross through the towns and become man-made geological networks of concrete. In fact, the entire landscape has a mineral presence. From the shiny chrome diners to glass windows of shopping centers, a sense of the crystalline prevails.”
Robert Smithson, The Crystal Land

Since my posts on Geo-mimicry a while back I’ve been thinking that the concepts of geo-mimicry and the “new geographies” could be combined into a full-fledged geoURBanism. I have been thinking that because geo-mimicry, at least in the formalist incarnation adopted by most designers, is too limited an approach to apply to every design problem. The combination of the two would open up designers to a more fulfilling repertoire of techniques and devices for researching, understanding, and designing buildings and cities.

GeoURBanism, in this nascent stage, has four basic tenets:

Design as geology :: imitation of the processes and forms of geological systems and geological formations, such as geomorphology.

Design as geography :: the setting up of relationships that enable a deeper understanding of a particular location or the world.

Designers* as geologists :: Develop an understanding of a given situation through its dynamic processes of formation; its microscopic structure; and its stratification.

Designers* as geographers :: Develop an understanding of a given situation through its territorial relationships; its topography; the precise dimensions of things as they exist.

The last two points are hard for me to define in a bullet point and as I have been thinking about them the only way to distinguish them from one another is through a kind of dialectical approach, meaning that my understanding of one primarily came about through contrasting it with the other. Here are some of my initial thoughts:

A geographical approach is concerned with the present condition as it currently exists on the ground. It uses techniques of cartography and aerial photography to describe a context from the top down. It is concerned with surface, topography, relationships between objects and themselves and the landscape, and precise dimensions.
A geological approach will want to explain how a condition came to its present state: where do phenomena come from, what forces (global and local) caused it to come about. It examines dynamic forces, processes, tensions, movement, time and history from the bottom up—it begins with the micro structure (i.e. crystals/minerals) and works out. I think it would be more topological than topographic, more dynamic (i.e. fluvial systems) than static.

Questions I still have are how does a geological understanding of a place differ from a geographical understanding? How does a geological project differ from a geographical project? If you have any thoughts please leave some comments!!
Obviously the difficulty in differentiating the two come from the intense overlap in the two fields, at least as they relate to architecture and urbanism, creating a Venn diagram where the overlap is the most substantial portion. Perhaps actual geologists and geographers would be appalled at the idea of overlap—not knowing either a geographer or a geologist I’m not sure how much turf-ism there is in the two fields. I also think that designers and researchers, as I mentioned in the opening paragraph, need to utilize the techniques implied from each field to gain a more rich and nuanced understanding of the condition that is being intervened upon.
Ok…more to come.
Note: All images above from The Collected Writings of Robert Smithson, and are the work of Smithson. Smithson's SITES and NON-SITES are inspiration for geoURBanism and examples of potential techniques for new forms of research, analysis, and design.
*I have a hard time defining myself as you may have noticed, and sometimes use architect, other times use urban designer, and other times urbanist. For this piece, and probably from now on, I have substituted designer as a catchall for all design disciplines: architecture, urban design/planning, landscape architecture, etc.

Image Impotency

2008-11-09T11:37:00.003+08:00

The op-ed that I published on archinect is a condensed version of the original essay which went into more details about why I think architectural imagery has reached a low point in recent years. I wanted to keep the editorial short and positive. Here is the part that I cut out on the recent impotent imagery of architecture:

Architecture is currently experiencing an unprecedented exposure in mass media. Television, newspapers, and particularly the internet inundate us with a continuous onslaught of architectural imagery. At the moment that the production and consumption of architectural images has reached its most prolific point in history it has simultaneously achieved its maximum impotency. To me this has occurred for three primary reasons. First, the desire for increased shock and spectacle and the focus on icons has lead to the creation of architectural caricatures, which, while we can sit and pray for the icon endgame there appears to be none in sight. This is a discussion that has existed for decades, if not longer, and was probably most poetically debated by Walter Benjamin and Theodore Adorno in their correspondences of the 1930s so I will refer you to them for further reading. This point is more related to a discussion on the symbolic and representational nature of the architectural object itself, and I prefer in this text to discuss the images themselves.

On that note, the first reason for architectural imagery’s increased impotence is the architect’s loss of control over image quality and content to clients and marketing groups who want to insure the marketability, 'originality', and inoffensive nature of their architectural products, with many projects remaining confidential until their official ‘launch date’. The second, in my opinion, is the giving up of the image production itself to rendering companies, such as dbox, Auralab, and Crystal CG, which has lead to the corporatization and homogenization of architectural images. In my opinion we as a profession our misusing this unprecedented access to the media and it is time to reconsider the role of the image and its potential efficacy.

Public Images of Architecture (Archinect OP-ED)

2008-11-09T11:13:00.003+08:00

I was recently asked by archinect editor Nam Handerson to write an op-ed piece. The op-ed, titled The Public Image(s) of Architecture, is now published on their website.

The argument is that one of the key ways for architects to become involved in politics is to create images that communicate potential scenarios for particular political, social, cultural, and/or environmental issues. It also argues that now is a great moment for designers to become involved in politics and help steer conversations regarding potential public works agendas that may come about as part of the economic recovery. How can we argue that economic recovery be more than just a bailout for those companies that are failing and that it can be an opportunity to re-invest in public needs such as infrastructure, affordable housing, education, sustainable practices, etc.?

Since people are looking for change, let's provide the images that can provoke the spirit of how that change can manifest itself in the physical environment.

The op-ed is purposely ambiguous on the nature of what the images can be, in content and form, because I think that they can be almost anything--utopian, dystopian (as a way of demonstrating what could happen if the status quo continues), and can operate at any scale--be it your street, your neighborhood, your city, your nation, or our world.

Edible Architecture 3

2008-11-04T21:42:00.002+08:00

Pizza Hut with Chinese Characteristics

Ok…truth be told, I’m one of those people that eat when I get nervous…not that there’s much to be nervous about right now…but anyways, yeah, I love to eat food, look at food, talk about food, or even just blog about food.*

And when I can discuss food together with my second favorite subject, architecture, well…man, that’s even better! Which explains the abundance of food commentary in this and the last post.

One of the things that I love about living in a new country is watching the translation of culture from one country to another. Thankfully China has provided plenty of this during the past year that I have lived here. Sadly, the majority of this is observing the transformation of America’s fast food culture as it gets repackaged for Chinese consumers. Imagine my pleasant surprise to show up at Pizza Hut and find that people have subversively transformed that great American tradition, the salad bar, into a performance art piece of epic architectural proportions.

There exist two primary reasons for this succulent mutation. First, when Pizza Hut first opened in China it was quite expensive compared to traditional Chinese restaurants. Therefore entire extended families would show up to Pizza Hut and order just one bowl of salad which required that some member of the family go up and chock that bowl as full of yummy goodness as possible. From then it turned into a mini-competition, which is the second reason for the mutation—the competition became popular, especially among young friends and couples. How tall, how beautiful, how diverse, and how tasty can you make your Pizza Hut salad?

The parameters are clear: in all of China only one size and shape of salad bowl is served at Pizza Hut. Therefore the site constraints are regulated at a national level. From there the only laws governing the procedure are the laws of physics: How tall can you make your salad tower without it falling over? How heavy can you make it and still safely transport it back to your table? I have seen people bring multiple friends to the salad bar to help mobilize their formerly static salad skyscrapers.

The architectural comparisons are pretty straightforward. Economic, structural, and aesthetic concerns drive the design and critique of these culinary creations. Only this time aesthetics do not appeal only to the sense of sight but are expanded to the senses of taste and smell as well.

One day I hope to have an skyscraper salad challenge between some of the architecture offices in Beijing...if that happens, I’ll be sure to post some images here on _URB_

*I don’t really need to get nervous to have an excuse to eat, I just through that in for literary effect.

See Previous:
Edible Architecture 2
Edible Architecture 1

Edible Architecture 2

2008-11-04T19:47:00.000+08:00

Top :: The model cake being completed

Middle :: The cake compared to the model. Exactly 1:1000!!

Bottom :: The best part…eating the cake!

Since there is not much going on today I thought I would fill the void with a little story of human interest.

Last Friday was my project manager’s last day in the office. To celebrate his departure he bought himself a cake…in the shape of our project. Solid bars of chocolate stacked in a hexagonal pattern floating over a landscape of rich butter icing. Ever the minimalist, the icing bore no words, no salutations or celebratory remarks, but rather was engraved with the regulating geometry of our project: the hexagonal grid.

See previous: Edible Architecture

National Mobility

2008-11-04T00:56:00.003+08:00

David Brooks has written an article for the International Herald Tribune advocating a "national mobility project", which, although poorly defined in his article, seems to be based on updating and increasing the United States' highway infrastructure, particularly when he says "Major highway projects take about 13 years from initiation to completion - too long to counteract any recession. But at least they create a legacy that can improve the economic environment for decades to come."

While I am sympathetic to Brooks' idea for an 'mobility project' it is hard for me to agree with his suggestion that the investment be in highway infrastructure and not on public transit or some other eco-friendly infrastructures.

Brooks writes that:

Moreover, an infrastructure resurgence is desperately needed. Americans now spend 3.5 billion hours a year stuck in traffic, a figure expected to double by 2020. The U.S. population is projected to increase by 50 percent over the next 42 years. American residential patterns have radically changed. Workplaces have decentralized.

Commuting patterns are no longer radial, from suburban residences to central cities. Now they are complex weaves across broad megaregions. Yet the infrastructure system hasn't adapted.

What Brooks' fails to mention is that the creation of highway infrastructure, along with post-WWII efforts to decentralize our cities (as much a defense measure as an opportunity to build up the fledgling tract housing and automobile industries), are not merely a symptom of the mutation of commuting patterns but one of the major causes of this mutation.

In Europe many countries, the Netherlands being a prime example, have been able to better control the expansion of cities through the planning of excellent national rail systems. While a system like that in the Netherlands would be difficult to implement in a country the size of the US a series of regional rail systems (maybe those same megaregions mentioned above) might be possible with the type of investment that Mr. Brooks suggests. At least we could invest more in intensifying rail and bus systems in those cities that sorely lack it and decrease the gulf of inequality that mobility, or the lack thereof, creates.

The creation of these regional rail systems could potentially change our current patterns of conurbation as much as the creation of the automobile networks did 50 years ago. This is perhaps overly naive, but it never hurts to dream. And if given the opportunity to dream such dreams this time we can try to learn from our mistakes, make better predictions through increasingly accurate models and simulations, and create a mobility infrastructure that is both more socially and ecologically sustainable than our present one.

