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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!

PHREE_URB 06 || ECOMETROPOLITANISM

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.

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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

Happy NYE and PHREE Update

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!

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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

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!

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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.

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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?