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famous perspective view showing a luxurious terrace from which the ‘primitive’ nature is to be contemplated) has been superseded by an attempt to turn the tower into a wild, unkempt vegetal structure (that same luxurious terrace now becomes a place to inhabit that ‘primitive’ nature).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

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