February 2010 Archives

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.