DEVISE: Detroit (v3)

To Detroit, for the endless inspiration

TAUBMAN COLLEGE architecture + urban planning

University of Michigan Master of Urban Design

2015-2016 Š The Regents of the University of Michigan All rights reserved A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning 2000 Bonisteel Boulevard Ann Arbor 48109 www.taubmancollege.umich.edu

DEVISE SIMULTANEOUS URBANISMS

Table of Contents

Volume I: DARE

Introduction

Students Manasvi Ashok Bachhav

Travis Crabtree

Nine Urban Thesis for Detroit

Learning from the Ruhr & Rust Belt

A-07

B-07

Just Kidding

Rust Belt Region

A-10

India | Sir J.J. College of Architecture University of Mumbai B. Arch

Utopian Campus Converter

U.S.A. | Mississippi State University B. L. A.

Jonathan Adnan Hanna

U.S.A. | University of Michigan B. S. Arch

A-34

China | South China University of Technology B. Arch

Shao-Chen Lu

Taiwan | Tamkang University B. Arch

Nishant Raman Mittal

India | Maharaja Sayajirao University Baroda B. Arch

Luneoufall Vital Gallego U.S.A. | Texas Tech University B. S. Arch

Melia Jae West

U.S.A. | University of Notre Dame B. Arch

Zhe Zhang

China | Suzhou University of Science and Technology B. Arch

Biographies Acknowledgments

Instructor

MarĂ­a Arquero de AlarcĂłn Associate Professor, Architecture and Urban Planning Director, Master of Urban Design

B-10

Ruhr Region B-24

IBA Emscher Park Mine the Gap A-48

B-34

Ruhr.2010 B-40

Invert City Mengyu Jiang

Volume II: DISCOVER

A-64

Duisburg

Fricticious Realities

Nord Landschaftspark

A-90

Bind-ary A-114

An Island in the City A-134

B-46

B-50

Essen B-54

Zollverein Industrial Complex B-56

Gelsenkirchen B-58

The City and the City A-146

Expresscape A-156

Nordsternpark B-60

Bochum B-62

Dortmund A-194 A-196

Volume I: DARE

B-64

Volume III: DEVISE Field Guides to the Ruhr

Simultaneous Urbanisms

Discourses in Urbanism

Bus Stops to Bandstands

Post/Re Urbanisms

Airborne 48127

Cities: X Lines. Approaches to City+Open Territory Design

D-06

[Ruhr] Appropriation C-68

Play [Grounds] C-78

Big Shelters C-86

Moving Boundaries

E-66

D-10

D-16

E-76

Infra-Eco-Logi Urbanism

A “Motor” City Center

E-88

D-22

Urban Ecology: Detroit and Beyond

The Moving Skyline

C-96

D-28

Postcards of the Ruhr

Radical-con-nexus

E-98

C-100

D-34

Urbanism: Working with Doubt

The Hidden Eye

Reconstructs

Water Urbanism East

C-108

E-106

E-114

D-40

On Landscape Urbanism World of Walls C-112

E-124

An Island in the City D-46

Typological Urbanism Authenticity C-114

E-130

Church Express D-52

Formerly Urban E-136

Germany in Motion C-136

Bind-ary

Conversations

D-58

E-146

E-150 E-152

C-138 C-140

Volume II: DISCOVER

Volume III: DEVISE Table of Contents

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INTRODUCTION Volume III: DEVISE

This volume showcases the work developed in the master of urban design capstone course (UD742).

Last in the degree studio sequence, the work draws upon the intellectual inquiry and design work developed over previous semesters. As part of the year-long focus in Detroit, this capstone course offers a platform for students to advance their personal research agendas through the development of a design thesis project.

To support the collective and individual agendas and set a platform for exchange of ideas among students, the course includes three inter-related modules that address modes of practice (through the experiential learning component traveling to Detroit and the German Ruhr Region and engaging with local urban agents), modes of production (through the exposure to techniques and tools of making, and the study of texts and projects), and modes of design inquiry (through the development of a final thesis sited in Detroit).

The three modules are staged over the course of the semester to build on each other through the development of different exercises including individual and collective components.

Introduction

The first volume, “DARE: Nine urban design thesis for Detroit” initiates the sequence showcasing nine design speculations developed by the students. Operating as a synthesis of the work developed during the semester in the theories and field trip sections, each proposal opens up possibilities to reimagine radical conditions of urbanity for the future of the metropolitan region.

The second volume, “DISCOVER: Learning from the Ruhr” establishes a disciplinary conversation between the Rust Belt and Ruhr Regions, building in their industrial past and examining the agency of design in their ongoing transformation. The volume showcases the students’ Field Guides of the Ruhr as recorded during the site visit to the German region.

This last volume, “DEVISE: Simultaneous Urbanisms Detroit” represents nine found urban conditions in Detroit and instigate imaginary urban narratives around them. To instigate the larger disciplinary claims of these quick explorations, the volume includes readings on urban discourses and conversations with local practitioners and academics.

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SIMULTANEOUS URBANISMS

The following pages display nine existing conditions found across the geography of Detroit. Each area, contained in a 1/2 square mile, was modeled and analyzed for specific urban parameters. Each student was prompted to derive a speculation for the site, and to represent it utilizing different mediums: digital fabrication, drawings and a written narrative. The resulting speculative proposals led to a larger narrative for the rest of the semester.

