





Below I've included the 'infill',

Plan without infill:

Plan with infill:






WIP model below - will continue modeling for tomorrow...





Taking the blockwork pattern I had a few weeks back and the branching variation just before, I've combined the two with elements of the other ideas to produce something which is uber simple, and gets rid of any unnecessary curved geometry that really isn't helping for the moment. The following variations are a top floor plan, showing with varying scales the 5 different forums. As a whole the building has 5 floors (5 forums). You gain access to each in a pinwheel motion from the previous larger forum from the floor below via a ramp - there will be no lifts, because I'm promoting chance interactions between forums as well as in them. The way the light wells are positioned, they also define varying sizes of closed forums on each floor below. So the ground floor which holds the largest Parkorum, will have various closed forums on the same level surrounding it.
This text is confusing I know. I think it's better if I just get on with the drawings....
First attempt of the 5th floor plan (I begin from the top and work down for now) - this one has far too many light wells (void symbol) for programme to occur freely below.

Attempt 2; I've nested the upper forums together to remove a number of the light wells. It's a denser plan, but access between the living and seminar forums are not overlapping, so they need to be shifted with one another to ensure this occurs.

Type Three; below, the light wells are relatively small and don't vary in size towards the lower levels.

Next, too many light wells have been added between the forums, so have removed a few by increasing the amount I nest the forums.

Below is the final variation for now - still not perfect, but I'll draw a more detailed plan for each of the five floors for tomorrow and aim to get it onto rhino to help clarify everything... Sorry - there's a few baby steps in my head waiting to spill out onto paper!





The above isn't a periodic, but I've taken a traditional block arrangement (a grid) and begun to rotate it to increasing amount towards the river, in doing so creating more public and less private space whilst maintaining circulation throughout. So the traditional grided circulation becomes the forum circulation closer to the river.
Below is beginning to look at a-periodic tiling - here, using only two types of tiles that can be repeated, but with no part being the same as any other part. Something I wan't to carry on looking at throughout the day.


The square bounding box contains only 1 type of forum nested within. The region between the boundary of this forum and the bounding box is the area of infill - an area in which I don't design. It's similar to the existing LA grid - The grid becomes my forums that connect horizontally and vertically. The area between the forums is the infill in a similar way to the areas between the LA grid system.
Drawings will be continued... Below are variations on a typical Hall Forum

