European cities have been contending with a growing problem of space to bury their loved ones. Many new ideas are challenging ways to densify burials but also to use the burial grounds as multi-functional spaces -- spaces not just for the dead, but also the living. Traditionally, cemeteries were designed as "gardens of paradise", beautiful public places in their own right, but today that relationship is tenuous in many cases, and many cemeteries have turned to neglect. The Santa Coloma de Gramenet cemetery outside of Barcelona has introduced a contentious green solution towards a multi-functional use of a cemetery as a solar energy collection field.
This is a very unpoetic design of a traditionally thoughtful public space. It's becoming emblematic of our time where we are rushing to install solar panels onto every possible place at the expense of proper integration. In principle, I appreciate the partially conscious attitude of finding new areas of untapped energy, but at the same time see how our times are so dominated by practicality and insensitivity. In the future, when clean energy has achieved a certain milestone, there will probably be a cleanup wave to make solar panels better integrated. For now, it's a quick and dirty solution to harvesting clean energy.
A fellow graduate student and I are attempting this design competition as an elective for this term. There is a lot of opportunity to learn about sustainable communities, urban planning, transportation, economics, social development, and issues like globalization, urbanization, and gentrification.
Open international ideas competition Competition period: 27 May to 26 September 2008 Final date for submission of questions: 4 August 2008 Questions and answers will be uploaded to this website There is no deadline for registration.
CPH City and Port Development has launched an open international ideas competition for the Northern Harbour in Copenhagen, a new urban development area with room for 40,000 residents and 40,000 staff in buildings with a total floor area of three to four million square metres.
The vision for this unique site, which features waterfronts on three sides, is to create a dynamic, lively and sustainable city district with diverse, effervescent life and room for a broad mix of residents and enterprises.
The competition is open to everyone, but is in particular aimed at urban planners, architects, landscape architects and traffic planners, who are very welcome to collaborate with experts in special fields, eg sustainability.
Total prize money amounts to DKK 3 million. The jury can select between one and five winners of the competition. If more than one winner is selected, the winners will be invited to negotiations with CPH City and Port Development about adjustments/improvements to their entries so that the assessment panel can select the final winner. If CPH City and Port Development decides to continue work on the basis of the winning entry, such work will be carried out in collaboration with the winning entrant.
[image property of Richard Smith, of Jennifer Macklem + Kip Jones artists]
This past Wednesday Kip and Jennifer presented our art proposal to a jury of about a dozen multi-disciplinary critics at the Routhier Community Centre on Guigues Avenue. I played a low-profile role at the presentation, mainly to show supplementary views of our proposed sculptures. Both Kip and Jennifer did a great job presenting our ideas to the jury. Most of the questions were pragmatic in nature; none of those were directed at our conceptual position which is a long leap from my usual pedagogic critiques. Will there be sharp edges? [no] Can the etchings be aged? [yes] Are those the actual plinths you envision? [in some cases, yes] What material are they? [reinforced concrete plinth, aluminium + bronze sculpture] What sort of longevity does it have? [1000 years] Have you considered spotlighting? [for some, yes] Have you done this before? [yes] All these questions were expected by Jennifer and Kip and they answered each one with some persuasive flair (elaborations of the above yes/no answers). We walked out feeling good about the presentation. The results came back a couple days later however and we didn't win the project unfortunately.
TRACES:: We started with Jennifer's mock ups which involved translating them into FormZ on my computer: Some of these mock-up schemes were abandoned because of major constructional issues. To form aluminum or bronze casts for sculptures as complex as these, there's a high chance of error in forming hard bends and curves. Even though the process of solid casting is over 5000 years old, a construction of this sort is by no means a quick process.