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83° 15’ 27.44’’ W

42° 25’ 02.46’’ N

+

URBAN PARAMETERS FAR

GROSS FLOOR RATIO AREA....................................................... 0.29

floor area / plan area GSI

NET FLOOR RATIO AREA............................................................ 0.40 GROUND SPACE INDEX................................................................ 0.24 OPEN SPACE RATIO........................................................................

built area / plan area OSR

PERCENTAGE OF PUBLICLY OWNED LAND...................... 58% RANGE OF FLOORS........................................................................

plan-built area / floor area

1.9

LAND USE MOST PREVALENT

RESIDENTIAL

LEAST PREVALENT

INDUSTRIAL

49.7%

1.3%

CENSUS DATA: POPULATION

1950

1970

1990

2010

22,487

18,558

14,334

11,749

Simultaneous Urbanisms: Bus Stops to Bandstands

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1-4

BUS STOPS TO BANDSTANDS Jonathan Hanna There is power in expression: expression of form, place, identity, and self. Bus Stops to Band Stands is an installation piece as much as it is a permanent infrastructure. It attempts to give people the power to transform their immediate public space by coopting the street and transforming it from a place of circulation to a place of inhabitation. A lightweight kit of parts can easily be assembled and disassembled for moving. On a typical day, the installation acts as a bus shelter protecting people from the elements, and offering a place to sit while waiting for the bus. But the shelter can be converted into a place of performance, by expanding the

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seating to create an elevated stage; an ephemeral space which gives people reason to linger. When not in use for the Sidewalk Festival, I imagine that the shelter would be used by patrons of DDOT while waiting for the bus.

But, my hope is that sporadically people deploy the stage and utilize it for its alternative purposes, whether that be for speeches, music, performance, or simply to understand how the mechanisms of the shelter work. I image that as time passes the back of the shelter will act as an art canvas, a space for political propaganda, and a community posting location.

Simultaneous Urbanisms: Bus Stops to Bandstands

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RED GR

AN

DR

IVE

RA VE

NU

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ENUE GREYDALE AV

FO

RD

STR

EET

LAHSER ROAD

ORCHARD STREET

100X

10X

0X

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83° 07’ 27.71’’ W

+

42° 17’ 25.52’’ N

URBAN PARAMETERS FAR

floor area / plan area GSI

built area / plan area OSR

GROSS FLOOR RATIO AREA.......................................................

0.62

NET FLOOR RATIO AREA............................................................

0.79

GROUND SPACE INDEX................................................................

0.05

OPEN SPACE RATIO........................................................................

0.49

PERCENTAGE OF PUBLICLY OWNED LAND...................... industrial 34% RANGE OF FLOORS........................................................................

plan-built area / floor area

1- 4

LAND USE MOST PREVALENT

LEAST PREVALENT

commerical

industrial

INDUSTRIAL

COMMERCIAL

32%

4% commerical

CENSUS DATA: POPULATION

1950

1970

1990

2010

5,331

2,256

2,605

2,365

Simultaneous Urbanisms: Airborne 48127

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AIRBORNE 48217 Travis Crabtree Southwest Detroit will make you sick, literally. It is Michigan’s most polluted zip code. Each year, about 1.6 million pounds of chemicals are released in the area, triggering the highest pediatric asthma rates in the state. Located at the intersection of the regional wastewater treatment plant, the industrial portion of I-75, the Marathon gas refinery, and the mischievous Zug Island, the Delray neighborhood is the most prone to this air pollution exposure.

The collection of those byproducts is then used for feeding organisms like algae and other bacteria in return for fresh oxygen. Inside of the wall is high oxygen yielding vegetation. Residents who were once exploited through air, now have the most abundant supply of clean air in Detroit.

This speculation responds to the toxic environment through the construction of a massive living machine that acts as an air filter, and a dividing mechanism for a small enclave in Delray. The machine collects sulfur dioxide from the wastewater plant and carbon, nitrous oxide, and particulate matter from the freeways.

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CO2

SO2

NO x

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breathing skins

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The living machine structure exhales large quantities of oxygen canceling-out emissions from adjacent polluters. For decades, this area has been a contested territory for living standards. The filtration walls give residents a form of environmental justice that they have long deserved.

Simultaneous Urbanisms: Airborne 48127

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83° 04’ 19.29’’ W

42° 22’ 06.04’’ N

+

URBAN PARAMETERS FAR

GROSS FLOOR RATIO AREA....................................................... 1.27 NET FLOOR RATIO AREA............................................................ 1.92

floor area / plan area GSI

GROUND SPACE INDEX................................................................ 0.74 OPEN SPACE RATIO........................................................................ 0.14

built area / plan area

PERCENTAGE OF PUBLICLY OWNED LAND...................... 41%

OSR

RANGE OF FLOORS........................................................................ 1-26 plan-built area / floor area

LAND USE MOST PREVALENT

COMMERCIAL

LEAST PREVALENT

MED. DEN. HOUSING

46.6%

0.2%

CENSUS DATA: POPULATION

1950

1970

1990

2010

17,865

8,095

4,384

4,836

Simultaneous Urbanisms: A Motor City Center

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A “MOTOR” CITY CENTER Melia West During the 1920s, with no perceived end to Detroit’s continued growth and prosperity, it was thought that a second downtown was necessary and lucrative, in hopes of alleviating overcrowded conditions and stretching the City’s geographic wealth. The heart of this “New Center” was the intersection of Woodward Avenue and Grand Boulevard. The buildings embody the unlimited optimism and swagger of Detroit’s venture capitalists. However, the Great Depression halted all plans.