Below, a typical (town) Square Forum

And beginning to look at how they connect to one another horizontally

Forurbia The American Dream, Los Angeles fictional fifth ecology.
Preface:
Rockefeller Center Ideological Rebrief
The
Rockefeller Center was designed as an iconic symbol to fulfil a fictional dream
of the American people. The Great Depression and the recent end to the Great
War embodied this dream in the form of a new micro city that resisted the
Manhattan Grid and gave inspiration to a new and bright future. The vision of
the architect Raymond Hood was to respond to this dream with five "points of a
new architecture"; aesthetics and scale, unifying cultures, programme schism,
gardens in the sky and creating a plaza at ground breaking the city grid.
The
fictional dream of the American people that Raymond Hood was responding to
eighty years ago is emerging once again.
Manhattan and the World has evolved, the fictional dream has also
evolved, but the solutions of Raymond Hood's five points of a new architecture
remain the same. Just this time on
an entirely different scale. Now
is the time to ideologically rebrief how the Rockefeller Center can be
transformed to capture the fictional dream of the American people today.
The
Rockefeller Center as we know it will be fragmented, expanded, rotated and
translated to allow for the five points of new architecture to be fictionally
inserted. Aesthetics and scale will give hope after a new economic depression,
cultures will be unified through the insertion of the Forum, programme will be
mixed throughout from residential to education, gardens will adorn the rooftops
and filter down, and the plaza and subterranean vaults will break the Manhattan
grid.
Together,
the Rockefeller Center Ideological Rebrief will dream a brave and bold new
fictional city that will begin to meet the dreams of the American people in the
same way that Raymond Hood envisaged eighty years ago.
Forurbia:
Los Angeles Ideological Rebrief
Los
Angeles: a perpetual American Dream. A city that has been able to decline how a
traditional city is formed, and in doing so has continually adapted itself. A city of continued experimentation,
Los Angeles has allowed the inhabitants to fulfil their own dream and turn a
fictional ideal into a reality. A
reality away from the squalor of a suffocating traditional city, an urban
homestead where a plot becomes your estate and house your castle, individual
and highly adaptable.
The movies
of Hollywood perceive LA as a dream in the same way, each different from the
other. The houses and automobiles
are equal figments of this great dream.
The city distorted, fragmented and adapted fictionally by the
scriptwriter to meet their own idea of how they perceive the city. From the romanticism through Grease, to
the destruction through Terminator, LA has continuously reinvented itself.
The
adaptation of the American dream into reality led Rayner Banham to describe LA
as consisting of four very distinct ecologies. Surfurbia, Foothills, The Plains of Id and Autopia. Together, they have allowed fiction to
become a reality. However, the
city has evolved further since Rayner Banham.
The
American economy has just been through a depression, and there has never been a
more pressing time to unify cultures and faiths. The cities crippling
infrastructure has created angry home owners who now dream of more public
space. The city of perpetual
experimentation must once again envisage a fictional ideal and transform itself
to fulfil the dreams of the American people. The Los Angeles Ideological Rebrief will therefore capture
the American dream and manifest it to a fictional fifth ecology. An ecology that reconfigures the
existing city and its four ecologies into a single networked co-dependent
ecology and continue to allow both the Los Angeles inhabitant and Hollywood
director to perceive their own unique dream within: The urban Forum, Forurbia.
In the same
way as the Hollywood film director, each existing ecology will be fragmented,
expanded, rotated and translated to allow for Forurbia to be fictionally
inserted. Together, the Los Angeles Ideological Rebrief will give a
new fictional city that will begin to meet the dreams of the American people in
the same way that were met through the creation of the cities four ecologies,
into a new fifth ecology, Forurbia.



The work shown on Friday, below, very much showed a diagrammatic approach to how the river will be returned to its natural course, and how each successive Forum will be based around the river. Since then, some work has been done to understand how each type of Forum relates to each other and how they can be successfully applied to the site as a plan.