Design Sheets

2008-11-02T21:58:00.004+08:00

I recently put together some 'design sheets', kind of a mini-portfolio, which I thought I would share with you. This is only a small sampling of the work so it is difficult to get a full picture of each project, but here it goes. Click on each image for an enlarged view.PAGE 1 :: This is from my thesis project which explored strategies for intensifying intermodal exchange points of the public transit system in Atlanta, GA. The project looked at three typical conditions in the transit network, which I called primary, secondary, and tertiary node types depending on the sites geographic location in the metropolis, the transit intensity and territorial scale, and the context's density and programmatic mix. The specific sites were chosen based on current proposals for Atlanta's transit system, including a new downtown multi-modal transit hub, the Beltway light-rail proposal, and a series of BRT suburban shuttles. These images are from the proposal for the downtown site, one of the few primary nodes in the city.

PAGE 2 :: The project at the top is a housing project which developed a series of vertical strata which reacted to the contextual and programmatic contingencies: a landscape/parking/townhouse layer that dealt with the sites extreme topography and housing's need for a layered sequence of private, semi-private, and public spaces; a slab condition which creates the required density and a complex assortment of apartment types; and a series of twisted towers that creates an iconic 'skyline' for the project's lakefront site.
The middle project is a group project with my boys Penn and JJ for a bus station in Zacatecas Mexico. The project explored fabric formed concrete, new forms that could be made with this process and fabrication techniques. For the form we developed a series of hollow-core column types that would perform as both structure and as a sustainable infrastructure support system for the project, such as cisterns, gray water filtration, planters, solar energy collection, lightwells, ventilation etc.
The bottom project is series of ceilings that explore digital fabrication and design.

PAGE 3 :: The top project is a courthouse in Allston, MA.
The middle project is at Sirkeci Station in Istanbul where the new tunnel going under the Bosphorous Strait would connect the European and Asian sides of Istanbul. The design begins by redesigning the highway, creating a roundabout that connects the various transit types (water ferry, train, and car) by taxi for fast connections that forms a large public square in the center of the roundabout. A variety of programs were added to further intensify the site such as theatres, a hotel, restaurants, and a market under the raised highway to mitigate the effects of the road.
The bottom project is for a satellite campus of a junior college in the greater Boston area. The site is a big box retail parking lot and the design again involves redesigning the road network to break down the nebulous site structure into a more manageable geography. A series of hybrid buildings were designed to engage the new road system and develop symbiotic relationships between the academic institution and more public and/or commercial institutions to engage the community and leverage financial investments.

Megastructure Definitions

2008-10-28T23:41:00.003+08:00

As an appendix to the previous post I thought it would be interesting to add the remaining points of Wilcoxon's definition:

...not only a structure of great size by...also a structure which is frequently:
1 :: constructed of modular units;
2 :: capable of great or even 'unlimited' extension;
3 :: a structural framework into which smaller structural units (for example, rooms, houses, or small buildings of other sorts) can be built – or even plugged-in or clipped-on, having been prefabricated elsewhere;
4 :: a structural framework expected to have a useful life much longer than that of the smaller units which it might support.

Banham's introduction also features other definitions:
Kenzo Tange (1964)
"Mega-structure is a large frame in which all the functions of a city or part of a city are housed. It has been made possible by present day technology. In a sense it is a man-made feature of a landscape. It is like the great hill on which Italian towns were built."
Justus Dahindian
"Urban Structures for the future"

Archigram's Plug-In City, prototypical Megastructure, via archinect

Are we really ready for the "Bottom Up"?

2008-10-28T22:50:00.009+08:00

On Bottom Up Design, Megastructures, and City Regeneration

A few weeks ago I was at a client meeting for the residential project I am currently working on and the conversation aimlessly wandered over to discuss the possibility that future residents might desire to construct various appendages and outcroppings on the exterior of our yet-to-be-realized building. The topic was generally met with a large amount of eye-rolling and grumbling and a discussion on whether or not we can avoid it and if not what strategies we can take to mitigate the potential damage this uncouth display of individuality and customization might reek upon our great edifice. The landscape architect wanted to make an equally damaging comparison so he said something to the effect of “if you let them do whatever you want it will end up looking like the Golden Mile complex—this slanting 60s behemoth where everyone built their own structure on the outside—it looks like a shanty town!” At this everyone simultaneously shuddered and silently exclaimed “NO! Not the Golden Mile!” Everyone that is, except me. I thought it sounded cool and I couldn’t wait to get to my desk and do a flickr search.

Golden Mile Complex - Singapore - via Jonolist on flickr

What I found, well, did not exactly live up to my expectation. I had expected something truly amazing from the description and everyone’s reaction. Something more akin to the favela’s of Sao Paolo. But it wasn’t so bad. Maybe this has something to do with Singapore and their low tolerance for unruliness. More than anything, it revealed to me that maybe architects aren’t as ready for bottom up design as I had thought.

Golden Mile Complex - Singapore - via Jonolist on flickr

Golden Mile is representative of that class of building demonized a few decades ago but quickly gaining wide acceptance once again—the Megastructure. Few megastructures were ever actually built. Singapore might be home to half of all the specimens we can still examine. Safdie built a megastructure in Singapore. Paul Rudolph did too. Even today we can think of Singapore as a safe haven for the megastructural thinkers of the world.

Moshe Safdie - Ardmore Habitat Condominimums - Singapore

Paul Rudolph - Colonnade - Singapore

Megastructures went so quickly out of fashion that as early as 1976 Banham was able to subtitle his historical opus on the subject “Urban Futures of the Recent Past” and refer to them throughout the book in the past tense. The Golden Mile complex was finished in 1973 so it barely made it in time. But its existence is currently under threat. It is slated to be demolished and redeveloped, and a Singaporean politician recently claimed that it is a ‘vertical slum’, a ‘terrible eyesore’, and a ‘national disgrace.’ Who knew that a perfect example of self-expression and democratic freedom epitomized in built form would be so vilified?

Megastructures paradoxically exhibit the limits of top-down and bottom-up design sensibilities simultaneously, represented by Banham’s introduction in which he includes the four-part definition of megastructure as laid-out by Ralph Wilcoxon:

Point 3 :: a structural framework into which smaller structural units (for example, rooms, houses, or small buildings of other sorts) can be built – or even plugged-in or clipped-on, having been prefabricated elsewhere;
Point 4 :: a structural framework expected to have a useful life much longer than that of the smaller units which it might support.

The structural framework can be seen as the top-down approach where as the infill can be thought of as the bottom-up approach—something that can change over time, take on a will of its own, and transcend the designer’s original conceptions.

Example of super structure - Golden Mile Complex - Singapore

Today designers love to talk about ideas such as bottom up, self-organized, open source, etc. But are we really ready for that? It seems that we are only willing to accept these ideas if they are set into motion by evolutionary algorithms composed by ourselves that we can willfully manipulate to generate an acceptable outcome it the computer. But we might not be so keen to allow an evolutionary process to take place on its own, in real time, completely out of our control. I think many of us are worried that the buildings we design will take on a life of their own and lose that picture perfect image that we see in our minds.

This conflicting view is portrayed very vividly in an interview with Siza in the recent Croquis (I should preface this by saying I’m a big fan of his). At one point in the interview Siza claims that he prefers for his buildings to transform over time, that “things are really always unfinished. There is never anything that you can say is really concluded…I regard every completed building as a first stone: the rest has to be done by history…starting with the first inhabitant.” Later he (perhaps unwittingly) contradicts himself when discussing the restoration of his social housing in Bouca: “…the cooperative members did not want to negotiate the restoration of certain elements to their original state, like the open terraces which were completely changed with new colours that detracted from the original project. I tried, but it was impossible, so I had to design new glazed enclosures to cover the terraces.” His respectful approach to the restoration of historical buildings (he says that “‘nothing is more beautiful than the ruins of beauty.’ That is why the scar of history is to a certain extent enriching”) he has trouble extending to the restoration of his own buildings.

Alvaro Siza - Bouca Social Housing - Bouca, Portugal via El Croquis

There are some designers who are accepting of change. Some friends of mine reminded me over the weekend of Alejandro Aravena’s Elemental project which has a few resonances with the concepts of megastructures ( structure + infill) but implemented on a much more modest, and some would claim humane, scale. His housing project not only permits change but encourages and enables it. Knowing that typically people who live in squatter settlements tend to build their homes opportunistically—upgrading and expanding the structure as their income allows it—Aravena’s project anticipates the future alterations by designing a flexible spatial and structural framework that accommodates expansion.

3 Images above: Elemental Chile Housing Project - Alejandro Aravena, via ArchRecord

To end I will quote Ma Qinyun from a speech he gave last year at the Shenzhen Biennale on the idea of urban regeneration:

How can we inherit perennially the judgment of the city? That is, how can we predict today, now many generations in the future will be happily living in this situation as we are today?...I don’t think the architect should create permanent memorials, whether for himself or for history. The architects should always think wisely…Here I think we should apply our agricultural wisdom to our high-rises buildings; they can be harvested time and again like wheat.

Stack City :: Ben Behin

2008-10-28T09:46:00.004+08:00

Stack City, Ben Behin, via archinect

Archinect posts an interview with Ben Behin featuring some beautiful images of his amazing graduate thesis from the Harvard GSD which one the prize for best thesis this past spring.
The project, titled Stack City, is a proposal for a zero-carbon development in Ras al Khaimah in the UAE. It uses Jorg Schlaig's "solar chimney power generators" as a jumping off point for re-thinking the role of technology, nature, and utopia in contemporary urban development strategies.

Here are some choice quotes from the interview:

Behin: Here I would refer to Melvin Kranzberg's first law of technology: "Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral." My intent in this project is neither to celebrate technology, nor to demonize it, but merely to point out that it underlies an emerging form of urbanism, and that it will ultimately be only what we make of it. Technology presents us with a series of choices, with both pitfalls and opportunities. To address them, we require not additional technology, but rather its integration with culture and politics. It is precisely here that I think architecture has a role to play; it can provoke discourse about the ethics which will shape the nature of technology in our future environments. The "machinistic" in Stack City is intended to provide such a provocation.
...
On the other hand, faced with the futility of a positive social/cultural/ecological project for architecture, giving up and regressing to an empty cynicism or retreating into formal and stylistic navel-gazing seems to get us nowhere. I think the answer is to find new ways of being earnest which are, perhaps, more nuanced, and difficult to pin down.
...
Specifically, as you pointed out in a previous discussion, cities are an accumulation of technological infrastructure which enables all the experiences we have in them. I think this is especially true in the "zero-carbon" urban developments that are being proposed today. By articulating this infrastructure as a zone that can itself be occupied, I hope to bring it into the open, and to exploit it architecturally and urbanistically through its relation with the other strata.

Stack City, Ben Behin, via archinect

You should go check out the interview for more great images and thoughts from Mr. Ben Behin.

Beijing Design Events

2008-10-26T11:02:00.004+08:00

For those of you in the BJ area I have started compiling a list of design related events on a sister blog called Bj.BLU.

