PHREE_URB 05

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famous perspective view showing a luxurious terrace from which the ‘primitive’ nature is to be contemplated) has been superseded by an attempt to turn the tower into a wild, unkempt vegetal structure (that same luxurious terrace now becomes a place to inhabit that ‘primitive’ nature).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

PHREE_URB 04

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.

ECOTRANSITIONAL URBANISM

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_.

CAA Phase 2 by Amateur Architecture Studio

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

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

Public Farm, Work AC

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