Bridge City

Ji Qi & Yifan Zhang

Architects Eric Owen Moss Architects Location Nanjing, China Client

Two Trees Management Co, LLC Program City master plan Building Site 12.700.000 m² Date 2013-2014

Project Description

The Bridge City is one component of a multi-city master plan located outside of Nanjing, Roadways on the edge of the existing lake are connected across the water (north-south and east-west) via an elevated Bridge. All new development is located along this Bridge over the water, thus preserving the surrounding landscape.

Source: www.ericowenmoss.com

A Plan for Tokyo, Kenzo Tange

With a unique insight into the emerging characteristics of the contemporary city and an optimistic faith in the power of design, Tange attempted to impose a new physical order on Tokyo, which would accomodate the city’s continued expansion and internal regeneration. The plan was proposed at a time when many cities in the industrial world were experiencing the height of urban sprawl. It propses a series of satelite cities and general decentralization as the solution to Tokyo’s rapid population boom.

The ideals of the Metabolist Movement were perhaps best exhibited and advocated by Kenzo Tange in his 1960 Plan for Tokyo. Tange argued that the movement that the automobile introduced into urban life had changed peoples perception of space, and that this required a new spatial order for the city in the form of the megastructure, not simply a continuation of the radial zoning status quo. The plan proposes a linear megastructuregram would acrete as the needs of the population dictated.

Source: Kenzo Tange, A plan for Tokyo 1960, ArchEyes

Master Plan for Magnitogorsk, Ivan Leonidov

The master plan proposed by the OSA group with Ivan Leonidov as a team leader, is a linear city concentrated on a stretch of 15 miles around a communication route which led from the industrial hub to the state farms and laid out in a square grid pattern. Landscape and urbanisation are reconciled, with all the built functions distributed in a natural setting with a low density in a way which directly refers to disurbanist theories.

In the central strip of the city are the residential buildings, glass towers alternated to lowrise structures located in a green belt, all detached one another in order to provide the maximum access to air and light. Public buildings and spaces for leisure take different forms and are distributed freely in a lateral strip, each one located in a square of the grid. On the other side, beyond the residential strip are the educational buildings, areas for kids, parks and farmlands.

Source: Ivan Leonidov, The complete works, Socks

Projet Obus, Le Corbusier

About 100 meters away from the coast a 90-60 meter high concrete structure would connect the two extreme baulieus of Algier, St.Eugene and Hussein-Dey. The structure would provide housing for 180,000 people with optimal hygiene conditions in a beautiful environment. The project provides the two essential solutions for any city: The development of rapid circulation and the creation of necessary housing capacities.

Source: Le Corbusier, Ouvre Complete

Roadtown, Edgar Chambless

Roadtown outlined the idea for a linear city built on top of a railway line. The idea to lay down a modern skyscraper on its side and run the elevators and the pipes and wires horizontally instead of vertically. It could be built not only a hundred stories, but a thousand stories or a thousand miles. It would take the apartment house and all its conveniences and comforts out among the farms by the aid of wires, pipes and of rapid and noisless transportation.

Source: Edgar Chambless, Roadtown

The skyscrapers stood on great elevated piers above intersections of radial and ring-rods in Moscow. These piers with their open-faced lift-shafts, support the horizontally cantilevered building. Beneath them are metro stations and bus-stops. The building is supposed to be made of steel and glass, all the parts being standardized so that no scaffolding is needed for its erection.

Moscow is a centralized city, characterized by a number of concentric ring boulevards connected by radial main streets emanating from the Kremlin. The proposal (sky-hook) intends to place these structures at the intersections of the radials and the boulevards, rise system the innovation concits in the fact that the horizontal is clearly separated from structures and is usually predicated by the structural system.

Source: El Lissitzky, Wolkenbügel (1924), The charnel house

Morphology

Plan transformation study from Ivan Leonidovs low-rise structures into Kenzo Tanges Tokyo Plan residential building.

Section transformation study of Kenzo Tanges Tokyo Plan residential building into El Lissitzkys Horizontal Skyscraper.

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Geometrical studies based on the section- and plan transformations of selected precedents.