There are some interesting events happening right now and coming up. The Beijing Biennale is starting up this weekend (the theme is Ecological City Building) and there are some affiliated openings and parties associated with it. Yesterday the 7th Beijing Pecha Kucha took place. I will write a little bit about it in an upcoming post.

IF you are in the Beijing area and know of cool design happenings please submit them to the Bj.BLU administrator.

art progeny: Kapoor + GMC = Tunnel House

2008-10-19T01:19:00.002+08:00

Anish Kapoor and Gordon Matta Clark (brought back from beyond?) have recently given birth to an artistic love child known as Tunnel House, by artists Dan Havel and Dean Ruck. This transfigured suburban home is now the coolest house on anyone's block. Architects everywhere, including myself, are jealous that they didn't come up with it first, as this is the most subversive act in housing history, or at least since Matta-Clark was chain sawing similar structures in half back in the early 70's. All architects could come up with was putting them up on stilts or making them out of glass.

Here is a description from 'art league press':

Havel and Ruck will create a large funnel-like vortex beginning from the west wall adjacent to Montrose Blvd. The exterior skin of the houses will be peeled off and used to create the narrowing spiral as it progresses eastward through the small central hallway connecting the two buildings and exiting through a small hole into an adjacent courtyard.

all pics via this site. the project was originally seen on io9 a couple of months back.

flotation devices - brazil

2008-10-17T13:14:00.004+08:00

A collection of Brazil's floating architecture from flickr, mostly from this set.

Floating appears to be a characteristic work of not just Paolo Mendes de la Rocha's work but of virtually all of Brazil's modern masters. Oscar Neimeyer, Lina bo Bardi, Joao Battista Vilanova Artigas, Mendes de la Rocha, etc, all have this fascination with strong forms that hover, playing on alternating themes of heaviness and lightness. Even Siza, as I have previously pointed out, picks up this theme when he began working recently in Brazil and carries it back to Portugal with him. Concrete, the counter intuitive material of choice for this game of levity, is pushed to its extremes of plasticity, massivity, and lightness.

I wonder what is the reason for this common thread--is a formal game inherited from Corbusier and passed down through the generations? Has it something to do with Brazilian culture? Or, is it an act of political posturing--a giving up of the ground to the masses?

If you are interested in seeing more work of the Brazilian magicians I invite you to check out the Brazilian Modernism flickr set of 'weyerdk' who has a wonderful collection of photographs.

See Previous: flotation devices - mendes de la rocha

flotation devices - Mendes da Rocha

2008-10-16T19:40:00.006+08:00

Paulo Mendes da Rocha's buildings float, levitate, they are suspended between heaven and earth. Mendes da Rocha is the magician and his buildings the lady in that old famous magic trick. Why do they float. In the earlier projects they seem to float to open up the space around and under the buildings for public use. At the same time that they float the act as ruling devices--providing measure the topography of a place and calling attention to relationships between the landscape that previously did not exist. Particularly recently, as his most recent buildings and proposals have taken on a scale that allow Mendes da Rocha to operate at the scale of a vast territory.

Student Dormitory for Cagliari University, 2007

Conhecimento School Park, 2006, Santo Andre, Brazil

Technological City, Vigo University

Especially in three of his more recent projects: Conhecimento School Park, 2006, Santo Andre, Brazil; a project for a Student Dormitory for Cagliari University, 2007; and a masterplan for Technological City, Vigo University, 2004. In the last two this strategy of territorial connection is particularly outstanding. The dormitory hovers over two piers and connects the three water bodies that separate them. The masterplan consists of a series of long bridges that float over hills and ravines, connecting the campus buildings. Also in the rendering there are a number of empty structures that seem to create public spaces on the hillside and create framing devices for viewing the landscape. Of course this is just speculation on my part because there is little information on the particulars of the project.

Over on design boom there are two great interactions with Mendes da Rocha - an interview and a presentation by him at last year's FestArch. In a description of the Cagliari dormitory project Mendes da Rocha describes his intention of synthesizing a number of disparate elements in one gesture:

I felt obligated to make a reflection on the spacial characteristics of cagliari and the identity of sardinia in the universe. I thought I have to consider its primordial architecture and its ongoing transformation with 'naturalezza' (in a natural way). I had to consider the city's topographic specificity, its geomorphology, the original difficulty of human settlements, that big repository of all the intelligence and wisdom of architecture... here in cagliari I tried to embed two aspects in in my project: a 'spacial issue' and that of a 'point / counterpoint' position to america. in america's civilization (and in more or less all the occidental civilization and independent from the disaster of colonization...) the development is towards water. the direction has been from the coasts, the seaside, towards the inland. different to cagliari, which started from the inland, from the mountains developing towards the coast. in cagliari, you see all these monumental buildings, the ancient stone towers / the marvelous st. pancrazio with the elephant... I now synthesize the magnificent inventions that have given new opportunities to people: as building in stone and all this complex and difficult constructions in this specific geo-morphological landscape,developing towards the seaside.

He also mentions aerial photography as a relatively recent phenomena which allows this type of intervention to take place when he states "today there is the possibility for architects and engineers to work from maps but also by photos taken from satellites. this does not seem to young architecture students a novel thing, but when I was 30 or 40 and working as an architect, there was no such opportunity for me to base my work on. no aerial views of the landscape, the cities, the buildings..."

Now with Google earth we can conceptually link projects from around the globe which is an interesting concept--from the territorial perspective to the global perspective. It reminds me of a quote on of my professors made about all architects attempting to produce an idealized city out of their work--that their projects seen together as a whole can represent their own personal utopia. But more on that later.

For now, more de la Rocha buildings that float:
note: all images via Design Boom and Land + Living

Good Business Practice

2008-10-12T22:29:00.004+08:00

This article from the Wall Street Journal discusses how design-build architects such as Peter Gluck, Marmol Radziner, and Randy Brown are not feeling the economic pinch as much as traditional architects. In discussing the 'radical' nature of design-build for most architects, the article states that:
Some skeptics still believe the practice is unethical, saying it is a conflict of interest for designers to determine a building's budget. "In theory clients like it because it sort of simplifies their life. But they're paying with one less level of protection and oversight," says New York architect Richard Dattner. "There's either a conflict or an appearance of a conflict."

I wonder if this is not the way to expand the role of the architect and also provide financial safeguarding in the future: discover apparent conflicts in traditional architectural practice and exploit them.

further reading:
Architect as Developer

Geo-Mimicry Update

2008-10-11T17:47:00.003+08:00

Earth's exposed geology, originally uploaded by bldgblog.

Just an update on the earlier post on geo-mimicry:

If you are a flickr user I started a group called Geo-mimicry + Design in order to collect images of geo-mimicry projects and inspiration. If you are interested and have some cool images to contribute please do so!

I have been working on an idea for a full fledged GeoURBanism combining the ideas of geo-mimicry and the growing influence of geography on design and urbanism as exemplified by the New Geographies group at Harvard University, so look for that in the next few weeks.

Hangzhou Wrap Up

2008-10-08T08:30:00.001+08:00

I hope you have enjoyed the pics from our recent trip to Hangzhou in the last couple of posts. To wrap it up, here is a random assortment of pictures which represent some of the interesting sites and sounds of Hangzhou and the surrounding cities we visited:
Driving into Hangzhou from the airport you are greeted by their nascent CBD and one of the many unknown icons beautifying Chinese city-scapes. Looks like someone else got to build the deathstar, sans boolean, before Rem did.
At Ling Yin temple, one of the most beautiful things we saw in Hangzhou, you can find hundreds of Buddhas carved into cliffs, caves, and grottoes that line the valley before heading uphill to the temples.
Coming out of the last temple at Ling Yin we were greeted by a gorgeous rainbow stretched across the sky, connecting two of the mountain peaks. Here is a shot of it on our way back down the slope.
Wuzhen and its Discontents: In Wuzhen we were greeted by a local resident inviting all the "invaders to get the &*(% out" of her town, which is apparently what the sign says in English. I have to say that I wholeheartedly empathize-the government has turned Wuzhen into a Disneyfied city of ghosts--the place feels incredible dead and overrun with tourists.
Later on we saw more icons, like the double inverted pyramid skyscraper in the background here.
In Suzhou we visited the beautiful Humble Administrator's Garden, which will celebrate its 500th birthday next year. This garden inspired both Wang Shu and IM Pei, architects of the buildings featured in the previous 3 posts.
And as always, we saw TONS of people everywhere we went.

If you like these please check out my flickr page for more pics from the trip and elsewhere.

CAA Phase 2 by Amateur Architecture Studio

2008-10-07T08:30:00.002+08:00

Part 2 of 2

::text continued from previous post::
The campus has been written about in Domus China by Bert de Muynck, and other places, (see here for a good set of model shots and construction images) so I’ll just quickly point out what I find really interesting about it from my own visit:
i) Regionalism – Wang Shu & co. do fantastic work that is firmly rooted in the amazing history of architecture and landscape of the Hangzhou region and nearby Suzhou. Amateur Architects take this tradition of form, material, and relationship between building and landscape but make it contemporary—it does not reek of the pastiche of postmodernism.
ii) Architecture Promenade – Whether this is derived from the seamless circulation among building and landscape along zig-zag paths found in traditional Suzhou gardens or from the work of Le Corbusier I’m not sure but gathering from the material references to both I imagine you can not point your finger to one precedent very easily. Regardless, Wang Shu & Co. are able to take these references and transform them into something fresh—I would liken the experience of walking along the CAA’s many bridges, ramps, and corridors that slice through and connect each building, creating a seemingly endless amalgamation, to running countless laps deliriously through and around Corb’s Carpenter Center in Cambridge, MA.
iii) Sustainability – part of what AA have learned from the past is a way of making architecture that responds to climate—much of the buildings that I visited were open-air, using corridors and other circulation in creative ways as thermal buffers and shading devices (phase 1 uses more of the former while phase 2 uses more of the latter). Traditional elements such as operable screens also help. But one of the most interesting things is the campus’ use of recycled materials—according to the Domus article an estimated 7 million old tiles and bricks were recycled for phase 2 alone!! The resulting textures can be seen in the photos.
iv) Ecology – The buildings are sited in a way that reduces their footprint and subsequent damage to the campus nature reserve. In addition to that, much of the land around the buildings has been given over to agricultural use for local farmers. Water features and irrigation systems provide both water for the crops and also become beautiful systems of infrastructure in the landscape. This gives the project a much different atmosphere than the manicured lawns of the quadrangles of most campuses in the US—it feels more organic, productive, and raw. Additionally this creates an interesting overlap of students and farmers on the campus. Seeing this contrast along with the influence the campus has had on local business (better art supply shops and design bookstores have sprung up organically on the dirt streets just outside the campus than I have seen in the bustling metropolis of Beijing) makes you realize the new campus is having a positive (in my view) impact on the human ecology of Zhuangtang as well.

