PATRICK

Laying out work takes a ridiculous amount of time.  Some additional work has been done as shown below - I've identified exactly which members undergo buckling and how much buckling.  With this information, I'm going to remodel the component frame with engineered timber in mind so that the segments that have undergone the most buckling with have thicker timber parts to them.  I've also had a tutorial with both Wolf and Javier who agreed with pushing ahead with this!  The project is finally gaining momentum at the 11th hour! A bit tight for TS though...!

 

I'm in the middle of laying out a number of pages that covers further testing of the geometry of my structure for TS.  As recommended, this time the structure was made from spaghetti! I've now managed to get the geometry so that it is stable under loads which is good news.  However, I'm not entirely happy with it aesthetically now, so I'm hoping that the nest stage of looking at material will bring back some of the aesthetics I've lost.  Below is a picture of the test model and part of a drawing that lists all the results I've taken.

A weekend of work work work! I've been testing the geometry of my model through thin sticks and glue and spending much time consolidating my work so far so there's a clear direction to where I've got to.  It's made me realise that, even though I've been jumping around enormously, there's elements of most of the work done to date that has been brought forward.  I'll print out all the new layouts for tomorrow in addition to latest new work, but below are a few snap-shots...

With two TS tutorials today I've been working getting the geometry of the structure sorted out a bit more. Wolf suggested doing a number of structural studies with simple cocktail sticks or even spaghetti and going through iterations to get the best result that also ensures light and circulation still works...  I'll keep modeling and drawing tonight, so I have a clearer indication of what do test physically.

Have spent much of the weekend looking at geometry and how I link together the forums on different floors.  But of course this isn't answering 'what is the forum'. The general size and relation to each I know, but I don't yet know exactly what they are. Saturday and Sunday was spent looking at a geometry for the infill and not the forums. Images are below of this. I began to link the voids together that in turn defines the forum.  However I should be working in reverse. The geometry should be designed for the forums themselves.  I'm therefore beginning with the infill grid and punctuating it with a forum at each level in the location I've already specified.  So long as the connections between the different levels occur between the different forums, then it'll work. I'll keep drawing this up so it'll become much more clear for tomorrow...

I've just come out of a 1.5hr tutorial with Javier! Very positive and was great to pin down the next steps before the TS deadline.  What I've been doing over the last 36 hours is to 1. adapt my scheme to the site (river and grid), 2. look at a single light well and how it mediates vertically through the floors and forums, wrapping, dividing etc etc 3. Looking at the outer parts where the void is not necessary, but where I'm arguing for a form of terracing that responds to the river and the park forum, and square forum.  I've been doing plans and sections in sketches, and have drawn out the plan as shown below so I know exactly what the dimensions and proportions are.  The Rhino is combining the plan with section sketches into 3D which is still ongoing....  It's certainly making much more sense than it was yesterday.  The curved arches I quickly put in to have a conversation with Javier, but by putting them in, I'm beginning to see how they could be used to mediate my light wells...  Will carry on working...

Everything IS coming together, and the following IS making sense(!).  I'm going to push through to have some clear drawings for tomorrows tut, but have included an evolution (5 iterations) of the top floor plan so far.  It very much COMBINES all my previous studies and therefore isn't just another variation - promise!

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.

The plan below is a refinement to the previous version; indicating the progression from no green space - forum to all green space near the river.  I've also started to put it into 3D. Below include some Rhino shots.  There's still many many questions to be answered, but it's a start at least.

Some further guidance is certainly needed as I don't feel as though I'm clear.  I've been looking at how I can simplify each of the forum types - have some very clear rules that are super simple but give complexity in how they are associated with each other.  So I've been looking at a-periodic tiling that occurs in both 2D and 3D. It's leading me in an interesting direction although I feel as though I'm becoming stuck once again.  Here's some images below that give an idea of what I've been looking at.

Two images so far. After a clear steer from today's tutorial I'm looking at how to simplify each Forum type and how they are nested next to each other.  This includes looking at types of tiling (bottom image), the principals of which can be used to multiply the forum using very simple bounding box geometry, but how they're arranged and their associations give the required complexity.  Back to it!

Step by step I've been taking a typical example of one of the Forum types and manipulating it with regard to itself - dimensions, boundary conditions, connections, wall thickness etc. A typical Hall Forum has been drawn and a typical Square Forum.  I've also begun to look at how these are joining together which redefines the conditions above and the scope of the infill. 

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

After the frustrations of last week, I've focused on my manifesto (in addition to modeling), to better grasp the direction of the project.  This is the first time it's been rewritten since the comments from the Jury, and writing it has definitely helped me to move forward.  Let me know what you think.  I realise it can be clarified further, but hopefully the main points have been conveyed including the fictional element.  Firstly the title of the project has evolved from The Inverted City to Forurbia. Rhino modeling and drawings to follow...

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.

 

Applying this to site. Firstly the existing LA grid was deformed to allow for the river to expand in locations and to contract in others to form links between. This new grid defines the Parkorums; the largest of the Forums, that maximises the amount of public green space at ground level for the city. It also forms the connections to the forums that spiral up above the Parkorums.  I'm now looking into how all this works in three dimensions...

There are five forums as mentioned earlier; each successive forum emanating, and being derived from the previous. Where they intersect at the same level, they join up to allow for circulation through and structure. WIP. Next is deforming this logic to the site conditions...

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.
 

Beginning to sketch out the main Forums; Parkorums on the site. These are situated around the amended River; a proposal by the LA River Revitalisation Project to promote habitat, recreation and land value whilst maintaining flood protection.  The spine of the River that also acts as a new and much needed infrastructural route to the centre of LA will be the principal Forum that binds the Parkorums together.  Off from these (yet to be added) will be four other forum types of different scales; Squarum, Halrum, Semorum & Livorum.

The first few site plans will be uploaded on the blog shortly which begin to configure the Forums over the site using the Los Angeles River.  I've also gone through all the work I've done to date and future work that I know I need to cover and have completely rearranged the order to make a clearer argument for the Inverted City. I'll re-organise the White Book soon, below is the new Contents Page as a starter. Each line will roughly correspond to a double page spread and includes the TS outline.
  

THE INVERTED CITY CONTENTS

 

1. 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 5^th 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

 

 

 

An appreciation of LA, its movies and architecture.... Los Angeles Plays Itself

The weekend has been looking at the notes I wrote from the Jury last Friday. Some amazingly positive and constructive comments came from the floor which will inevitably change the direction of the project.  There are however also some concerns and further questions, not least around one of the comments to hold back on TS for now (We only have a few weeks until our first draft submission..!  Ahhh...)

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.

This is where the real criticism came from: One of the jurors referred to it as scrambled eggs. They are tests which need to go back on to make sense of. But here they are: