Manifesto

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.