the
Auxiliary Kindergarten A cookbook
URBAN ACUPUNCTURE is an urban environmentalism theory which combines urban design with traditional Chinese medical theory of acupuncture. This process uses small-scale interventions to transform the larger urban context. Sites are selected through an aggregate analysis of social, economic, and ecological factors, and developed through a dialogue between designers and the community. Acupuncture relieves stress in the body, urban acupuncture relieves stress in the environment. Urban acupuncture produces small-scale but socially catalytic interventions into the urban fabric. This strategy views cities as living, breathing organisms and pinpoints areas in need of repair. Sustainable projects, then, serve as needles that revitalize the whole by healing the parts. By perceiving the city as a living creature, thoroughly intertwined, “urban acupuncture� promotes communitarian machinery and sets localized nucleus similar to the human body’s meridians. Satellite technology, networks and collective intelligence theories, all used to surgically and selectively intervene on the nodes that have the biggest potential to regenerate.
The main approach of this project is to utilize a new ecological corridor system with urban catalyst programs inserted into the existing urban issues, especially at an urban village and its voids, in order to open up, like urban acupuncture, the blockages of urban development. The whole system intends to serve as the starting point for the self reparation of the urban issue. Urban villages act as the blockages of the sustainable development of China’s megacities. However, these kinds of blockages are not as bad as cancer cells which need to be eliminated, but challenge points need to be opened up. By opening up blockages along “urban meridians,� just as acupuncture and other forms of bioenergetics healing open blockages along the energy meridians of our bodies, this approach can liberate chi, or the life force of a village and its dynamic community. Opening urban meridians in this project will be applied to an existing urban village, Shigang, and its voids. They take the form of vital hubs of activity, a quality civic space or green space, easing movement or facilitating connections, or other appropriate responses according to the local needs.
Victor Papanek (1927 – 1999)
Nomadic Furniture (1973)
An Important aspect in Victor Papanek’s philosophy was to design to the most simplistic and functional point where the
use of resources where taking into count and where the
product wouldn’t use fancy packaging in order to make it look more expensive. Victor Papanek ethical driven design was deeply connected to the ethical manage of resources and the
products impacts on the environment. Decentralization was one of Victor Papanek’s proposals for an environmental solution, thinking that the decentralization
would led to a better local autonomy, which was discouraged by modern technology, and also would mean an easier way to implement renewable energy for a small town. By a decentralized design, the final product would be more
adequate for the climate of an specific location, size
of the city, it would make better use of the recourses in that area such as materials and energy. His thesis was based on the deliberate, purposeful utilization of the processes of nature and society to obtain particular
goals. The content of a design must reflect the times and
conditions that have given rise to it, and must fit in with the general human socio-economic order in which it is to operate.
His methods were based on the interaction of tools,
processes, and materials, an honest and optimal use of materials.
Martin Pawley (1939 – 2008)
"Waste can be good" Martin Pawley, one of the most insightful and provocative international commentators on contemporary architecture and design, had developed an idea that he called "garbage housing" using industrial and consumer wastes and by-products as inexpensive building materials - he experimented with structures built out of soft-drink cans, rubber tires, and cardboard cartons. Buckminster Fuller's concept of ephemeralization, which turns out to be about Pawley's concept of ephemeralization, a rather different matter. Fuller used this term to denote the technological trend of achieving more
and more mechanical advantage from devices requiring less and less material. He
did this despite the Greek root, ephemoros, which Pawley cites as meaning "lasting only a day". Construing the term this way, Pawley spouts on about "shelf-life", "timelessness" and the vagaries of art history. Garbage Housing (1975) was both an attack on the financing and construction of housing at the time and a proposition for specially developing countries that they must start building out of customized building
materials, like bottles, tins, cardboard and car panels from the west.
Ken Isaacs Living Structures (1974)
Ken Isaacs (born 1927 in Peoria) is an American designer. Isaacs was Head of Design at the Cranbrook Academy of Arts from 1956. He is known for his creation of a Matrix based modular system to build “living
structures”.