[image property of Richard Smith, of Jennifer Macklem + Kip Jones artists]
This initial development created numerous "sheddings" which formed a sort of junkyard of types which we were able to work with in FormZ:
[image property of Richard Smith, of Jennifer Macklem + Kip Jones artists]
With these pieces, we eventually evolved the project into a system of deforming a language of serial types which we had modeled out of our central idea of "weaving". Points, lines, and planes were shaped in an aesthetic way that eventually reached contextual sensitivity:
These surviving models were favoured for both their aesthetic quality, and their ability to be constructed. Different methods include water-jet cutting the aluminum, solid casting either aluminium or bronze alloy, or bending the solid planes of aluminum over a roller. All of the etchings would be done with a hand-held etching tool, and Jennifer had considered using public designs as a means of initial community involvement in the project.
The sketch I posted a week or two ago describing my tower's program never really saw any fruition whatsoever. My prof half-glanced at it and repeatedly demanded I hide it from his sight. It was a bit premature in that it was way too detailed for that stage in the semester. So, it's inches away from the trash pile now. Since then however, the project has developed quite a bit in a slightly different direction.
Monday was a major pin-up in the Pit and our group was theatrically maimed in front of an all-school audience. I was able to show a near-finished site plan which was a plus, but I was obliterated for my sectional drawing, not for completion, but for common sense. I got a little hung up on articulating the tower's profile, without enough structural support or even conceptual justification. (I'll show just a rough sketch of the section because the full two-meter drawing has already changed a lot overnight...and I can't get a decent photo of it either).
In terms of the concept, I've been having tons of fun exploring 'colliding particles'. I've seen a number of clips of the Large Hadron Collider in Cern Switzerland which is completely fascinating. As of recently I wanted to literally put in an atom smasher in or around my building as part of its function, but never mind being ballsy, it's kinda ridiculous. It's gigantic to begin with and costs six billion dollars to build. So, instead I'm taking the cheap route: metaphor. In declaring people as particles, I'm using the Highline as the metaphorical particle accelerator, sending people whipping around my entire site, as shown in the site plan above (outer green circular line), eventually colliding with oncoming pedestrians at the very center of my tower, giving the tower its explosive form. In the explosion, energy gets destroyed (to operate certain programmatic uses, such as a ferris wheel, drop zone, etc.) and energy created as well (wind generators, photovoltaics, solar panels etc).
Since I haven't really talked enough about the Highline, here's a brief description of its redevelopment project by Friends of the Highline, showing the winning design by Diller & Scofidio. There's also an interview with Edward Norton. Huh?
Why the atom smasher? Well, it works. As for being appropriate for New York City, maybe not at all...particularly the exploding skyscraper part...yeeeesh. As an urban gesture, it's great -- the tower becomes an illusion brought to life out of a big bang (like the proton accelerator in Cern). The tower emerges as a fragmentation of the block grid of Manhattan, a universe on its own. This goes along the lines of Koolhaas' theory in Delirious New York of Manhattan becoming lobotomized in its overlay of fantasy skyscrapers on the mundane NY grid giving the city its core identity.
Colliding particles is a sub-human phenomenon, in that we don't physically experience this sort of event in nature, but rendering the idea inspires the imagination to create its potential 'observed' experience for the human senses. Applied architecturally, the idea of colliding particles works well. Based on the behaviour of particles in their collision, I can start drawing out circulation patterns, programmatic transitions, structure. As mentioned before, the idea of creating energy to be consumed and consuming energy to be created is an extremely powerful idea for a skyscraper, which will continue to evolve in the latter half of the semester.
We are a couple weeks in to our new studio project. This semester, we are designing a 60-storey skyscraper in west Manhattan on top of the Hudson Yards. The Hudson Yards is the end of the rail line in Manhattan and represents the last frontier of development on the island. The scope of the assignment is huge as it is integrated into a formal urban regeneration plan issued by the New York Planning Department. This is the kind of proposal that New York developers and architects dream of. There's more floorspace in this project than Ground Zero and the site footprint covers two full blocks. Each student for this studio will be primarily concerned with one of 11 towers on a designated plot of land on either the east or west yard for their site which can embrace or reject the NYC planning proposal. At the end of the semester, each of the towers will snap into place on a giant site model.