NEW

MOTOR CITY

Net FAR

CENTER CENTER 1.9 7.6

Parking lot SF

1,220,000

0

Built SF

8,860,000

35,000,000

Percent Vehicle 25.8% to People SF

6.5%

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Ironically, the aspirations for the Motor City’s new downtown, driven

by General Motors and the Fisher Brothers, has only materialized into a landscape for the very object that produced New Center’s wealth: the motor vehicle. Now, the remaining architectural gems swim in a vast sea of asphalt.

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In my speculative modeling, I have merely emboldened New Center’s existing reality, imagining a second downtown of high rise towers. The views and prime real estate is reserved for Motor City residents - vehicles that is.

A parameter for the speculation draws on one of the healthier Rust Belt downtowns, Pittsburgh’s Golden Triangle. The floor area ratio (FAR) is increased from 1.9 to 7.5. All parking lot square footage is transferred to the tops of these towers; the programming for people occupies the lower floors. While staging a provocation in making the car king, it activates the pedestrian zone, by pushing commercial and residential land uses closest to the street.

The Amtrak station is rebuilt with playful architectural expression enticing passenger trains to stop.

Motor City Skyline

Current Condition, highlighting parking lots and parking structures

MOTOR CITY: Diagram showing the parking lot square footage transfer to the top floors of the second downtown Simultaneous Urbanisms: A Motor City Center

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Halting: Formal explorations of possible ceilings in the new Amtrak terminal

Parking Pent House: Elevations showing the privileged real estate reserved for motor vehicles (next page) D-26

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Simultaneous Urbanisms: A Motor City Center

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83° 3’ 34.16’’ W

+

42° 20’ 59.41’’ N

URBAN PARAMETERS FAR

floor area / plan area GSI

built area / plan area OSR

plan-built area / floor area

GROSS FLOOR RATIO AREA.......................................................

1.2

NET FLOOR RATIO AREA............................................................

1.73

GROUND SPACE INDEX................................................................

0.37

OPEN SPACE RATIO........................................................................

0.36

PERCENTAGE OF PUBLICLY OWNED LAND......................

30.5%

RANGE OF FLOORS........................................................................

1-14

LAND USE MOST PREVALENT

INSTITUTIONAL

LEAST PREVALENT

RESIDENTIAL

31%

12.4%

CENSUS DATA: POPULATION

1950

1970

1990

2010

38,659

16,010

9,262

6,905

Simultaneous Urbanisms: The Moving Skyline

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THE MOVING SKYLINE Nishant Mittal Art thematizes spaces, and through critical commentary, transforms them. Art not only plays an important role in the re-evaluation of urban areas; it reveals hidden narratives and promotes awareness and discussion of the found conditions on site.

Building on this capacity, the project explores architecture’s artistic expression to trigger imagination around notions of urban domesticity, ownership, and permanence.

The Moving Skyline aims to puncture the envelope of exclusion through the ‘blighted’ houses of Detroit. Today, the skyline of Detroit represents the capitalist corporations that still dominate Detroit; most of the decisions and development patterns are still under their control.

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The intervention in the half mile by half mile portion of Midtown aims to ‘bury’ the new infrastructure (the downtown centric Q line), which is associated primarily with a certain pool of creative class, to create a series of public spaces above the newly buried infrastructure. Moreover, the intervention takes charge of the 50year old ‘Nail and Hammer’ building by incorporating a slide, a new kind of entertainment that combines the reality and fiction of architecture, and triggers a tactical re-occupation of abandoned buildings in the city. Using the slide as a space-reclaiming strategy, the project fosters the incremental transformation of parking structures around the building into porous ephemeral gathering spaces.

The Moving Skyline attempts to generates a polemic from the current social situations around inhabitation in Detroit Simultaneous Urbanisms: The Moving Skyline

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Suspended Domesticity

Q Line

Urban acupunctures The Slide

Frames Festivalization of Midtown Burying infrastructure

Porous courts Interfering Platforms

Simultaneous Urbanisms: The Moving Skyline

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83° 3’ 38.94’’ W

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42° 22’ 29.30’’ N

URBAN PARAMETERS FAR

floor area / plan area GSI

built area / plan area OSR

plan-built area / floor area

GROSS FLOOR RATIO AREA.......................................................

0.38

NET FLOOR RATIO AREA............................................................

0.62

GROUND SPACE INDEX................................................................

0.21

OPEN SPACE RATIO........................................................................

1.25

PERCENTAGE OF PUBLICLY OWNED LAND......................

42%

RANGE OF FLOORS........................................................................

1-7

LAND USE MOST PREVALENT

INDUSTRIAL

LEAST PREVALENT

28.22%

COMMERCIAL

4.5%

CENSUS DATA: POPULATION

1950

1970

1990

2010

16,637

4,480

1,552

1,511

Simultaneous Urbanisms: Radical-con-nexus

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RADICAL-CON-NEXUS Manasvi Bachhav

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Radical-Con-Nexus builds on the concept of a modern acropolis over the city’s infrastructure of rails and highways at the intersection of Chrysler Freeway and Grand Boulevard. It attempts an unusual bridging of uses, through buildings with a radically inflated FAR, over the underused sites adjacent to rail and road lines. The linearity of the structures draws from the linear movement of the infrastructure itself.

a cultural narrative as a place for the collective.