So that pretty much does it. If you want to visit the project yourself, just take the 308 bus from the east side of Hangzhou’s West Lake south away from the city center. Continue past the 6 Harmony Pagoda another 10-15 minutes and you will arrive directly at the front door of the campus.
See also: CAA Phase 1

CAA Phase 1 by Amateur Architecture Studio

2008-10-06T08:30:00.000+08:00

Part 1 of 2

The night before I went to look at the China Academy of Art’s new campus in Zhuangtang near Hangzhou, China, I reflected on my personal memories of architectural pilgrimages and noted, with a little irony considering I maintain a blog about urbanism, that all of my favorite architecture experiences thus far in life have been in visiting buildings that are either in small towns or completely in the countryside. With the exception of a few notable structures the best personal reactions I have had to architecture have been buildings that have been off the beaten path, difficult to find, in countries whose native tongues I do not speak; therefore making the journey itself often as memorable as the building itself. These have included the Brion Cemetery by Scarpa, Palladio’s Villa Rotonda, Gropius’ house in Lincoln MA (an exception to the language barrier, but try getting a career disco studio lost in the woods trying to find this place and you will understand), and of course Le Corbusier’s Notre Dame du Ronchamp and La Tourette.
With these thoughts in my mind the next day I set off to visit the new Xianshang campus of the CAA, a relatively new campus designed and built in two phases by the architecture firm Amateur Architects, led by Wang Shu. And I have to say I was not let down—it was a wonderful campus, a beautiful place, and although I am reticent to place it fully in the ranks of those previously mentioned projects (it does owe some obvious debts to Corb’s work, which I will discuss), I think it is a very special project. I would venture to say it is an extra special project for today, as it exists on the periphery of architecture's standard modes of production while exploring themes firmly entrenched in the center of contemporary architecture debate--ecology and sustainability; culture, tradition, and history; urban-rural dichotomy, etc.
Oh, and thanks to the insane traffic caused by China’s national holiday, it took the two hour trip and 4 non air conditioned buses required to give it official pilgrimage status!
In the next post I will show images from Phase 2 and discuss the project more in depth.
Below is the location of the campus on Google maps:

View Larger Map

Suzhou Museum

2008-10-05T02:51:00.007+08:00

This past week I took a trip to Hangzhou, Suzhou, and Wuzhen in southern China. It was a great chance to see the city that Marco Polo called the most beautiful city in the world in the 13th Century. But, things have changed, and while the lakes, mountains, and gardens are as beautiful as ever, Hangzhou itself is not so great. Nevertheless, I did get a chance to see some interesting architecture which I will be sharing with you over a series of posts in the next few days.

To start, here is a slide show of I.M. Pei's Suzhou Museum in, you guessed it, Suzhou, which is in between Shanghai and Hangzhou. Suzhou is considered a water town, with canals and such, and known for its beautiful gardens, one of which will be celebrating it's 500 year birthday next year!
While not one of Pei's most exciting works, lacking the grandeur of the Louvre for example, it fits in quite well with the surrounding context of hutongs. This is achieved my submerging half of the museum's program below ground, meaning that half the galleries receive no natural light--probably a benefit knowing today's curatorial desires.
The project is quite humble and attempts to make reference to Suzhou's famous gardens, such as the Humble Administrator's Garden situated right next door, using characteristic Chinese features such as pagodas, courtyards, reflecting ponds, and a series of top lit pavilions connected by covered paths. These features are geometrically reconfigured, echoing the faceted forms of Pei's Hong Kong bank (the octagon being the shape of choice this time) and given the technical refinement and precision we typically associate with Pei.
One of the most interesting things about the museum is the relationship between the interior spaces and the courtyard. The courtyard has a variety of scales and materials--featuring a bamboo garden in one section and a larger open section with reflecting pond in another--so that alternating atmospheres of intimacy and collectivity emerge.

The Commune

2008-09-29T00:41:00.005+08:00

The commune exists silently in the shadow of the rising titans. This particular instance of the commune, for there are many around Beijing that look almost exactly like it, is situated footsteps away from both the tallest and most massive additions to Beijing’s emerging skyline. The adjacency of the two urban systems represents the antagonism between China’s one party, two ideology system: communism’s provision of welfare and housing, and capitalism’s neo-liberalism’s free market, laissez-faire form of urbanization.

The commune is under siege. Dislocation, dismemberment, and extradition are but a few of the possible dangers that confront the commune. The crystallization process overtaking large portions of the CBD threatens to transform the commune into steel and glass monoliths. Urbanization without qualities; this is the horrifying potential future of the commune.

The commune faces its destroyer on a daily basis. The commune acts and feels like an enclave, a safe haven separated from the rest of the CBD. A quick glance up is all it takes to remind you of the threat of displacement and the erasure of the space of your life memories.

The commune is the black sheep of the family. The story of preservation in Beijing is similar to those in the rest of the world: buildings considered of extreme cultural and/or historical significance are given the exalted status of preserved by the government. These are the temples, palaces, and important Communist-era buildings in Beijing. Grassroots organizations and citizen activists have fought long and hard for the recognition of the hutong communities. There have been some minor acknowledgements on the part of the government with small areas achieving conservation status. The commune, as far as I know, is notoriously absent from these discussions.

The commune is a framework. The architecture of the commune is quiet, sits in the background, and creates a poetic frame for the quotidian activities of the daily lives of its inhabitants. The buildings are relentlessly parallel and repetitive. This develops into an obscurity which transforms the open space into the urban protagonist. The open spaces are differentiated through various programming, intensities of vegetation, and the inclusion of smaller structures that act as storage, retail, or office space.

The commune is malleable. It is a simple, flexible system—its spaces adaptable and easily regenerated. The architecture is simple and easily renovated. It is not so tightly woven that the introduction of new infrastructure is impossible or even destructive. When thinking about preservation there is always the question of what to preserve and how much to preserve—should these places be frozen in time? In the case of the commune total preservation would be a death sentence—its structure should be preserved but the physical objects can be allowed to change, upgrade, renovate, and regenerate as needed.

The commune is familiar. The scale of the buildings, the spaces in between, and the road networks are fine-grained and most importantly, comfortable. The commune is filled with people playing, people eating, people commuting, but it is not crowded. There is a feeling of community and of shared values among the people here. It feels like home.

The commune's geotagged location.

Shlian's Geo-inspiration

2008-09-26T01:53:00.007+08:00

A few days ago while doing more research on geo-mimicry I came across the work of artist paper engineer Matt Shlian via the weblog Lynn Was Here. It was originally this image that caught my eye:

Desert, by Matt Shlian

In this work I see the juxtaposition of two different topographic systems which create a kind of surfacial moiré. The first is the topography of the image, implied through the relative values of light and shadow printed on the page, the second is the physical topography of the page resulting from Shlian’s technique of origami. The overlap of these two systems create a more complex reading of geometry and surface than each would have individually, and is something that I think could be an interesting technique for advancing the ideas and mechanisms of geo-mimicry in design—the development of techniques for transforming the found geological condition but leaving its trace embedded in the artifact.

But as I tried to find this image on Shlian’s personal website I came across many other amazing images. The ones that follow all seem part of a similar investigation in geometric tessellations and topography. They remind me of the geometric explorations of Baroque polymaths-such as Guarini and Borromini-that lead to advances in architecture, sculpture, engineering, and yes, urbanism. It is this ability for such drawings to cross disciplinary boundaries that I find them so evocative—they could be the genesis for new buildings, new landscapes, and new cities. Their ambiguous nature is evident in Shlian’s names for the drawings as well—Implosion, Crazy City, Invisible Cities, Kasparov’s Nightmare, In Between, etc.

Shlian himself writes about the relationship between his work and an emergent urbanism. Much like a self-organized city, his work is focused on process rather than product. Here he discusses how he employs algorithmic procedures with unknown results:

My drawings begin by asking indirect questions which yield no concrete answers. As with my three dimensional work, my focus is on the process rather than final product. I am fascinated with computer technology and its ability to mistranslate information. Like a game of “telephone”, multiple software programs fracture and compound text and image as they travel through different formats on the computer. Bearing little resemblance to their origin, the new information is rendered on a pen plotter creating a chaotic world rooted in happenstance. No longer legible, I see the drawings as blueprints for invisible cities, answers to questions that may unfold over time.

All images below by Matt Shlian via his website.

In Between represents another potential technique for geographic urbanism--the creation of a middle ground that creates new relationship between the "natural" and "artificial".Kasparov's Nightmare

Everything, Everything

Morning Glory Lane

Exploded SpheresMurq

Seeing is Forgetting

Super China

2008-09-25T00:01:00.003+08:00

Mckinsey Global Institute (MGI) issued a report in March of this year on the growth of China’s cities by the year 2025. The figures are pretty astounding. Here are the figures straight from the report:

350 million
Will be added to China’s urban population by 2025—more than the population of today’s United States

1 billion
People will live in China’s cities by 2030

221
Chinese cities will have one million + people living in them—Europe has 35 today

5 billion
Square meters of road will be paved

170
Transit systems could be built

40 billion
Square meters of floor space will be built—in five million buildings

50,000
Of these buildings could be skyscrapers, the equivalent of building up to ten New York Cities

5 times
--the number by which GDP will have multiplied by 2025

Simply amazing. Furthermore, MGI studied five scenarios for how this growth could take place (and they produced some pretty interesting infographics to animate the scenarios as well): the first follows current trends, then four hypotheses based on different growth models: distributed, hub-and-spoke, townships, and finally MGI’s economically preferred model: the SUPERCITY option:
MGI's analysis suggests that China should tailor policies that would shift urbanization toward a more “concentrated” shape of urbanization. This pattern of urbanization could produce 15 supercities with average populations of 25 million people or spur the further development of 11 urban “clusters” of cities, each with strong economic networks and combined populations of 60-plus million. (highlights mine)

Infographic via McKinsey Global Institute

15 Supercities at 25 million or more people!! That’s 15 cities larger than any city we currently have on the planet at this time according to the ranking by the City Mayor institute.
This is essentially one giant experiment—urbanization at this scale and this speed has never occurred anywhere at any moment in history. Will the challenge be met or will the same status quo development continue to occur? Chinese planning has not been able to keep up with the rapid pace of development in the last couple of decades. Can they now leapfrog development’s lightening speed, get ahead of the curve, and control how this growth will occur? That in and of itself is one of the biggest challenges, let alone producing quality places for people to live, work, and play.
Which beg the questions—how are we going to design and construct these cities ? What forms should they take? How do we make them environmentally benevolent? Do SUPERCITIES require SUPERSTARS? (I’m tempted to venture into BLDGBLOG style conjecture at this point, but I’m not as talented and I’d rather you use your own imaginations)
It is easy in this context to understand why China is so provocative for all types of architects and urban designers—entrepreneurs, utopian dreamers, and dystopian prophets alike—in this day and age, the challenges and opportunities are endless.