He described in 1974 how to build these living structures in a book called “How to build your own living structures that’s now out of print. How To Build Your Own Living Structures explains on how to build furniture, small houses and even vehicles using basic tools and materials. It’s a DIY architectural manual created by American architect Ken Isaacs from 1974. “This book is a beautiful guide about how to make a variety of flexible experimental indoor interiors, storage units, and a microhouse. The microhouse is a flexible creation of architect, Ken Isaacs. The modular design is based on stacked tetrahedrons, which can be moved in and around each other providing shelter and dividing living space in a creative way. The book gives you step-by-step instructions with plans for many different versions of Isaac’s original designs interspersed with ideas about simplicity, and getting rid of our personal possessions. The book is type written and spiral round in a nice Do-It-Yourself aesthetic, and Isaacs writes in a genial manner as if he were sitting across the table from you. He muses on the philosophical meanings of surplus and uses the designs as a means of addressing life as whole; a simple place to raise a family and house extended family that has a low impact on the surrounding natural environment – by the The Library of Radiant Optimism for Let’s Re-Make the World”. from http://www.triangulationblog.com/2011/08/ken-isaacs.html
The Metabolism of Voids The architecture of the void is born of the interplay between the urban morphology and the architectural typology.
building
urban space
urban morphology
architectural typology
void
Public Space The leftover voids act as Public spaces although they are not programmed as such. These public squares are very important for the health/ecology of the city and cover a range of flexible programs. When the voids fall into disuse, or when their owners consciously close them off, they turn into private voids, garbage dumps, moats, and abandoned spaces. The flexible program is lost and when the public becomes private.
Analysis according to the interests of residents in urban villages Strength Cheap rental housing Cheap living expense because of the cheap commodities and service provided in the villages A more livable community life and social interaction Weakness Unsafe, unclean living environment; Lack of transportation infrastructures and resources like water and energy Low social status leading to segregation and discrimination Lack of community facilities and public space. Lack stable jobs and working places Opportunities Convenient public service and facilities is also attractive to the high income groups The villages are usually the places which inherit the traditional lifestyle, culture and identity of the whole Threats Lack of power in the decision-making The transformation usually clears up all in the villages including its cultural diversity and traditional identity by introducing too much commerce
Local utilization and sorted collection Typical features: Lack of collection Lack of transport Lack of processing facilities and therefore severe pollution. Some thoughts on how to manage these issues : One potentially useful strategy for dealing with the waste issue is to focus on landfill-to-energy generation, which could help address two pressing challenges—abundance of garbage and shortage of energy. Organic waste should be locally utilized; construction waste should be processed locally; key is to collect packaging waste Conversion of organic waste into fertilizer Conversion of flammable waste into fuels Villages near each other should build facilities and offer services that they can share. It is unnecessary for one village to build their own complete waste disposal system, and it is much more effective to focus on establishing complementary facilities with a nearby village. Services and day-today operational duties can also be run together, with different villages’ committees responsible for their own tasks.
Analysis of current urban village waste process FACT : “Garbage pool� collection method has brought serious sanitary issues FACT: Open garbage dumping sites pollute the environment FACT: Open-air incineration emits large quantities of dioxins
According to current standards on urban domestic waste managemnet, urban village domestic waste : - Is smaller in scale - Is more lacking in staff management - Centralized processing and pollution problems - Still needs collection and transport systems and costs for such systems are eventually higher Domestic waste collection sites should be at least 50 km apart from one another, but because transport costs are borne by the local city and township government, many localities claim that even transporting waste to a distance of about 20km is too expensive to maintain. Furthermore, due to potentially large differences in levels of economic development, there are great obstacles to urban villages collaborating to build shared domestic waste processing facilities.
the architecture(the physical)
the map (the conceptual)
The Production of Space Why is it important to preside over these voids? It is because the sociality of the community happens within the whole site of the village of Shigang. The spaces in between the village have the power to regulate society’s behavior. Currently the creative users of Shigang have found many different ways to use the unused spaces, becoming active agents in the creation of their public squares. The issue is that the uncontrolled, unregulated voids can quickly be taken away from the migrant users by the local villagers in acts of privatization. If the architecture could be embedded naturally, into these rhythms of village, it could activate feedback loops to keep the voids visible, active parts of village life. This visibility could be achieved by a two pronged spatial design strategy, first into the principles of the architecture(the physical) to make the public uses visible and second, that of making the phenomenon of voids themselves visible (by making maps).
example
By adding a metabolizer into this void of disuse, we can change the urban fabric on this micro scale to kick the cycle of the space back into the hands of the public. Although the current ownership of the space is debated, we can create temporary life in the space. In the case of the Yellow house in Shigang, a small insertion can bring the now disused courtyard back into a child-friendly public sphere. These simple squatting mobiles re-program operate outside of the existing system and therefore bring into focus a larger debate. Who owns the residual spaces in between? Why should the absent villager have more rights to these unused spaces than the users of the voids.
