urban design [UD] makes me nervous. not necessarily the outcome, built, although it usually gets me thinking, but more the aspect of planning as an act. the planning act is highly connected to the time it is undertaken. so to say we are dealing with fashion manifested as built form. with fashion I am not only talking about the color and style, but more the self-concept of the society as such.
even more than in architecture UD is representing the current society and its vision. architecture probably is closer involved with fashion and trends but is also able to cover it's ambitions with a style, color or material. UD on the other hand is kind of honest and lays bare the capacity of the society building it. one could argue, it therefore is a summary of the social and scientific background of the time. to follow, this idea would open the possibility to read something into any UD. say the barcelona masterplan with its octagon blocks and rigid grid reefers to the rationality of the scociety surrounding its development. it would be interesting to see how detailed such an interpretation could be developed. but in this case I would guess this.
past UD-visions were usually based in a wider such context. say related to architecture, art, science and society. see 1920's le corbusier's plans of rationality and separation. the intention was to clean up and install a plan that would be able to answer all the questions.
in terms of UDtoday there is now up to date theory covering these aspects. my vision for this project would be to outline such a concept of UD.
what I am talking about is the idea of something that lies beyond the obvious labels of UD. these labels size, high-with relation, connection, [space syntax], color, material, grain, usage, ownership, density... seem to me like materials to build something upon, but I d'rather be interested to talk about the tools to handle them.
something must be responsible for the setting of those elements. as stated above those settings can be seen as society rooted, and therefor a statement of the current state of the art. fashion and trends are probably not predictable, lots of theories around predicting this must exist. here I would say it could be more something as state of the art rather than visionary. if it would be possible to root UD in society that would already be a lot. in the end I do believe in something like a collective memory. UD as a massive form representing this. like the thought I mentioned once in one of my plymouth posts, UD as a body extension. is it possible that one can/does experience UD as a body extension. experiencing and shaping the urban environment at the same time? how far can a intellectual body extension be stretched?
I am thinking about some references just like you guys [J_L] did in your bartlett project, you had some interesting references into science. could be into physics, math [fractals, space syntax, systems, ...], neurotics, medicine, sociology, art, fashion, it, computing, communications, design, material, environment, ...
to refer this vision to my former topic "cycles" [C] I would interpret the aim of the investigation undertaken at the bartlett as a search for an element that drives movement within an urban setting. as a vision Cs could be an element of an urban driving system that contents objects, relations and Cs. this was my basic picture, but I was not able to built up enough evidence to proof anything. but there too was the aim to research on the driving forces behind urban live. also the AKA project could be read as an investigation in this direction, the search for the basic elements of UD. we talked long enough about floating and reconfiguration elements until the "city" dissolved. but again at this point we where not able to come up with the essentials nor the drivers beyond the elements we managed to supersede - so it is kind of time to try again : )
I read an article about the possible split of the new yorker OMA office from its sister office in rotterdam. it is probably down to a dispute between the master rem and the new head of the new york branch. the argument of the guys in new york is basically that they want to establish a new vision of architecture that moves away from the one genius idea in architecture [thats why they think they can not continue working with rem k. as he is an celebrity in architecture and widely recognized as a genius...]. they call it HYPER-RATIONAL [2.2]. sounds great and basically means bringing the intellectual architecture on an even more rationalized level [can't believe it]. explained is it as talking things down to essentials. in order to take decisions and setup directions on those simplified findings.
transferred this idea into this vision, it would be trying to brake UD down and reach trough the decoration of the above "materials" to access the simple links within the society - UD system.