Big Ups for Mitchell Joachim and Sustainable Cities

2008-09-23T10:46:00.003+08:00

Wired magazine ran an article on Mitchell Joachim and his collective Terreform yesterday. Additionally Joachim was placed on Wired’s “2008 Smart List” as being one of 15 people the next president should ‘listen to.’ Unfortunately he was placed after people whose ideas include using big robots and bigger guns, anthropology in warfare, and embracing the Post-American age. Shouldn’t Joachim et co. optimistic vision for our future cities be a little closer to the top? Oh well. Hopefully next time.

Here are some choice quotes from the first article:

And don't get him started on sustainability. "I don't like the term," he says. "It's not evocative enough. You don't want your marriage to be sustainable. You want to be evolving, nurturing, learning." Efficiency doesn't cut it, either: "It just means less bad." Even zero emissions falls short. "This table does zero damage," he says, thumping the one in his office. "No VOCs, no carbons. Whatever. It doesn't do anything positive."

Citing US Department of Energy statistics, he says that while 29 percent of the nation's energy expenditure--what he calls "the suck"--now goes toward getting around, "in 50 years that will double." Among the biggest sources of waste, he argues, is the automobile--not only in energy but in the space it occupies (cars, he notes, spend more than 90 percent of the day parked). For nearly a century, Joachim says, "cities have been designed around cars. Why not design a car around a city?"

For some visual delight, here are some YouTube videos I dug up on Joachim and Terreform:

Today's UD News Roundup

2008-09-23T00:00:00.008+08:00

Today is an eventful day for urban design news...

Westside Boulevard proposals by Hargreaves/Ten Arquitectos (left) and Work AC (right)

1) New York unveils five design proposals for the new Westside Boulevard--a heavily landscaped thoroughfare that will anchor the West Side Redevelopment (and here too). I have to say that all of them seem like a distraction from the heavy handed corporate development of Related's 'megadevelopment' (curb's word, not mine), alluded to by some of the proposals as the ominous shadowy thing in the background (particularly in Gustafson/Allied Works' proposal which is reminiscent of a Hugh Ferris rendering). From the New York Post:

From fanciful images of hills, trails and plantings to a park filled with enormous evergreen trees and rock outcrops, the proposals from five teams of architects vying to design the park and boulevard will go before the public beginning today.

The project, part of the Hudson Yards redevelopment, will create four acres of park space down the middle of a boulevard stretching from 33rd to 42nd Streets, between 10th and 11th Avenues, and linking up with a massive new office and residential project planned for the West Side rail yard just to the south of the new avenue.

2) Metropolis magazine questions the relative merits of a maglev train proposed to connect Anaheim, CA, with Las Vegas NV, compared with other, more sensible solutions:

Magnetic levitation, which involves running high-speed trains on a cushion of electromagnetic attraction or repulsion (depending on the system), is one of those futuristic ideas that have never quite arrived...While we have been dreaming about floating trains, Europe has been methodically threading its cities together with a sophisticated high-speed rail network.

I don't really understand the big deal--what's wrong with connecting America's biggest playground for children (Walt Disney Land) with America's biggest playground for adults (Vegas) with a train that floats? What's not sensible about that? What, you want to connect "people" and "places" that actually "matter" by so-called "sensible" high speed train systems? sheesh!

3) And, finally, we have an emerging example of OrwellURBanism:

images via World Architecture News

World Architecture News features an interesting short editorial on a new capital city being built in Burma, despite its recent natural disaster, which killed tens of thousands of people, and the ensuing food riots. Here are some excerpts from the original article:

New ‘Orwellian’ capital built on foundations of famine and poverty

Burma is building a new capital. While millions of its inhabitants are still reeling from the after effects of Cyclone Nargis and the ensuing massive rise in food prices, the military government, led by dictator Than Shwe, is building a vast new city. But all is not as it seems.

A new ‘Soviet Style’ city hall will dominate the centre of the new capital which is closed to westerners. The opulent city, founded only in late 2005, will be home mainly to government officials. There are no international flights and foreigners are banned. For good reason: The estimated build cost of £2.7 billion has been funded by trade in ruby, teak and opium and offers its residents untold luxuries (relative) including 24 hour power (unheard of in Burma), exclusive villas, three golf courses and a zoo.

As you approach Naypyidaw, loosely translated as ‘abode of kings’, dusty trails turn into vast, 12 lane highways, all deserted bar the odd horse drawn trailer or a speeding convoy of blacked-out limos heading for the rumoured network of luxury houses built for Than Shwe and his junta of top generals. Reportedly locked in a closely guarded secret quarter, the exclusive villas form an essential part their opulent lifestyle including golf, gambling and much more.

Some 1,500 new blocks of apartments sprawl across the city, and in true Orwellian style, these are colour-coded depending on which government department the residents work for. Blue for health, green for agriculture and irrigation etc.

Some are clearly more equal than others.

It's like Pompidou style color coding at the scale of the city, although with some pretty sinister social-engineering undertones.

Insanely Beautiful

2008-09-21T16:52:00.007+08:00

Sometimes you see architecture works of such exquisite beauty that it makes you want to [insert one of the following]:

cry
give up this whole design thing in desperation
stop blogging, grab a sketch pad, a chunk of soft lead, some museum board, glue, and an Exacto knife and commence the creation of your next masterpiece
all of the above

El Croquis issues 139 and 140

This past week I have experienced these emotive outpourings and quasi-religious experiences on a near nightly basis as I have explored the two latest El Croquis. They are on the recent works of SANAA and Alvaro Siza, respectively, architects whom I have long admired (in the former individual works from Sejima, Nishizawa, and the SANAA collective are all represented). Thanks to the architecture book black market here in China I was able to obtain both of these inspirational titles at an extremely moderate price.
It is interesting to me that El Croquis would publish monographs on these three masters (and I do not use that term lightly) contiguously because somehow I have always put them in a similar class of architect, and not only because of their well-known affinities for monochromatic palettes. Although I must admit their ‘toute-en-blanche’ approach to swatch picking does make it rather easy to lump together. Rather it is because I feel their architecture all seem bourn from a particular place and culture, a particular time, and particular world views, thus leading to highly personal and idiosyncratic working methods and production; at the same time they are capable of transcending these particularities to achieve work that resonate universal ideas, moods, atmospheres, and a sense of timelessness. Not an easy task.
What I see in their work is something akin to a personal style except that I would rather term it a personal grammar. For, to me at least, their work has not devolved into the repetitive, monotonous, and in worse cases banal modes of production of other designers who are known for their ‘signatures.’ The idea of a personal grammar to me would connote a different strategy than a personal style. A personal grammar, developed over time, provides a designer with certain rules--guiding principals such as geometry, materials, and trajectories of exploration--but encourages invention and innovation within these rules.

Municipal Library in Viana do Castelo, Portugal, and the Museum for the Ibere Camargo Foundation in Brazil

To me it is amazing that Siza can steel produce works that feel fresh and inventive after all these years, and distinctly his own at the same time. Two recent projects that I am particularly struck by are the Municipal Library in Viana do Castelo, Portugal, and the Museum for the Ibere Camargo Foundation in Brazil. The former is structurally daring and ambiguous, but sensitive to site and context, and provides the familiar domestic quality of Siza’s best interiors. The latter is highly sculptural and related to Siza’s biggest inspirations—Wright and Le Corbusier—without feeling deriviative due to Siza’s idiosyncratic approach to geometry and form, and again his sensitivity to site. Both of these represent a more heroic approach to structure than his earlier work, an exciting recent development of his oeuvre.

What is most impressive about the work of Siza, Sejima, and Nishizawa is an attention to craft, detail, and above all beauty, which seem so out of place in today’s world of architecture. Each object, be it drawing, model, or building, is delicately crafted and questions the familiarity of common architectural elements and typologies.

Sejima’s plan drawings, for example, often look like diagrams at best or immature children’s drawings at worst: walls are represented by single lines, corners are misaligned, grids are distorted, and structure is notoriously absent from plans. Upon further study you begin to realize that those single lines are purposefully drawn: steel plates, frameless glass, single-sheets of plywood are substituted for the clumsiness of traditional walls; the corner misalignments are the result of perceptually driven decisions of countless models for particular spatial qualities; grids are distorted for programmatic or spatial reasons, never willful; and innovative structural solutions are engineered to minimize the disruption of her well-known spatial continuums.

In the end Sejima has the last laugh: what we thought to be crude drawings are actually accurate representations of structure, enclosure, and aperture collapsed into a single line. SANAA plays on our expectations of what things should be by constantly exploring the minimums and maximums of design.

SANAA, various projects, via El Croquis

Alvaro Siza, various projects, via El Croquis

UPDATE: Relic of the Ancient Future

2008-09-17T22:38:00.008+08:00

As a follow up to the previous Relic of the Ancient Future post/photo essay I am adding some new images of the bulding to my flickr page and the already existing set.

Since last time I focused on the project's imagery this time I thought I would supplement it with some general analysis. Part of this stems from my desire to finally see the project from the sky. I tried and tried to find someone to let me into their apartment to get a bird's eye view but for some reason I kept scaring them away. So, alas, Google Earth images will have to suffice. I think you can see from the following image the general scale and complexity of the building. It's almost 3 football fields in length! I figure it's roughly half a mile long, maybe reaching the full 900' if you straighten it out a little bit.

Previously I had compared this project to the hutong, saying that this might be seen as a contemporary version of the vernacular type scaled up for contemporary programs and more flexibility. I suggested it might be an interesting way to think about rehabilitation of the hutong. In order to demonstrate the difference in scale and nature of the hutong and this new structure see the comparison below (all of the aerials are shown at the same scale). For kicks and giggles I thought it would be interesting to also show the Forbidden City also at the same scale. The differences are immediately striking - the homogenous web of the hutong compared to the singularity of Pingod compared to the rigid, regal geometry of the Forbidden City. However, it is interesting to note they are all basically riffing on the courtyard typology. In a way I like to think of the courtyard as one of the basic DNA of Chinese architecture. This might be one of the reasons why the relatively recent explosion of towers in Chinese cities is such an anachronism. The apartments at Pingod represent another oft used typology of recent Chinese architecture--the wall building.
Below is a preview of a few of the photos I added to the Relic of the Ancient Future set. In the set you can see how complex the structure's geometry is (also in the figure ground above). There are virtually no right angles in the entire project! Yet the building is rather crude in its construction and displays a lot of craftsmanship and handiwork. It makes me wonder how all of it was communicated from the architect and translated from drawing to building.
I'd like to think that maybe the architect put together not a drawing set but a set of general rules and guidelines. Maybe there was only a few typical details and some basic urban and geometric parameters to follow--maintain XX distance from the adjacent building, use only these three angles, never use the same geometric relationship twice in a row, for example. The rest would be left to the craftsman. The result would be completely unexpected but strangely familiar. "Emergent," you might say, using the parlance of our time, or "self-organized." Could this also be a strategy for design in undeveloped areas or in disaster relief areas?
There was a discussion on Flickr about my previous comments on the beauty of the uninhabitated building and how I was worried that it would not be as beautiful or interesting once it was inhabited. Part of it was I really enjoyed seeing how the structure was appropriated by squatters. I would love to hear what all of you out there in Cyberspace think about it!
Without further adieu, the photos:

OMA @ Venice

2008-09-16T10:06:00.000+08:00

OMA Official Press Release

OMA presents the urban renewal of two European cities at Venice Biennale

(Venice, September 15, 2008) – At the 11^th International Architecture Biennale of Venice the Office for Metropolitan Architecture exhibits urban regeneration proposals for the business district of La Défense in Paris and for the neglected fishing port of Saint’Elia in Cagliari, Italy.