The crossover of industrial, residential and commercial axes defies the monouse of the infrastructure below, by having a gradient-like transition of uses from one side of the freeway to the other. Meanwhile, at the convergence, the complex embodies

At the high speeds of the freeway and railway, the complex is designed to be conceived as a continuous object; however, a pedestrian would experience it as a collection of buildings.

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Parts of the complex have modular elements that add to the transformational aspects of the proposal. The modules play a role in either constructing the buildings from the beginning, in relation to market growth, or they can be added to the facades as emergent connections between different uses within the buildings.

The nexus speculates on the concept of Mixed-Use buildings through vertical and horizontal crossovers.

Simultaneous Urbanisms: Radical-con-nexus

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industrial

Commercial

neighborhood

Commercial

commercial Simultaneous Urbanisms: Radical-con-nexus

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83° 3’ 41.742’’ W

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42° 22’ 20.6148’’ N

URBAN PARAMETERS FAR

floor area / plan area GSI

built area / plan area OSR

plan-built area / floor area

GROSS FLOOR RATIO AREA.......................................................

0.39

NET FLOOR RATIO AREA............................................................

0.51

GROUND SPACE INDEX................................................................

0.18

OPEN SPACE RATIO........................................................................

1.60

PERCENTAGE OF PUBLICLY OWNED LAND......................

43%

RANGE OF FLOORS........................................................................

1-8

LAND USE MOST PREVALENT

INDUSTRIAL

LEAST PREVALENT

COMMERCIAL

92%

3.3%

CENSUS DATA: POPULATION

1950

1970

1990

2010

12,249

285

701

1,565

Simultaneous Urbanisms: Reconstructs

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RECONSTRUCTS Luna Vital The three-dimensional speculations study the formal instances that allow different operational arrangements to form from existing conditions. Spatial reconstructs are playfully rearranged to replace outdated infrastructure or building parts, or to hang from dissected buildings. They are ready to be deployed to landfills, cogeneration plants, recycling warehouses, or denser sites as temporal installations. The most permanent circumstance includes the reconstruct as anchor for action, of unspecified programs.

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In terms of composition of the device, a structural frame supports the combination of two similar components that inherently create the greater complexity of the reconstruct.

In its articulation, four volumes perform as the catalyst and point of connection for the following data. The sequence of lines are the innermost parts of the device and are generators of its unique identity. The translation of data and mapping is defined within the intensity and patterns of these lines. Also, the vertical surfaces mediate

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the interrelation of the datum and the series of lines.

A chain process - one event leads to the next. A duplicate component, a planometric overlap, a rotational movement; actions are merely methods for the greater purpose: reconstruction of space, with no additions nor subtractions, just an ongoing process of two stories fully intertwined, whose connections are beyond physical, simply a resultant.

Simultaneous Urbanisms: Reconstructs

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83° 3’ 41.4’’ W

+

42° 19’ 52.6’’ N

URBAN PARAMETERS FAR

GROSS FLOOR RATIO AREA....................................................... 1.22 NET FLOOR RATIO AREA............................................................ 1.93

floor area / plan area GSI

GROUND SPACE INDEX................................................................ 0.39 OPEN SPACE RATIO........................................................................ 0.32

built area / plan area

PERCENTAGE OF PUBLICLY OWNED LAND...................... 41%

OSR

RANGE OF FLOORS........................................................................ 1-25 plan-built area / floor area

LAND USE MOST PREVALENT

COMMERCIAL

LEAST PREVALENT

INDUSTRIAL

51%

0.4%

CENSUS DATA: POPULATION

1950

1970

1990

2010

18,323

4,909

4,336

4,336

Simultaneous Urbanisms: An Island in the City

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AN ISLAND IN THE CITY Shao-Chen Lu Exemplified by the highway system around Downtown Detroit, the city is segregated by huge infrastructure that occur at different scales, densities and even uses. The area between Downtown and Corktown is a good example of an area containing extremely different scales, on two ends of the spectrum. This divergence can represent a difference in social status, economic, and even political power.

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To represent and feature this situation along the boundary of Downtown Detroit, extremely different scales come together in one model: almost six blocks of Corktown fit on the rooftop of the MGM Grand Detroit.

This operation reveals the social, economic and political imbalance along the downtown perimeter, and exposes new mechanisms that could challenge the existing situation.

Simultaneous Urbanisms: An Island in the City

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Simultaneous Urbanisms: An Island in the City

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83°02’18.3”W

42°20’16.4”N

+

URBAN PARAMETERS FAR

floor area / plan area GSI

GROSS FLOOR RATIO AREA......................................................

1.03

NET FLOOR RATIO AREA...........................................................

1.73

GROUND SPACE INDEX................................................................ 0.36 OPEN SPACE RATIO.......................................................................

built area / plan area OSR

0.40

PERCENTAGE OF PUBLICLY OWNED LAND...................... 43% RANGE OF FLOORS........................................................................ 1-30

plan-built area / floor area

LAND USE MOST PREVALENT

LEAST PREVALENT

HIGH DEN. RESIDENTIAL

GENERAL SERVICE

42%

6%

CENSUS DATA: POPULATION

1950

1970

1990

2010

12,026

6,264

6,020

6,734

Simultaneous Urbanisms: Church Express

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CHURCH EXPRESS Mengyu Jiang Churches in Detroit have proven to be the most stable institutional landscapes over time.