I do see our locations [the different towns] as test and specially recourse areas, where different findings and outputs can be compared.
in order to find essentials this comparison could be the key point. trough comparing the same aspects we would be able to filter out data that refers to underling processes. I imagine it to be real fun to dismantle bogota, london and plymouth/basel. a reassemble in a different order/mixture could be even more fun, having good old ben in bogota high-street and drake-circus at the riviera basel.
to go about it: braking urban structures into fragments is a matter of systems/perspective. say we could brake along extended analysis lines, such as transport links with infrastructure - multistory parking. in terms of history, starting with a urban timeline, we could look at elements from the past that survived and up to now have a relevance within the city structure. ex: union street in plymouth, covent-garden in london.
this would suggest that we continue on the strategy but transfer investigations consequently across the different locations. we end up having a comparable catalog of topics revealed from three/four different scenes.
what do we need a UD theory for? is it useful to know how to do it, to act in different cases? what is the meaning of such a theory. it can't be a how to do manual. this goes too low. I do see a theory more as a state of the art description. a sketch of interrelations and a manifesto for the urban society and positioning UD in the light of a collective commitment rather than a collage of genius visions. this would give consideration to UD as a continuos and collective process and incorporate its fluidity referring to the society it is constituted out of. the word theory is probably not the right one, it claims to be too intellectual. it should be rather guerilla style - [plymouth under attack, bogota under attack, london under attack, basel under attack]
to conclude, I have no idea what I just wrote about and even less clue of how to go about it. it is basically a collection of feelings if not dreams, but maybe for a vision dreams are essential, specially with a personal favor for utopias.
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fan_visionStatement_2007-11-25
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maybe this is more of a statement rather than a vision....
[1.0] K E Y W O R D S
.1 >interpretation of designs
.2 >summary of state of the art
.3 >independent statement
.4 >new theory
.5 >underlying process
.6 >hyper-rational
.7 >city comparison
.8 >
.9 >...
[2.0] R E F E R E N C E S
.1 >barcelona masterplan
.2 >prinz-ramus/rem koolhaas OMA twist - businessweek.com, interview with Joshua Prince-Ramus, feb 23, 2006 - "We believe in a hyper-rational process where you accept the constraints, conditions, and challenges of a project, and you attempt to engage them by going back to first principles. You don't accept any convention. ... Our observation is that if you do this hyper-rational, almost dumb process of taking everything back to first principles, it's tiring as hell, but you start to construct something that has never been done before -- something that transcends convention."
>[http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/feb2006/id20060223_523277.htm?chan=innovation_architecture_architecture+lead]
>[http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/95/open_design-prince-ramus.html]
>[http://www.archinect.com/forum/threads.php?id=35551_0_42_0_C] what the web-community has to say
[3.0] L A B E L S
.1 >work
.2 >research
1 comment:
In general, I do appreciate the determination to develop a set of tools. I think at the moment, we couldn’t start with the theory (that takes long time), hence start with tools or vision with detailed reference should be a good platform. The question now should what tools are we going to develop? F, could you elaborate more? Do you mean something like ways to study a city?
When you talked about the UD-vision, I agree that based on a wider context in general and I guess that is the first purpose. If you traced back London’s master plan after 1666 fire, or Roman time – the UD visions have very specific historical purposes to the social, military, economic needs; and hence in my vision, I mention UD should address social needs (please refer to my comment under my vision).
Collective memory is an interesting issue. I probably use the wording ‘experience’ as I am not sure if such experience could be collective in some cities. I guess Plymouth is different to London. Plymouth is relatively a stable city in terms of population mix, while London is a very mobile city – people come and go. It happens to my hometown, Hong Kong as well. There is very little memory for the public (it also related to its political history, British colony government didn’t want us to have any memory) or immigrant is in a high proportion in the people combination, and hence every ethnic groups have very different interpretations to the cities. Of course, even so, every city should have some collective memory to some extent as basis for UD. To me, ‘experience’ is firstly about spatial experience (that also relates to intuition). Such spatial experience could then develop a lot of other experiences such as walking, shopping, living, neighbourhood, etc. I would use ‘spatial politics’ to describe such study.
I love studying driving forces and its relationship with the system. I think we touched some in our blog so far. We have mentioned about zoning, boundary, density, influences from culture and economic, ownership. Of course, we can talk about space syntax as well, but as a start, I would suggest us narrowing it down. It seems that social issues are our common interest (let me know if you don’t agree), why don’t we with something related to it.
Key words / issues
Definition of UD?
Spatial politics
Relationship between driving forces and system
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