La Défense Masterplan

OMA’s design for La Défense is presented in the Carlo Scarpa building, curated by Francis Rambert, alongside 12 other proposals for the region. OMA’s scheme stems from the recognition of La Défense’s struggle to maintain and expand its position on the international scene. The masterplan proposes to create a nodal point that transforms La Défense into a compact and efficient business district by creating a new central transit stop in the middle of the district with an internal shuttle that extends to the neighbouring district of Les Groues – to bring in life and also distribute to surrounding neighbourhoods.

Regeneration of Saint’Elia

OMA’s design for Saint’Elia is presented in the Italian Pavilion, in the section "Housing Italy – 12 Projects for Inhabiting and Re-inhabiting the City”, curated by Francesco Garofalo. Garofalo invited a team of Italian architects to explore a series of challenges posed by the quest for quality homes in the era post subsidised housing. OMA’s design is used in a conceptual proposal produced by the Italian architecture firm Salottobuono whilst other contributors investigate proposals such as the residential conversion of industrial areas and the settlement of foreign communities immigrating to Italy.

The Italian Pavilion is located in the first Tesa delle Vergini at the Venice Arsenale while the French Pavilion is located in the Giardini - both will be open until November 23.

OMA’s La Defense contribution is made possible by collaboration with EPAD and the Amsterdam based architecture and planning firm One architecture. The Italian Pavilion is supported by AREA & the Italian Ministry for Cultural Affairs and Activities.

China Collage City

2008-09-11T00:07:00.003+08:00

This is the first part of a series of posts demonstrating how contemporary Chinese artists are confronting issues of rapid urban transformation. This post's technique: Transformer style assemblages of buildings, urban areas, and people. These collages use the familiar images of China's new icons and personifies them. I guess the first question to pop into all of our minds is "Am I looking at Optimus Prime or Megatron?" I leave it to you decide--drop in a comment or two if you have any thoughts.

I am going to use a quote from Brian Holmes which I found in a recent issue of Urban China to preface the images. You can find the full article, which is really great, here.
There is only one possible world, only one possible dream: continuous buildings, endless highways, infinite urbanization, a city beyond the limits of the imagination. Huge urban blocks, surging arteries, expanding ring roads, metros, airports, refineries, power plants, bullet trains, a city that devours the countryside, scraping the mountains and the sky. A world city.

The Outlook Magazine - September Cover
CHI Peng - Why Should I Love You?

Chi Peng - Dan er~

Cao Fei aka China Tracy - RMB City

Pic of the... 10 September 2008

2008-09-10T08:41:00.002+08:00

LinYi Market Panorama, originally uploaded by o d b.

LinYi Market Panorama
While traveling on the outskirts of Lin Yi in the Shandong Provinve we came across a small village where it appeared that every tractor and trailer for miles was congregating into a single alley. Venturing into that alley revealed a massive market space being prepared for the weekend trading.
I can't help but be reminded of Manuel de Landa's description of peasant and small town markets being the best example of decentralized decision-making. De Landa states
"...it is only in peasant and small town markets that decentralized decision-making leads to prices setting themselves up in a way that we can understand. In any other type of market economists simply assume that supply and demand connect to each other in a functional way, but they do not give us any specific dynamics through which this connection is effected. Moreover, unlike the idealized version of markets guided by an "invisible hand" to achieve an optimal allocation of resources, real markets are not in any sense optimal. Indeed, like most decentralized, self-organized structures, they are only viable, and since they are not hierarchical they have no goals, and grow and develop mostly by drift."

Edible Architecture

2008-09-09T14:52:00.000+08:00

Top – via Vestal Design

Bottom – ‘Sweet Tall Tower’

I arrived at work this morning, opened up my inbox, and found an invitation to consume a most delectable treat – a cake which resembled a skyscraper. The email invited us to all eat the “sweet tall tower,” a description I hope to one day overhear someone exclaim in regards to one of my future designs…”Dude, check out that sweet tall tower!”

This ‘sweet tall tower’ had all the makings of a genuine skyscraper in today’s day and age: cylindrical core, iconic wrapper, with a zone of homogenous substance sandwiched in between (in this case cake, in a typical skyscraper’s case it would be program).

The cake is made from a German company (as if you had to ask!) and the orginal name for it is Baumkuhen, literally “tree cake”. With a quick flick of my nifty delete button I can quickly turn this into Baukuhen, or “building cake,” as it should more accurately be called. German is a wonderful language like that.

A quick Google search revealed some more interesting ‘edible architecture’. The first comes from Vestal Design who created an architecture cake. (The image above is from their website). They say the “project examines the architectural symbolism and spatiality of cake.” They based their design on a great edible architecture reference. They say that “the cake designs built upon a manifesto which was published in the Yale food magazine Taste.” I have added some quotes from the original manifesto at the bottom of this post.

And in this YouTube video you can see what happens when Boy Scouts start playing dodge ball with a Buckminster Fuller inspired tetrahedron made of spaghetti and marshmallows. Those Boy Scouts probably know more about structure and joinery than most architecture students!

I am also reminded of can food stacking competitions, which is actually a great way to boil architecture down to its most essential elements: form, structure, material, color, pattern, etc.

Edifice, artifice. The time has come for cakes to rise to ever greater heights. I have seen the future of Confection, and it is Crenellated.

For centuries we have walked a fine line in both our culinary creations and our aedicular aspirations. Our collective tendency to live in our food, whether literally or figuratively, begs the eternal question: Are we eating it or is it eating us? Reformulated: why do our cakes demand to be Inhabited? Why do they so often, so irrationally, look like buildings?

To find the answer, let us scoop deep through the layers of our buried lives, our homes, and our daily bread, and our religion. Exodus tells of the departure of the Jews from Egypt, an icon of architectural achievement: for what? For the desert, the flatlands, a void unfilled by stone and brick! This unleavened wasteland was made habitable only by the culinary gift from the heavens: the manna, the holy bread of life, which replaced the first edifices of the Jews and was the badge of their freedom from the oppression of an inedible architecture.

Come now, Citizens Cake – to lead a second exodus, from the oppression of an consumptive and spaceless architecture of the present to the glories of a once and future cake!

Urban Blogging Gets Political

2008-09-08T10:26:00.000+08:00

I found an interesting article on Planetizen this morning about urban bloggers going political, in a grassroots sense. It basically says that the ‘creative classes’ are returning from their creative excursions to creative cities and ready to tackle issues of banality back home. In Tampa I guess they are called the ‘creative diaspora’. The author predicts that these urban blog activists will become the local political heroes of tomorrow. Here is a quote from the article:

"The lack of a sustainable, planned vision for our area on the part of decades of leaders has left a developer-led landscape of mind numbing sprawl. Linear "shopping strips" and placeless big-box retail are lined up along noisy, dangerous, congested and poorly designed thoroughfares that disappear over the horizon. There are few centers, little expression of regional identity, and fewer places where communities can congregate and share ideas, or even accidentally encounter neighbors and friends (like real cities have)."

"On blogs and Web sites across our region, folks are collaborating and sharing and developing ideas on how to turn our area around — and it's just a question of time before some of these folks enter the local political scene."

Here is a link to the original article, from TampaBay.com.

Aqua-Plagiarism

2008-09-07T15:19:00.007+08:00

Going through BIG's delightful bag of goodies today doing some research for the Geo-Mimicry piece and lo-and-behold what to my wondering eyes did appear??!? No, silly, not 8 tiny reindeer. Not even one! But I did discover something else...an aquarURBan project that looks remarkably similar to the LILYPAD project by Vincent Callebaut discussed in the first AquaURBanism post...eerily similar, in fact. See for yourself:

BIG - Mer

Callebaut - LilyPad

And it turns out that BIG's project was done way back in 2005....hmmm.
Previously: AquaURBanism

Geo-Mimicry 2B :: Catalogue of Projects

2008-09-07T14:58:00.003+08:00

....And finally: the new Geo-Mimicry projects!

Rather than do a typical post I decided to create a flickr set that indexes the Geo-Mimicry movement. This set will be continually updated so check on it often. Let me know if you come across projects that should be included in the set or if you would like to have your own project included.

I am still working on a way to categorize the projects. If you have any thoughts on how to do it leave me some comments!

I hope this set of eye-candy makes up for the two previous super long-winded posts. I even won an award on an Archinect discussion for best archi-babble! Thanks guys, I'm really touched...

Geo-Mimicry

Geomimicry 2A: Beginners and Begetters

Geo-Mimicry 2A :: Beginners / Begetters

2008-09-07T11:40:00.014+08:00

Part 2A
To begin showing the projects of Geo-Mimicry I thought I would start by showing some of the historical precedents of geologically inspired architecture of the past. Now this could go waaaaay back in time because geology is something that has continually inspired architects through the ages. Indigenous peoples of almost every continent developed a form of architecture related to the geology of their region, as the following images from Mesa Verde, Chaco Canyon, and Tibet demonstrate.

But the point of this post is not really to create a historical trajectory tracing geo-mimetic architecture from the annals of history to present time--for geo-mimicry is kind of like what Frank Gehry famously remarked about his use of fish for inspiration: it references something beyond the history of architecture in an attempt to create something new (it is therefore extra-disciplinary)--it is merely to demonstrate that geo-mimicry is really nothing new at all. The difference now is that it appears to have reached a central point in our disciplinary discussions, whereas in the 20th century it might said to have occupied a more peripheral role architectural discourse.
In the early 20th Century Geo-Mimicry developed a small but devout following as part of the larger Expressionist movement, particularly in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. This sets up one of our modern trajectories of geo-mimicry, which tend to operate more geographically than chronologically. I'm going totally out on a limb here, but I would venture to guess that geology was put into the minds of architects by the growing number of expeditions and explorations of virgin geographies in the 19th Century, which were glorified and put into the popular zeitgeist by artists like Caspar David Friedrich, and his painting Das Eismeer (The Sea of Ice), from 1823 – 1824.
In expressionist architecture, it was Bruno Taut that would make the greatest argument for geo-mimicry with his book Alpine Architecture: A Utopia, and the amazing drawings and etchings published as part of the book. Taut's alpine architecture was faceted, crystalline, and resembled the Alps. The amazing Taut appears to have come back from the grave to create a MySpace account from which he shares a few tidbits about his ideas:

My plans for an Alpine Architecture really took off—it was basically this utopian vision of a world where the natural landscape would be beautified by buildings/sculptures of illuminated colored glass, and these structures would bring people together despite class or national differences and be a means of spiritual renewal. Soon a new society could form, a non-hierarchical and integrative collective.