The Flux of Spatial Practices When introducing the temporal process of a building into the design equation, and all the overlapping rhythms of the village uses, the design itself has to become an ecosystem. Through the combination of the two processes, a hybridized void spawns to create an auxiliary space organically flowing though cycles from a primary bungalow to a vernacular typology to a ruin and back to a void to a garbage dump to a dense housing development or a playground. By inserting the proper program/ intervention, we can grow the voids into a more stable public space. In this way we nurture the ecology of the urban village of Shigang.
the map (the conceptual)
The Map We do not propose to make a map of the healthy and unhealthy voids of Shigang, instead we wish to investigate the different types of voids and diagnose what sort of spatial intervention could be undertaken by the villagers/ the users to make the space “work� for them. If we could embed temporal information in the map, we could show the behavior of the cycles of the village of Shigang. The waves of rebuilding and subdividing of the lots leading to proliferation of high-rises, as well as the smaller and smaller lots constitute the urban language of Shigang. The many different typologies of buildings and many different types of urban voids thus become inextricably linked into mutually
dependent typo-morphologies in the village.
Johan Kure, Kemo Usto and Thiru Manickam - Favela Cloud (Brazil 2012)
Mass Design Group (Boston)- Butaro Hospital (Rwanda 2011)
Workshop Architects (NTNU) - Tacloban Children’s Study Center (Philipines 2012)
The Auxiliary Kindergarten Why is there a need for a Kindegarden in Shigang? It is because the invisible dwellers of Shigang are not given the necessary infrastructure to both work and watch their children. Why are they not factored into the village? There is an invisible political border created by the huko system around the village, which separates them from the urban dwellers. Designing under these auspices of illegal or invisible children, the architecture has to either make these users visible in a clever way, or help them fly under the radar. Architecture for social change : The surroundings The informal peripheral settlements develop faster than the urban cores they surround. A disadvantaged site cannot simply be removed from the problems concentrated there, in reality, all architecture plays part in negotiating the terms of all the diverse surrounding communities. ( D.Sanders)
Decent Public architecture is just a dream when there are no basic necessities such as: Rights to food Potable Water Shelter Working Sewage systems Making impossible architecture simply leads to the problems of romanticizing the slums. One can just as easily make a landmark for the urban village an icon of identity or pride without a multi-million dollar building. (Favela Cloud etc) Eg. Workshop Architects (NTNU) Mass Design Group (Boston)
We need a bottom – up working model for change.
References: Daohan Wang , ´ The exploration of the sustainable transformationof urban villages in China ´ , 2009 Fan Feng , ´Garbage Villages - Growing waste problems in rural china´ , 2008 Xu Haiyun , ´ Village and township waste management´, 2009 Behaviorology: Atelier Bow-Wow. New York: Rizzoli, 2010. Print. “Parcdesign * Collective Arts *.” Parcdesign * Collective Arts *. N.p., n.d. Web. 05 May 2013. Saunders, Doug. Arrival City: How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World. New York: Pantheon, 2010. Print. Bonnemaison, Sarah, and Ronit Eisenbach. Installations by Architects: Experiments in Building and Design. New York: Princeton Architectural, 2009. Print. Burns, Jim. Lawrence Halprin: Changing Places : San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 3 July - 24 August 1986. San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1986. Print.
Precedents Concepts Aldo VanEyck “Playgrounds” Atelier Bow-wow “ Void Metabolism” Teddy Cruz “ Political Equator” Marcus Miessen “Nightmare of Participation” Mike Davis “Planet of the Slums” Lawrence Halprin Parcdesign haus rucker co Basurama “acting” Victor Papanek “ Nomadic Furniture”t Martin Powley “garbage housing” Ken Isaacs “Living Structures”