V.04 "FLOCKING VS MACHINE"

W.03 "DEFINING URBAN SITES"

The reading this week really engaged my imagination, defining a site is hard enough without the implications of influence on ever expanding larger scales. Kahn starts to mirror the same step in the thesis process I'm currently engaged in, where an urban site refers not only to a specific location of intervention but to the entire city as well. I wish to work to continue a sites boundaries to showcase possible communication with adjacencies instead of bounding my site as shown in the Palmanuova Plan of 1713. I found the five concepts of urban site thinking refreshing and helpful, especially the notion of mobile ground. "Mobile ground describes a space of progression, slippage, and continual revaluation, where diverse realities tip over, into, and out of each other. It is where site boundaries and site images shift, bend, and flex, depending on who is looking. Its focus on urban sites as dynamic and provisional spaces where points or departure take on more meaning the places of arrival is a concept I would like to explore further. Secondly, a pivotal point of the essay is the concept of unbound sites, where any actions for a limited site in a city is at once influenced by, and has consequences for, the city as a site. This issue of scale and lack of isolation is what makes urban design a public endeavor and one that attracts me to it.

V.03 "FLOCKING"

"There is no better way to illustrate how complexity can erupt from many local interacting decisions than flocking. The individual elements might be plants and animals in an ecosystem, vehicles in traffic, or people in crowds. If one considers the city a dynamic in which systems of flow - such as traffic, circulation of goods, or crowd behavior - can be applied to any urban transformation, then flocking provides a vital model of complex coordination that describes these material shifts."

- Tooling / Aranda, Lasch

W.02 "THE MUSES ARE NOT AMUSED"

Silvetti reduces the lines of contemporary architectural design to finite concepts that he argues determine the outcome of design through their respective approaches. Program-ism creates architectural design through the conversion of programatic diagrams into built 'form', Thematization "seeks to shorten the distance between the model used as a referent and the architecture produced to invoke it," Blobs create forms without meaning, Literalism takes language and derives formal representations directly through metaphors.

I'm not one for such gross reductivism, instead I see a gray area where aspects of each could be expunged to enhance a design. Of course a programmatic diagram cannot be mistaken for tectonics, but they do help analyze potential occupant relationships. Thematization may not be relevant in the realm of academia, but the public loves the referent more then they do the repercussions. Blobs harken to our nostalgia of the future and science fiction, yet Silvetti provides insight in the manner when he writes "it is only a matter of time before our nostalgia for the future will become just as ridiculous and debilitating" as any historical revivalist periods that have come before. I don't believe that Literalism really exists, I believe people often don't have the words to describe their intentions and/or finished products so they hide beneath a veil of conceptualism and metaphors. So my idea is to create architecture not solely in any of these realms, but to pull from multiple disciplines and medias so as to create a strong enough catalogue of referents to position the design with its greatest potential.

V.02 "POP CULTURE REFERENCE No.1"

Peter Jackson's "District 9" claims that xenophobia was not an intended theme...

1 + 3 + 9 = (POSITION PAPER V1.1)

Unlawful settlement development has been trivialized by contemporary architecture.

Shanty towns are housing units of irregular low cost self constructed building material erected on illegally seized lands. Local municipalities will not support these communities with urban planning and utilities. Cities have grown to meet these towns, resulting in violent demonstrations when occupants are evicted as their homes are seized and razed.

Squatter settlements represent a critical concern for the future of urban life, already more than 1 billion people live in unsuitable housing. Without legal access to water, electricity, and an educational system residents (mostly of whom are employed) have little chance of moving on. An architectural response to the problem would have to improvised for variations in climate and available building material. Self-sustainable adaptability in the urban scale for planning and growth, and unit scale for occupant habitability. As opposed to slums, these towns are places of hope, scenes of a counter-culture, with an encouraging potential for change and strong impetus. Squatter camps, imijondolo, barrios, favelas, bidonvilles, gecekondu, khoshash, or zhopdi, are the new suburbs now confronting metropolis. The city must take ownership and give legitimacy to this style of unmanaged urban growth for the health of its citizens. Unlawful settlements are starting to organize politically, this should start changing public policy in many developing countries (their built environment will change, which is the only constant). Thus architects, designers, and urban planners will have to be prepared for a new urban fabric suburb constantly in flux.

V.01 "HOW TO DRAW UP A PROJECT"

over 1.3 billion people living in squatter settlements...

sounds like a job for an architect.