Dispersed throughout the urban fabric, yet strongly connected to the suburbs through the many highways that crisscross Detroit, churches perform as social anchors and active places of congregation and worship.

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To celebrate the urban resilience of these tax exempt social nodes, this proposal speculates on the coupling of church and highway, creating a hybrid condition that maximizes the use, visibility and access to the church, by negotiating the highway air rights for redevelopment.

The testing site bridges Downtown with Lafayette Park, and includes a school, a casino, an office building and

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some parking structures. The church is deconstructed and reassembled over the highway. Through aggregation of programs, the project suspends a mini-city; the ring from the church’s dome becomes a pedestrian circuit connecting both sides. Along the loop you can encounter several minichurches, learning rooms for children, a gas station, retail and viewing towers.

Simultaneous Urbanisms: Church Express

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Simultaneous Urbanisms: Church Express

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82° 54’ 56.2’’ W

+

42° 24’ 35.4’’ N

URBAN PARAMETERS FAR

floor area / plan area GSI

built area / plan area OSR

plan-built area / floor area

GROSS FLOOR RATIO AREA.......................................................

0.26

NET FLOOR RATIO AREA............................................................

0.35

GROUND SPACE INDEX................................................................

0.21

OPEN SPACE RATIO........................................................................

1.13

PERCENTAGE OF PUBLICLY OWNED LAND......................

37%

RANGE OF FLOORS........................................................................

1-3

LAND USE MOST PREVALENT

LEAST PREVALENT

RESIDENTIAL

INSTITUTIONAL

54%

3%

CENSUS DATA: POPULATION

1950

1970

1990

2010

1,563

1,546

1,209

1,264

Simultaneous Urbanisms: Bind-ary

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BIND-ARY Zhe Zhang The contrast between Detroit and Grosse Pointe renders through the residential fabric, a difference of completeness, with the Detroit side seen as blight by the other side. The boundary between the two cities becomes a buffer to protect Grosse Pointe residents, though they need to cross it to access services in Detroit frequently. With one wide, divided two-way avenue, enormous amounts of asphalt-paved parking lots and several commercial boxes with huge footprints, the current boundary condition distinguishes itself with a different urban fabric, and enhances the contrast between the two sides.

In fact, the underlying tension is far from being fully revealed. With half of the road closed and reclaimed, new interventions occupy the boundary between the two cities.

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In this newly reclaimed space, new interventions deploy seeds of urbanity through playful and expressive artifacts of different dimensions and characteristics, creating a distopic landscape.

The proposal builds on the notion of a wall as both a mechanism of segregation and inclusion, protection and occupation, reacting to surrounding pressures and urban needs. Walls become spatial activators by defining, containing, and stitching new public spaces. With the new walled urbanity in place, the long-time invisible wall of exclusion between the two cities can be challenged and dissolved because of the unavoidable penetration by Grosse Pointe residents, under the economical mechanism of land value difference between the two sides.

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PRACTICES AND

D DISCOURSES ON URBANISM

The following pages compile a series of contemporary practices and discourses around urbanism. At times presented in opposition to each other by their practitioners and followers, this section examines their core ideas and most representative projects in operation simultaneously, as productive drivers in the formulation of future urbanities worldwide. Global in scope, the different approaches generate many possible approaches, in any given territory. As such, Detroit is a fertile ground for experimentation on the many ideas and polemics these different urbanisms represent.

Throughout the semester, the studio hosted conversations with a variety of design professionals based in Detroit. We learned about their larger agendas, and engaged in conversation about their work in legacy cities. Each designer approaches the post-industrial landscape in a way sensitive to the found contextual conditions. These conversations were an influential part of our design development and critical for understanding the agency of urban design under complex political, economic, and social circumstances.

an anti-urban understanding of the built form; a conception of space/time as matter/flow, fragmentary and continuous; no single condition of origin

POST

01

URBA

Source: http://dip9.aaschool.ac.uk

If not further annotated, all images are from Post Urbanism and Re Urbanism by Michigan Urban Debates, edited by Roy Strickland

RE

ANISM

a rediscovery of urban form; urbanism is a condition with no stylistic categories as in architecture; comprised of fundamentally constant spatial elements

At the turn of the twenty-first century, the University of Michigan sponsored a series of debates among various strands of contemporary urban design. One such debate was held pitting two ideologies as opposites in how they approach the existing fragmentary nature of our cities: Post urbanism versus re-urbanism.