The project has already gone through an official open design competition, but the city is requiring a second review of new submissions based on the initial lack of interesting proposals. Steven Holl has submitted the most developed of the schemes, and the design seems quite logical. The other proposals are done mostly by major New York developers and haven't quite struck the right chord with the site's potential yet, hence the second review.
Steven Holl's proposal: Brookfield Properties’ proposal, led by Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill and Field Operations, with a large group of contributors including SHoP Architects, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, and SANAA:
The Tishman Speyer and Morgan Stanley proposal, designed by Helmut Jahn and Peter Walker: Kohn Pedersen Fox, Arquitectonica, Robert A.M. Stern, and West 8 collaborated on the proposal from the Related Companies and Goldman Sachs: From reading a number of different blog sources, New Yorkers can't stand any of the proposals. The general climate is a rejection of glass and steel buildings which are generally alien to New York, in place of the art-deco style masonry buildings. The reality is that concrete or masonry is way too expensive for this scale of project. At the very least, New Yorkers want to preserve the certain 'character' they know best, of which none of the proposals seems to grasp.
This studio term will be the heaviest yet. Not only is the breadth of this project immense, but our prof is the most demanding in the school by reputation. We have an integrated life drawing course as part of the tower study as well as a trip to New York city. As our first assignment, we have had to draw up a site plan that adds a bit more spice and flavour than the developers' projects. Our prof truly is a no bullshit kind of professor. The more theory or cerebral mumbo jumbo in a building, the harder he hits. If he heard a peep out of me from last semester's project, he would have triple dropkicked me in a heart beat. Instead, he favours the one-liner, or one-word concept. Ultimately, it's what you show, not what you say that gets the best critique. So, my concept for this term is colliding particles. I found the following images which are quite seductive and inspiring for the site plan. It seems to capture the site's axial arrangement really nicely. The concept of creation that emerges out of destruction has interesting possibilities for an architectural project. While a bit too image specific for my liking, the image of collided protons appears like a city arrangement in itself and the patterns produced are beautiful arrangements of circles and squares, which is right up my alley. With these ideas in mind, I'm planning to rip open the proposed deck over the rail yards rather than seal it completely underground. I want the gashes in the landscape to allowing the towers and people to come right up to the rails. Here is an image of my site plan to date. Eleven represents my tower footprint, with ten other classmates aligning with my tower. The cultural centre is essentially a horizontal skyscraper which another student will design. Hopefully you can get the feeling of collision from this scheme. The dark scrapes represent openings in the landscape to the train yard below. In our pin-up on Monday, it was seen as being too "candy-ass" so I need to run them right through the buildings themselves, no holds bars. The surrounding buildings also look too much like "little wimpy muffins", so that's up for changes as well. For next week, we have to hash out a 1:200 section of the tower (which happens to be enormous), all on vellum. Check out these other sources on the topic: //Gothamist// //Urban Toronto// //Link to all 5 Proposals//
Norman Foster, a British architect has just released preliminary images of the walled city of Masdar, Abu Dhabi as the world's first 'Zero-Waste, Zero-Carbon' city. You can read the article here from building.co.uk. The design will be showcased at the World Future Energy Summit in Abu Dhabi January 21-28, 2008 as part of the 'Masdar Initiative'. Foster + Partners have a movie trailer-esque video posted at the WFES website you can also watch.
There aren't a whole lot of details released in regards to the city planning such as how to supply and manage water for a desert city. At this stage, it's mostly schematic design and fantasy images so technical information probably won't be discussed until later at the main conference. I really wonder about the social side of Masdar city -- it's basically a gated community to the extreme, packed with 42,500 ultra environmentally conscious people (or just average Joe's under the pressure of being 100% waste free). I'm wondering how people will thrive within a walled city. People generally need space for expansion and growth (hence the transition from walled cities). While it may be environmentally 'neutral' I wonder what effect it will have on people living in such a restrictive environment.
Hey everyone. Paddy hooked me up with this really crazy site about Dubai. I still can't believe my eyes. Have a look and see what you think. We're in trouble... 'Dubai is ####ing Nuts!!!'
