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_.

UPDATE: Relic of the Ancient Future

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:

Discussion of the Week: SimpliCity vs. ComplexCity

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.