ciudades del futuro

“Cities of the Future” was sponsored by the History Channel, here in Atlanta this year. Washington DC and San Francisco were also featured. The competition encourages architect’s utopian visions of how our cities may be formed in the next hundred years.

Many, many of my past/present/and future studio professors were involved. Some through the official Georgia Tech team and others through their own firms. The point was to visually describe a futuristic scenario for Atlanta’s growth exactly one hundred years from today, hopefully while creating a building typology to rival that of the ancients (hence, the competition being sponsored by the History channel). A lot of students participated too, several friends of mine, mostly second year grads. During this same time frame however, I was working on the Urban Land Institute’s graduate level urban design competition. So I took merely an hour to sneak away from that prep to take some photos of my current studio professor’s entry. They named it “UberAtlanta” haha. Gotta love the Dutch.

Here’s the slightly more mainstream entry from what turned out to be Atlanta’s winners. They will go on to compete against the winners from DC and Sanny Franny.

More pictures on Flickr.

 

the structure of vagueness

To waste time before school starts to kick in, I’m reading TransUrbanism, and thus naturally jumped right to the first chapter with Lars’ name in the byline, ‘The Structure of Vagueness’. He actually starts off with the same historical architecture references that he uses in our studio proposal (Transurbanism published in 2002, studio proposal written in 2008, respectively). But at least now I understand the pretense better, the references being Antonio Gaudi (Sagrada Familia) and Frei Otto (Institute for Lightweight Structures).

Apparently, they both deal with ‘materials that can process forces by transformation’.

He experimented with this idea through a studio at Columbia that used the “wool water technique” to ‘calculate the shape of city patterns’ with a merging and bifurcating geometry. (I’m sure all my CP friends/professors would flip right about now – what? using threads to determine the lay out cities?!). I’ll post some scans showing the results of this process later, but basically, what emerges is a not a highly formalized, axial based grid like Paris, Rome or DC, but a “vague order” (with still connecting street blocks, thank goodness) that more resembles an Olmstead-ish Ansley Park. Lars’ names this new experiment “soft rigidity” instead of the “frozen rigidity” of angular geometry past. Thus the voids become the definition of space, rather than the strict and forceful axial roadways.

This is not really a novel idea. Maybe in architecture used to form buildings, but forming a city structure around public space isn’t a new concept. But then he goes on to mess with the architect’s historical penchant for unprogrammed ‘open space’. We all know, through many, many, many poor examples in urban planning, that unplanned, unprogrammed open spaces go vacant, eventually to become derelict and menaces to their surroundings. But the article here seems to suggest that if we just rename this space, we’ll solve the social, political, economic, and psycological problems humans encounter while moving through and trying to operate in it. He suggests,

We must replace the passive flexibility of neutrality with an active flexibility of vagueness.

Uh huh. The theory goes that if neutrality merely allows for formal and informal conduct, vagueness actually relates them. In a vague building, this is named structural Situationism, purposely allowing for derives (woohoo Libero!) as structural properties. If events/spaces/structure is precisely unplanned, that is now ok, because “the structure will engage itself in the ways decisions are made”. The theory opposes Mies’ empty openness and encourages solid vagueness.

Right.

 

the year of Lars

So, surprise surprise, I got Lars Spuybroek for studio this year. After three months of playing along on the sidelines, I decided it was time to jump in and really learn something. The studio is set up this time not based on knots, but on something he initially referred to as “textile tectonics”. The first time we met with him (he was still on a plane during the studio lottery), he corrected himself, and is now naming the studio, “variable nets”. Pure vocabulary if you ask me, but he thought that not only was the double T harder to roll off the tongue, but it implied a separate system of skin and structure. Variable netting implies a softer, yet more rigid system of design integration.

Our program is different as well. Instead of private residences, we’re composing skyscrapers. Hopefully, at the end of the semester, instead of amorphous blobs we’ll have . . . . well, tall amorphous blobs. (pictured is NOX’s world trade center competition entry)

We’ll be studying the history of the skyscraper and developing a framework based on Gottfried Semper’s idea of the “textile” skin and tectonic “bone”.

 

sculptural infinity

I’ve been researching molding techniques for Lars’ class. Mostly related to concrete, iron, and resin. Most of the information I’ve been pulling up is in science journals from the 1940s. Which is helpful only to the extent of understanding the historic process, and maybe how to set up a patent. Figuring out how to mold the highly curvilinear patterns from the previous semester is going to be rough. So I was quite surprised when I stumbled upon the work of Erwin Hauer. The methods of molding behind his continua series are very similar to the methods I think we’ll be using in Lars’ class. His screen walls have seen a resurgance of interest since his book was published in 2004 (Hauer was born in 1926).

“Continuity and potential infinity have been at the very center of my sculpture from early on.”

He’s been featured in Arch Record and his interview with Metropolis was quite revealing of the process he’s using now to replicate his decades old designs. Formerly, they just used traditional wood formed concrete molds, but they are now integrating CAD technologies and plastics. Using the techniques Hauer invented over fifty years ago would have been to expensive and time consuming. His partner, Enrique Rosado, spent months working with computers to input all his models and experiment with different materials but ultimately Hauer was dissatisfied.

“When we first made the prototype and he saw it, he was very polite and said, ‘Well, what else are you going to do?’”

“This is my obsession,” Hauer says. “Tension in a surface—it’s almost like a life force.”

This lessens my confidence in our ability to quickly and effectively physically model the designs. If a man who has dedicated his life to 3D sculpting is having difficulty achieving satisfactory results, we might be in trouble.