THE INVERTED CITY CONTENTS
- Re-Brief
i. Re-imagining an icon
1.
Smithsons Economist
Building, London
2.
Rockefeller Center
a.
Rockefeller Center, New
York
b.
Rockefeller as an Icon
c.
5 Projects through Rem
Koolhaas
3.
MicroCities
a.
The MicroCities of
Rockefeller and Exodus
b.
Cities within the City
c.
The Mountain
ii. Rockefeller Center Ideological Rebrief
1.
Rockefeller Center
1920's Vision
2.
Rockefeller Center
Rebrief
2. Iconic Context
i. Manifesto
ii. Four Ecologies
1.
Los Angeles Early Growth
2.
Cinematic Influence
3.
Four Ecologies by Rayner
Banham
a.
Surfurbia
b.
Foothills
c.
The Plains of Id
d.
Autopia
iii. Fifth Ecology
1.
Los Angeles since Rayner
Banham
2.
Future Growth & The
Non Stop City
3.
The Los Angeles Grid
4.
NIMBY
5.
Vision
a.
The Need for Green
b.
Civic Pride
c.
Scale Inversion
6.
The 5th
Ecology: LA Reinvention, The Forum
iv. The River Revitalisation Project
1.
River Industrialisation
2.
Vision
3.
Analysis
a.
Watershed
b.
Natural Habitat
c.
Access to Parks
d.
Land Use
v. The Site
1.
Reasoning for Site
Choice
2.
San Fernando Valley
a.
Urban Infrastructure
b.
Rural Infrastructure
c.
Population Density
d.
Programme
3.
Canoga Park
a.
Grid &
Infrastructure
b.
Figure Ground
c.
Programme
4.
River Project at Canoga
Park
vi. The Knowledge Economy
1.
The Effects on a City
vii. Campus Designs
1.
Utopian Knowledge &
Diagram
2.
Analysis
a.
Berlin Freie
b.
Berlin Freie Competition
c.
East Anglia Campus
d.
Chicago Humanities
e.
Bochum Competition
3. Iconic Proposal
i. Manifesto
ii. Initial Studies
1.
The Inversion Principal
a.
On a Plane
b.
In three dimensions
2.
Massing
a.
Volume for a City within
a City
b.
Public vs Private
Analysis
c.
Initial Configurations
iii. The Forum
1.
Forum Hierarchy Diagram
2.
Site Studies
a.
Boundary Conditions
b.
Revitalising the River
c.
The Forums
i. Parkorum
ii. Squarum
iii. Halrum
iv. Semorum
v. Livorum
d.
Adjacencies
e.
In Section
3.
Cities within the City
4.
Connecting Urban to
Rural
4. Constructing The Inverted City
i. Manifesto
ii. Natural State of Timber
1.
The Vision of Timber
2.
Precedents
a.
Geometry
i. dRMM Timber Towers
ii. Savill Building, Glen Howells Architects
iii. Metz Centre Pompidou by Shigeru Ban
b.
Material
i. Japanese Timber Construction Techniques
ii. Scandinavian Timber Construction Techniques
c.
Conversations with
i. Karl Heinz (KLH Timber)
ii. Charles Walker (Engineering Approach)
iii. Alex de Rijke (Architectural Vision)
3.
Material Behaviour
a.
Timber Properties
i. Solid Timber
ii. Engineered Timber
b.
Flat vs Beam
iii. Structural Solution
1.
Hypothesis
2.
Geometry & Material
Behaviour
a.
Hyperbolic Surfaces
i. Stressed Skin
ii. Multiple Stressed Skins
iii. Seam Behaviour
b.
Load Transfer
c.
Deflection
3.
Environmental Conditions
a.
Light Requirements
b.
Air Requirements
iv. Application to Site
1.
The Logic in Detail
a.
Plans
2.
The Logic in Whole
a.
Plans
v. Construction
1.
Material Waste vs
Overdesign
2.
Transportation
3.
Sequence
4.
Fire-proofing
5.
Replacing Segments
vi. Models and Prototype
A few main points. Firstly the criticism that I've proposed a geometry that couldn't possibly be the golden key to solving the 'problems' of LA. In addition to this, LA won't necessarily buckle under the strain of its bulging infrastructure. Instead LA is highly adaptable and have proved the critiques wrong on many occasions. In fact, many including one of the jurors believe LA is a great success. Further criticism came from not using my argument for Rockefeller with LA. I adapted Rockefeller in a fictional way to once again become an iconic city within a city to meet the challenges of today, in the same way that it did in the 1930's when it was built. Then, it solved challenges with the American people, such as building an iconic building after the Great Depression. So taking this logic to LA; how can I fragment, scale, rotate LA and reconfigure it in a fictional way to meet the challenges of today...
This is something I've been thinking a lot about aver the weekend, but so far not sure at all how to start doing it.
Another main point was looking at the urban scale; not focusing in on a building part that I did for the jury. I really need a strategy for the site as a whole before I can even begin looking at smaller scales.
Thirdly, I really need to redo my presentation and include more work that I've done and expand on others, such as talking more about Rayner Banham. This is something that will hopefully become clearer as I continue with the White Book.
Model:
The Jurors mentioned I need to hold off for a while with TS. I really feel TS should be integrated within the project from the outset, so there is plenty to get on with including case studies etc. Below is a sketch model that was meant to be produced for Friday and something I took into a TS tutorial today.