Source: lib.berkeley.edu

jacques derrida

Peter Eisenman

Source: novusordonapoleonis.tumblr.com

Source: www.gettyimages.com

Colin Rowe Source: www.datuopinion.com

robert venturi Source: http://coffeewithanarchitect.com

manfredo tafuri

Source: http://crosspollenblog.wordpress.com

others

Source: www.arch2o.com

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Source: http://darinhurst.wordpress.com

Source: www.zigersnead.com

LINEAGE OF THEORISTS While neither party would label themselves with their respective assigned titles, Peter Eisenman took on the position of the post-urbanists, rooted in urban theory shaped by the writings of Jacques Derrida and Manfredo Tafuri. Littenberg/Peterson understand an urban theory rooted in their experience as practitioners. All three were greatly influenced

by Colin Rowe at Cornell University.

richard meier Source: www.richardmeier.com

Barbara Littenberg + Steven Peterson

milton keyes new town Source: www.pilotcities.eu

Source: www.imagesofbirmingham.co.uk

Source: www.wikipedia.org_murcia_cathedralsquare1

Discourses on Urbanism: Re/Post Urbanism

Source: www.machado-silvetti.com

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others

URBANISM Both Eisenman and Peterson/Littenberg’s proposals made the cut for top six finalists in the design of the World Trade Center Memorial. Adding to the debate’s richness, their proposals were presented to illustrate their theoretical understanding of urbanism.

Eisenman’s project focused on preserving the scar left in the urban tissue as part of the Word Trade Center memorial, not trying to hide anything or fake a polished image on the site of a terrorist attack.

Littenberg/Peterson (following spread) took the opposite approach by offering a “stitching together” of the urban fabric, with emphasis on pedestrian connectivity newly afforded by the destruction of the towers which were designed as a super block.

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WORLD TRADE CENTER PROPOSAL - EISENMAN

+

motivated by generating culture and advancing the “critical project” maintains tower footprints; green open space commemorates tower shadows fingers of influence into the city memorializes pain from national tragedy

amorphous urban space uncontained leaves ‘wound’ of Lower Manhattan

Discourses on Urbanism: Re/Post Urbanism

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URBANISM WORLD TRADE CENTER PROPOSAL - LITTENBERG/PETERSON

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motivated by improving connectivity reknit urban fabric design for New Yorkers sequence of green spaces

presumptuous : healing according to whom baroque urban forms seem static or applied “uninspiring architecture”

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urbanism

+ Source: http://wikimedia.org

photo source: Melia West

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Source: www.dr4ward.com

Source: http://w-dog.net

A DEBATE: SO WHO WON? Regardless of diverse publics and cultures, plural points of origin, or our ability to utilize technology, data, and advancements in materials, the “subject� of architecture and urbanism is still the human person. Certain urban forms continue to relate to the proportion of the human body in familiar patterns.

While it is crucial to debate who has a right to shape the city, and for and according to whom, the city remains to be operated upon by individuals in spite of their brokenness, in hopes of improving the quality of life. In fact, this is the very ingredient which makes the urban condition so rich.

Discourses on Urbanism: Re/Post Urbanism

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CITIES: X LINES LINE 04 / Joan Busquets and Felipe Correa

RECONFIGURED SURFACES

According to Busquets and Correa, the book editors, Cities: X Lines catalogs the significant shifts designers have made in their projection of the city over the past decades, with new techniques in working the built environment, as deployed across the globe. The editors present ten approaches to contemporary urban design, two of which are Reconfigured Surfaces and Recycling Territories.

This line discusses four operations: restructuring, reconstruction, rethinking and improvement of residual spaces as described by Joan Busquets and Felipe Correa. The following projects are examples of these operations manifest in the built form.

Olympic Sculpture Park, Weiss-Manfredi

Source: :Cities X Lines: A new lens for the urbanistic project - Joan Busquets, Felipe Correa

Source: :Cities X Lines: A new lens for the urbanistic project - Joan Busquets, Felipe Correa

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APPROACHES TO CITY AND OPEN TERRITORY DESIGN

1

2

restructuring of fine grain open space, often derelict or outdated and in need of reprogramming

reconstructing residual spaces created by various infrastructures in the form of interventions focused on urban mobility

Cheonggye-Cheong Restoration, Multi-partner public organizations

Source: :Cities X Lines: A new lens for the urbanistic project - Joan Busquets, Felipe Correa

Source: :Cities X Lines: A new lens for the urbanistic project - Joan Busquets, Felipe Correa

Discourses on Urbanism: Cities X Lines

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rethinking geography of residual spaces and techniques with which they are reworked

Passeio Atlantico, Manuel de Sola-Morales

Source: :Cities X Lines: A new lens for the urbanistic project - Joan Busquets, Felipe Correa

Source: :Cities X Lines: A new lens for the urbanistic project - Joan Busquets, Felipe Correa

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improvement of collective spaces, often embedded in high density urban conditions

Privately-Owned Public Spaces, Jerold Kayden

Source: :Cities X Lines: A new lens for the urbanistic project - Joan Busquets, Felipe Correa

Source: :Cities X Lines: A new lens for the urbanistic project - Joan Busquets, Felipe Correa

Discourses on Urbanism: Cities X Lines

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LINE 07 / RECYCLING TERRITORIES

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decentralization as response to the new metropolitan scale

Source: :Deccan Traverses - Anuradha Mathur, Dilip da Cunha

Source: :Deccan Traverses - Anuradha Mathur, Dilip da Cunha

Source: :Deccan Traverses - Anuradha Mathur, Dilip da Cunha

Source: :Deccan Traverses - Anuradha Mathur, Dilip da Cunha

Source: :Deccan Traverses - Anuradha Mathur, Dilip da Cunha

Source: :Deccan Traverses - Anuradha Mathur, Dilip da Cunha

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Deccan Traverses, Anuradha Mathur + Dilip da Cunha Architect and planners Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha have developed methods of mapping and categorizing field conditions that keep the history and features of a place visible in the representations. Each map receives a name specific to its physical and geographic condition, which in turn fits into one of the four mapping categorizations described below.