Unfortunately Taut only realized a couple of works that resemble some of the fantasies of his Utopian Alpine vision. The most famous of which is the Glass Pavilion constructed as part of the Cologne Werkbund exhibition. Again, from his MySpace page, Taut continues:

All you architect scholars out there won’t chill out about my Glashaus (glass pavilion) at the Cologne Werkbund exhibition in May…but it was pretty cool…I made a kind of prismatic dome with colored glass (it even had a waterfall in it!) as a tribute to a new architecture that combines monumental function and fantasy.

Taut Glass Pavilion, Cologne

Skipping ahead a few years we come to Gunther Domenig, and Austrian architect who spent years working on his personal utopia--his very own house called Stein Haus. Steinhaus--Stonehouse is a book published by the AA to commemurate the home, which "tells the story of the conception and construction of a home cum studio cum intellectual haven for the architect in a landscape which has been part of his personal memory bank of images since childhood." This landscape is the remote mountain landscape of rural Austria. You can see another amazing photo of this house here on Flickr.

Domenig, Stein Haus

Another recent example of the Austrian trajectory is Hans Hollein's project for the Vulcania museum in Auvergne, France. This project represents a low point for the geo-mimicry project, for it is an example of the simplest form of easy-to-consume Disneyfied geo-iconography--you mine as well put some fake lava and smoke plumes in there to finish it off. Although I have to admit it did result in an interesting space within the sheared conical structure--I just wish it wasn't meant to actually represent a volcano. It's a little 1:1 and closes off other interpretations. But that opens up another can of worms that I am not very well qualified to speak about.
Hollein, Vulcania
And now we move from the European front to the New World to look at the other geographical trajectory--the American Southwest, best exemplified by Antoine Predock.
In my previous post on Geo-Mimicry I stated that Vicente Galluart might be the best example of a geological architecture. I might be eating those words today. Predock has been honing his special blend of geological architecture for some time now, and rarely strays from this path, despite an increased global production from his previously regional practice in New Mexico. This is one of the great things about geo-mimicry--since you are claiming the Earth as your primary context and source code, you can apply it anywhwere (see images below--projects from New Mexico, Minnesota, and China). Predock describes this when he says

New Mexico has formed my experience in an all-pervasive sense. I don't think of New Mexico as a region. I think of it as a force that has entered my system, a force that is composed of many things. Here, one is aimed toward the sky and at the same time remains rooted in the earth with a geological and cultural past. The lessons I've learned here about responding to the forces of a place can be implemented anywhere. I don't have to invent a new methodology for new contexts. It is as if New Mexico has already prepared me. (emphasis mine)

Predock's writings on architecture to me are probably the best example of what Geo-Mimicry in architecture could be. He discusses a lot of the topics I put forth in the previous Geo-Mimicry post. I still feel like his work is more about a formal resonance with geology, rather than what a process based approach would be, but it is still compelling. He speaks about the aspect of geological time when he writes

When I am working on projects with my team ...we remind ourselves that we are involved in a timeless encounter with another place, not just a little piece of land. All of the readings that have accumulated and been assimilated there, that are imagined there, that may happen there in the future — all of these collapse in time and become the raw material with which we interact. We are not merely trying to record or express a particular epoch.

And he describes the 'deep structure' of geology that I wrote about when discussing highway road cuts. Road cuts are also the space of exploration of John McPhee in his series of books on North American geology. Predock relates them to architecture when he writes

Critical to the spirit in my work is the enigmatic quality of the desert. You think you've got it, you think you understand; then you turn over a rock or crawl under a larger rock and you discover other worlds, other realms within. In a highway roadcut, for example, a sectional diagram of the earth is revealed through man's intervention. At the bottom of a roadcut in the southwest is pre-cambrian granite, overlaid by limestone…The roadcut is a poetic diagram of an investigative process for the making of architecture.

To close, and to bring the discussion to the present day (although Hollein and Predock are both still active, I don't think they occupy a central role in the contemporary discussion on geo-mimicry) I close with two projects that, because of their mass appeal and wide publication, made it safe to talk about rocks again in contemporary architecture. Although I'm sure this was not their intention, for neither of them are really about rocks and geology at all, they just look like rocks, and they are both often referred to as rocks. So here goes...
OMA's Casa de Musica and Aranda/Lasch's Grotto project. One paved the way for building's that are strangely contextual despite the fact that they look nothing at all like their surroundings and one made it safe for the digital exploration of rock-like forms.

Geo-Mimicry

2008-09-04T23:58:00.006+08:00

Part 1 of 2
Note: This post is broken down into two parts. Today's post will be primarily a textual description of the recent use, and future potential of geology in architecture and urbanism. The next segment will feature a series of projects illustrating the discussion.

Architecture might be said to have a mimcry complex. No, I'm not referring to a psychological affliction. I'm using it the phrase the way that evolutionary biologists use it - to refer to the collective act of a group of organisms, mimics, evolving to share common perceived characteristics with another group, the models.

Or maybe it is a mimesis complex? (and by this I do mean it psychologically) Plato and Aristotle's description of mimesis as the representation of nature in search for truth by the carpenter and the artist can be spread to architecture. For as long as architecture has existed mimesis has been used as a common technique by architects for the production of architectural form.

In the beginning was automimicry - one popular theory states that the stone details in ancient Greek temples were built to resemble vernacular wooden structures. In this case architecture mimics architecture. Then mimicry slowly crept into architecture's foundations - literally - as the use of rusticated stone and quoins were used to represent the earth growing to form a building's solid base during the renaissance. Much more recently biomimcry has been a technique used by architects. On the one hand by ecologically minded designers who want to imitate natural processes to produce sustainable architecture, and on the other hand by the avant garde, particularly digital formalists like Greg Lynn, Hernan Diaz Alonso, the Ocean collective, Andrew Kudless, Tom Wiscombe, and others.

In the past few years a new approach has emerged that appears to signal a new mimetic direction in the production of architectural form. Recent projects by architects such as Snohetta, MVRDV, and Vicente Guallarte (this list is by no means exhaustive) all t(r)end to use geological formations as inspiration. While geomimicry is a term used by some to "describe processes and technologies that mimic long term geological processes," these projects tend to use geology as a purely visual metaphor. Which is why I use the hyphenated form of Geo-Mimicry - to distinguish it from the single word geomimicry. I am also careful not to call the projects "geological" in the way that I used "geographical" in the post on New Geographies. For it seems to me they have left the logic part out of the equation (one notable exception could be Vicente Guallart, the designer who appears to be most invested in developing a geological architecture). What I mean by this is that the projects seem to mimic only the aesthetics of geological formations and not the complex processes of geology and geophysics.

But still I am drawn to these projects and excited about the possible new directions it could lead designers. The main reason for this is that it just so happens that I am currently reading John McPhee's Assembling California and I have been thinking a lot about the relationship between geology and design as I read. I think it is a lost opportunity for designers not to think about geology in terms of its processes and less formally, although I have to admit that geo-aesthetics are quite amazing in their intricacy and complexity (despite my recent questioning of the use of complexity in urbanism).

Now, the one question to be answered is why the sudden rash of geological metaphors in architecture?

While I don't know for certain, I do have a hunch as to why geology has recently become such a popular formal metaphor. And I have a couple of ideas of how designers might expand the notion of geo-mimicry.

To start, here are a few reasons why I think that architects might be drawn to geology:

1. Permanence - Any reader of John McPhee will know that the notion of permanence in geology is suspect, but most of us still view mountains and terrain as perpetually static. I think some architects are still drawn to permanence as a virtue, despite (or perhaps because of) architecture's ever-increasing impermanence.
2. Context - This I think is one of the main reasons architects have been mining geology for new material. One of architecture's most common (and easiest?) ways of dealing with context is through mimicry and assimilation. With the increased amount of city building in the untouched regions of the Middle and Far East (UAE, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, etc), it is natural that architects would look to the natural environment for source material.
3. Beauty - Let's face it - rocks just look good! If you don't know what I am talking about just Google any of the following: geology, rocks, geological folding, geodes, or virtually anything else related to geology and see for yourself.

And here's a few ideas of how designers could start thinking geologically to enhance the idea of geo-mimicry:

1. Plate Tectonics - the idea of plate tectonics and all its implications are so full of material for architects it's ridiculous. Here is just one example - I have been thinking of the idea of a geological suture and how it might relate to border conditions in urban areas. In geology the suture is the place where two plates 'dock' together and usually results in the most remarkable topography and rock formations. Sometimes the suture can be as wide as 50 miles. How might the idea of a suture be applied to urban design? Can the notion of an exceptional, thickened border with amplified intensity in form and program be an antidote to gated communities and other walled-off enclaves segregating our cities?
2. Transformation - We designers love thinking about form as part of a transformational processes. Since the earth is actually in a state of perpetual motion, the process of this motion and the morphological impacts it has on geological formations are full of interesting architectural metaphors: collision and convergence, spreading centers, subduction, shearing and strike-slip faults, transform faults, convergent/divergent margins, just to name a few.
3. Temporality - McPhee often speaks of the asynchronicity of geological time and human time. Sometimes though they can synch up, often to disastrous effects. Thinking about temporal variety can be useful in urbanism for manifold reasons: when thinking about the disparate time frames of urban districts (their metabolism, if you will), the processes of urban transformation (political time vs developer time vs implementation time, etc), or just to put everything in chronometrical perspective. Also, geological time is not linear or consistent-- temporal uncomformities and simultaneities abound and the results are rarely predictable. Additionally, geology is essentially an act of reverse engineering--figuring out what happened to the world, when, and how. The more we understand about this, the more we can project what will happen in the future. I think this is another way to think about the relationship between the disciplines of geology and design.
4. Deep Structure - The recent fascination with landscape in design has lead to thinking about architecture in terms of surface and topography. In geology, "one must develop a talent for seeing through the topography' and into the rock on which the topography was carved." (McPhee) Thinking geologically forces designers to think fully three-dimensionally construct mental maps of terrane. For rocks, "their unit-to-unit relationship--their stratigraphy and other juxtapositions--pondered as a whole is structure." (McPhee)

Literary Dystopias and Green Utopias

2008-09-04T13:26:00.001+08:00

Here’s a quickie…some recent articles/blogs/projects that have caught my eye.

LITERARY DYSTOPIAS

I’ve come across two articles on Dystopian visions of the future this morning that both refer to a bunch of dystopian literature. Since I have not read or heard of most of them I thought you might be interested also.

First, io9 features an article in their Liberal Dystopias segment called “Best Future Dystopias Where the Liberals Have Won.” The opening line describes the raison d’etre of the piece:

“The Republican Party is gathering in St. Paul, to put forth its vision of the future. And over the next few days, you'll be hearing a lot about the horrendous futures that could take shape if gormless liberals were allowed to run the show. Which makes us wonder: what does science fiction, the literature of the future, have to say about liberal-run dystopias?”

via i09

Second, I’m a little slow to this one (its all the way back from January 2008, light years in blogtime), but Adam Greenfield did an interesting piece on dystopian science fiction literature of the 1970’s in his blog Speedbird. Called “Along the Dystopia Line 1: I am your Density” it mainly discusses how SF writers in that period viewed high density urbanization as a pretty disastrous outcome for the human race. I like how he exposes SF’s fears of multiculturalism and cities in general in his description. I wonder if that is still a common trope for SF writers to use.

GREEN AVENGERS and their UTOPIAS

via crosshatchling

Guerilla Gardening has become a hot topic recently, with all the new books (1 and 2) and everything. Archinect offers a great review of the first book called Turf Wars (and Wars on Turf).

And finally, artist Anna Garforth takes guerilla gardening to the next level with her guerilla graffiti gardening (see pic above). Take that you low-level seedbombers!! This is highly cultivated guerilla gardening (pardon the pun).

Public Farm, Work AC

2008-09-03T10:15:00.012+08:00

Urban farms tend to oscillate between the polar extremes of totalizing urban systems (think Broadacre City) or isolated individuals diligently planting their terraces and sills (or the lone agrarian avenger seedbombing the destitute and vacant lots of our fair cities). Work AC’s Public Farm is sitting somewhere uncomfortably in the middle.

I like to think of it as a piece of driftwood—a misplaced fragment that tells the story of an extensive dendritic network, for it is the farm’s status as a complete architectural object that bothers me the most about the farm’s realization. Work AC’s reference to Superstudio’s Continuous Monument and Koolhaas’ Exodus seems to have been manifested primarily in a strong geometric form – a simple rectangular geometry with prismatic voids. At the scale of the PS.1 installation these gestures of monumentality seem quite diminutive. That is why I would prefer to have seen it treated as an all-encompassing infrastructure—perhaps referencing some of Superstudio’s other projects (see images below).

The primary element of the Public Farm contains all of the genetic code necessary to imagine the farm as a larger, more pervasive infrastructure. If so it could have avoided the ad hoc nature of the rest of the installation, which leaves a lot to be desired. The Public Farm’s repetitive module is easy to fabricate and install, and it is flexible enough to respond to singularities in topography and urban form.

Indeed, the strongest part of the design is its ability to operate across the multiple scales of furniture, architecture, and urbanism through a simple, direct formal gesture. One could imagine it as the connective tissue and iconographic symbol of a community in the way that Siza used water infrastructure in his Quinta da Malagueira social housing in Evora, Portugal.

The Public Farm is an ultra-witty piece of design, full of little tricks and gadgets to remind you that urban farms can not be thought of along the same lines as our grandparents’ pastoral landscapes but must be augmented, modified, digitized. The farm becomes urbanized through technology and persistent themes of voyeurism and artificiality.

In the end one can see the Public Farm as a reference to another one of Koolhaas’ early projects: the swimming pool featured in Delirious New York. Much like the swimmers trying to cross the Atlantic, society is now looking back to our agrarian past in order to figure out how to move forward.

Postlude: It’s been a few months since I first wrote about AgroURBanism and since then the press coverage of the subject has really blown up! It is all too much for me to really keep up with, hence my lack of recent postings on it. A couple of months ago I had the chance to check out this summer’s warm up installation, Public Farm 1 by Work AC which I wrote with reference to in that earlier post. This is kind of old news but I have been meaning to write a review of it ever since. This is now a work of historiography because the installation has been dismantled. But I thought it would be good now to write some thoughts about it since I have actually seen the artifact first hand.

See Previous: AgroURBanism 1, AgroURBanism 2

Sustainable Irony

2008-09-02T16:45:00.000+08:00

aka my depressing thought of the day

In today’s economy the ‘green’ rhetoric appears to be growing at a rate inversely proportional to the amount of ‘green’ projects getting built. As the global economy deteriorates rising construction costs, investment fears, and amplified value engineering will increasingly reduce our great green dream. At the same time, developers needing to improve ever diminishing returns will market themselves as more and more sustainable resulting in the persistent thinning of the green veneer.

The more you scream the less you get.

China Postcard

2008-08-28T10:18:00.001+08:00

China Postcard, originally uploaded by o d b.

Hello from China!
Beijing Welcomes You!
and Dave does too.
the weather is beautiful (sometimes)
the scenery is nice
the people are friendly
what happens in BJ stays in BJ!
until it gets exported
wish you were here
xoxo
Dave

Discussion of the Week: SimpliCity vs. ComplexCity

2008-08-26T12:24:00.006+08:00

One of our primary interests here at _URB_ is fostering discussion on issues relevant to urbanism and its related fields: architecture, landscape, and design. To help facilitate a more discursive atmosphere we are starting a new section featuring discussion topics that will be open to debate for one week. Please check in at the beginning of each week for the new topic. Also, if you have topic suggestions please do not hesitate to contact us.

Topic #1: SimpliCity vs. ComplexCity
The first topic that we would like to bring up for discussion is a debate between complexity and simplicity in the city. From the early moments of Postmodernism complexity has been celebrated as a worthwhile objective in both architecture and urbanism while the seemingly simplistic nature of the urban plans of the Modernists was vilified. Prior to Postmodernism the dissatisfaction with Modernist urban planning dogma had been growing for some time and is best exemplified in popular culture by the films of Jacques Tati such as Playtime and Mon Oncle. (1) In architecture the first signs of discontent began with the Team X group but it was perhaps not until Venturi first uttered the phrase “Less is a Bore” in Complexity and Contradiction that the floodgates of dissension were fully unlocked. Thus began what can beset be described as a disciplinarian full-court press in pursuit of the proper form of complexity that could overcome the damage that the elementarist attitude of the Modernists. (2) Rowe and Koetter’s Collage City, the research into the signs and systems of the ‘ordinary and ugly’ of Venturi and Scott Brown, the indexical mappings of Eisenman, the overlapping grids and fragmentation of deconstruction, and the montagic operations of Koolhaas/OMA were all attempts to imbue urbanism with the plurality, density, and ultimately the complexity that was determined missing from the Modernist City.

Over the last few years a new approach has developed, which is even known as the ‘Complexity Project.’ The complexity project’s most internationally recognized practitioners would be Hadid and Schumacher, but the group also includes firms such as Reiser + Umemoto (RUR), UN Studio, FOA, and countless other young practitioners. It is primarily associated with schools such as the AA in London (the DRL, EmTech, and Landscape Urbanism units in particular), Columbia University in New York, and the Angewandte in Vienna. In other words there is a tremendous amount of research and intellectual resources devoted to the Complexity Project.

The Complexity Project’s theory is based on a scientific understanding of complexity and is therefore related to computational, algorithmic, behavioral, and systems based approaches and ideas of emergence and self-organization. The complexity project is characterized by the use of advanced geometries such as Voronoi and Delaunay scripts; parametric software and the use of associative geometry are used to create fluid forms; and computational logics are used to digest massive amounts of information.

With these techniques they claim to trump both the mechanical approach of the Modernists and Postmodern’s rudimentary attempts at complexity. RUR claim that collage is the “accumulation of the merely different” and reject it in favor of “progressive differentiation” in their search for a “new conception of the universal.” This approach pushes for systems of variation rather than systems of variety. Hadid and Schumacher promote the concept of Parametric Urbanism and have developed techniques such as soft grids, fields, and pliant surfaces as a way to bring added richness to the city, although their strictly formal approach can be argued as not adequately contending with the real complexity of the city.

Recently I have been wondering if the Complexity Project is the appropriate response to the already overwhelming complexity of the contemporary metropolis. I wonder if we as designers should not be developing strategies to make them less overwhelming and more comprehensible. Using John Maeda’s concept of simplicity I wonder if we can come up with an idea for the SimpliCity. Recently there has been a backlash of sorts in response to the ComplexCity project. Some people argue that the diagrammatic fluidity of some of their projects belie a paradoxical lack of flexibility in the final fom--in it's use and adaptability. Groups like Dogma in Europe have been arguing for more formal autonomy and strong, identifiable geometry. This might be an initial way of understanding what the SimpliCity could be. I would also like to point out the progress of product design towards simpler interfaces and minimal design, Apple’s iPod being the perfect example (or think of virtually any Apple product compared to their competitors). In pop culture we might look to the evolution of the robot as demonstrated by Wall-E and Eva.

So now I would like to ask all of you, what do you think of the idea of the SimpliCity? What would it be? How would it operate? Would it create a desirable city or is the notion of complexity more appropriate for unleashing the potential of the city? How can we utilize simplicity without falling in the same traps as the early modernists?

In addition to these questions I am also providing some images below for visual stimulation. I cannot wait to hear what you all have to say!

1. Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities is obviously another example.
2. Best described in the first chapter of Reyner Banham's Theory and Design in the First Machine Age.

NYT - Curious World of the Last Stop

2008-08-25T08:37:00.007+08:00

Over the weekend there was a great article in the New York Times which surveys every last stop on all the subway lines in NYC. It is supplemented by a super interesting interactive page featuring maps, photographs, videos, and interviews (see screen shots below). Is it just me or is NYT really taking these interactive features to the next level lately?

Here is some of the text by Andy Newman from the article:

At the city’s often-threadbare fringes, there is an inescapable sense of lonesomeness. There might be a Last Stop Deli, a forlorn bar, a maintenance yard populated mostly by rows of empty trains. There is, surprisingly often, a cemetery.
Yet to visit all the system’s extremities is to see that the last stop is not a single, monolithic place. There are subway lines that end, logically, where the city runs out of land; lines that end, anticlimactically, where builders ran out of money; even a few that fetch up in bustling downtowns of one sort or another. From the marshy lowlands of Tottenville to the lush hills of Riverdale to the ceaseless clangor of Flushing, the end of the line manages to take in the entire breadth of the city beyond Midtown Manhattan.

Photos by Richard Perry via NY Times

I have to mention that some of the photographs remind me of some of the "not last stops" of some of the subway systems in cities like Atlanta, GA, where, particularly on the south side of the city, some of the stations exist in desolation, quarantined from the urban areas they are intended to serve by other infrastructure or vast parking lots catering to that city's culture of auto-mobility.

Below is a diagram I produced last year showing why MARTA stations in the city of Atlanta produce the island effect:

It makes me wonder what Disney could do at these locations?
NY Times article found via Planetizen