botanizing. uses the public garden in the city as a point of departure for a visual narrative that conveys the city’s botanical matrix

Source: :Deccan Traverses - Anuradha Mathur, Dilip da Cunha

Discourses on Urbanism: Cities X Lines

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triangulating. documents the first set of urbanistic actions, which defined the foundation and growth of Bangalore

Source: :Deccan Traverses - Anuradha Mathur, Dilip da Cunha

surveying. reconstructs the multiple geodesic expeditions that traversed this territory and singles out their agency in establishing an infrastructural framework

Source: :Deccan Traverses - Anuradha Mathur, Dilip da Cunha

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picturing. engages picturesque painting as an art form that is both an aesthetic and a scientific practice, and redefines it as an effective device able to isolate, archive and transplant elements within the landscape

Source: :Deccan Traverses - Anuradha Mathur, Dilip da Cunha

Discourses on Urbanism: Cities X Lines

Source: :Deccan Traverses - Anuradha Mathur, Dilip da Cunha

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reclaiming these territories aims for coherent integration and correction, and very precise gauging of the capabilities of the given territory and its natural systems

Caen Industrial Park, Dominique Perrault

Source: :Cities X Lines: A new lens for the urbanistic project - Joan Busquets, Felipe Correa

Source: :Cities X Lines: A new lens for the urbanistic project - Joan Busquets, Felipe Correa

Source: :Cities X Lines: A new lens for the urbanistic project - Joan Busquets, Felipe Correa

Source: :Cities X Lines: A new lens for the urbanistic project - Joan Busquets, Felipe Correa

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highlights projects of site reclamation developed in the last two decades, with the emergence of specific terms such as “terrain vague” and “derelict”, focusing on borderline, transitional spaces

Fresh Kills, Field Operations

Source: :Cities X Lines: A new lens for the urbanistic project - Joan Busquets, Felipe Correa

Discourses on Urbanism: Cities X Lines

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Source: :Cities X Lines: A new lens for the urbanistic project - Joan Busquets, Felipe Correa

Bordeaux Riverfront, Michel Desvigne

Source: :Cities X Lines: A new lens for the urbanistic project - Joan Busquets, Felipe Correa

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with the consideration of human settlement as part of a larger ecological system, the view of nature as something external to the urban settlement is now flexible

Duisburg Park, Peter Latz & Partner

Discourses on Urbanism: Cities X Lines

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INFRA ECO LOGI URBANISM RTVR

KEY CONCEPTS

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THE MEGALOPOLIS

LOGI

Megalopolis (sometimes called a megapolis; also megaregion, or supercity) is typically defined as a chain of roughly adjacent metropolitan areas.

Logi refers both to logics and logistics. Logi deals with the active role of protocols and spatial practices of production and operation, by investigating the territories and architectures that are traditionally considered the “back-stage” of cities.

INFRA

URBANISM

Infra stands for the infrastructure as a framework that underlies and manages the built environment as a physical, organizational, and operational structure shaping its forms and flows. The infrastructural systems of energy and mobility are conceived of as platforms to be rescripted and expanded, and as spaces that urban architecture might inhabit.

Urbanism is the materialization of society upon territory. RTVR argues that it is not limited to cities.

ECO

SCALING UP

Eco is the prefix shared by the words ecology and economy. Eco refers to the operational paradigm that is rooted in the ecological theories of systems thinking and in this vein, economies can be understood to operate through the principles of ecology.

The decline of a region must be seen as the initial phase of one more cycle of decline and renewal that has characterized the Great Lakes Megaregion (GLM). The book draws deeply on the region’s historic strengths - scaling up and connectivity - and showing how these strengths can be mobilized in new forms.

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A PROJECT FOR THE GREAT LAKES MEGAREGION

SPECULATIVE URBANISM: THE GREAT LAKES MEGAREGION FUTURE In the [ecological] paradigm, the relationship from parts to whole is reversed. The properties of the parts can be understood only from the dynamics of the whole. In fact there are no parts at all. What we call a part is merely a pattern in an inseparable web of relationships - Fritjof Capra

Source: :Infra Eco Logi Urbanism - RTVR

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SYSTEMS While Shed Cartographies are productive in revealing the relational fields of geographies, networks, flows and interactions within the territory, a different method of analysis is necessary to provide an understanding of how urban space is structured. On the ground, we are concerned with the physical artifacts and objects that literally figure the urban and shape the spatial relations within it.

Source: :Infra Eco Logi Urbanism - RTVR

EnviroShed

Source: :Infra Eco Logi Urbanism - RTVR

CommodityShed E-90

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Source: :Infra Eco Logi Urbanism - RTVR

GeoShed

Source: :Infra Eco Logi Urbanism - RTVR

CommuterShed

STRUCTURE

CODE

The highway and the interchanges that enable flows act as a strategic site where design interventions might possess agency.

The way in which structures, infrastructures, and cities operate over time is only partially due to their physical form, and more often a result of the legal, social and economic practices and frameworks that surround these situations.

Source: :Infra Eco Logi Urbanism - RTVR

Source: :Infra Eco Logi Urbanism - RTVR

Source: :Infra Eco Logi Urbanism - RTVR

Discourses on Urbanism: Infra Eco Logi Urbanism

Source: :Infra Eco Logi Urbanism - RTVR

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CONDUIT URBANISM The book presents a series of fragmentary utopic proposals set within the context of the GLM. The proposals are not complete urban schema, nor a totalizing vision; rather, it is a network of architectural interventions, simultaneously prototypical and specific, intertwined within existing urban infrastructures.

Source: :Infra Eco Logi Urbanism - RTVR

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THE GATEWAY, TORONTO

Source: :Infra Eco Logi Urbanism - RTVR

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Source: :Infra Eco Logi Urbanism - RTVR

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THE CROSSING, DETROIT - WINDSOR

Source: :Infra Eco Logi Urbanism - RTVR

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Source: :Infra Eco Logi Urbanism - RTVR

Source: :Infra Eco Logi Urbanism - RTVR

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THE EXCHANGE, CHICAGO

Source: :Infra Eco Logi Urbanism - RTVR

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Source: :Infra Eco Logi Urbanism - RTVR

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04

URBAN ECOLOGY Kyong Park

The author was born in Korea and moved to the United States at the age of twelve. He received a BS in Architecture from the University of Michigan in 1978, and participated in a post-graduate independent program at the E-98

Institute of Architecture and Urban Studies in 1979. As an architect, artist, urban theorist and activist, Park’s research and artistic practice focuses on the city. He is particularly interested in the conditions which give Volume III: DEVISE

rise to shrinking cities (Detroit, for instance) and expanding cities (as in Asia) and to the formation and reconfiguration of border cities (such as San Diego/Tijuana).

Co-founder of the International Center for Urban Ecology (iCUE) nomadic laboratory for future cities

Source: Book - Urban Ecology Detroit and Beyond

What is the book about?

The book is a compilation of projects and essays on Detroit and many other moving cities around the world. It projects Detroit and its issues onto existing or developing global contexts.

It examines the post-industrial city from a fresh perspective and articulates the ironies of Detroit’s current condition.

It builds upon previous projects and exhibitions that demonstrate that architecture and cities are not commodities to be used and discarded.

Source: content.time.com

Why Urban Ecology?

Kyong Park uniquely conceives work on urban ecologies suggesting a much broader approach to the city than might first be offered, especially considering that the term ecology is largely assumed to deal only with green or sustainability practices.

Source: www.63alfred.com

Aerial image Detroit 1949

In the satellite photos from the center of Detroit, one can see that it is actually as green as the farm land beyond the suburbs; a condition where even wild animals, like deer and coyote migrate to the city. When the center depopulates, nature enters the city and replaces the people. This combination of natural and artificial ecology gave him the idea of urban ecology. It is not only based on the idea of green, but its considered that a city has an ecology of its own, just like the natural world lives in its own method of ecological behavior. This leads to the argument that a city is an organism, rather than a machine.

Aerial image Detroit 2015

Why Detroit and Beyond ?

‘Beyond’ was added to explain that the condition of Detroit is not an isolated one. Detroit is one of many examples of the problems of contemporary cities.

Detroit is one of the most intriguing examples to understand the notion of urban ecology and moving cities, as well as helping to understand many active ingredients, and/or a general principle for other cities in other nations, territories and continents. ‘Beyond’ means exploring the expansion of these principles in all places, globally. The book also contains work that Park has done in Europe, especially in East Germany.

Discourses on Urbanism: Urban Ecology

Source: en.wikipedia.org

Mexico–United States border - To the right lies Tijuana, Baja California, and on the left is San Diego, California.

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Source: Book index - Urban Ecology Detroit and Beyond

Why other voices in the book?

The book has 26 other urban theorists who are difficult to categorize in one artistic sector. There are many disciplines that are engaged simultaneously in multi-disciplinary practices. Kyong Park tries to show that he is a part of a larger movement, where different disciplines and individuals are, unofficially, connected to one another. In this network, or self-generating movement, in which many people are participating, it is mutually constructing this new urban practice.

All of these people work in, and are involved with, different cities in different continents.

Why define the effort as Guideline 1?

Urban Ecology : Detroit and Beyond is the first of the guidelines that focuses on the explicit manifestation of eccentric urban culture, and the emergence of unconventional architecture and design by-products.

An even larger portion of the built environment today is shaped by a building industry that is economically wedded to industrialized mass production standards, which by and large, ignore local culture, and environmental or topographical conditions.

Guideline 1 aims to provide a stage for strategic approaches, targeted towards leftover topics and areas. Alternative ideas presented in the book raise questions, not necessarily conclusions.

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Source: Book - Urban Ecology Detroit and Beyond

OVER MY DEAD CITY Peter Lang The city , if this term is still to hold any meaning, should be considered a vibrant manifestation of intense constructive and destructive energies, released from centric poles or linear alignments.

The new urban conglomerations behave unpredictably, flipping rapidly from congested to decongested states, stretching perimeters, dropping centers. The city is becoming a metabolic work in progress that spills through space and time, chaotically reorganizing itself as it responds to an infinite number of economic and social pressures.

International art exhibitions, along with similarly inspired architecture showcases, are taking place periodically in various cities, and have ultimately succeeded in engaging impressively large transnational audiences.

“It seems high time to cast a more than superficial glance at artistic representations of [the] contemporary city.”

Source: Book - Urban Ecology Detroit and Beyond

Tokyo is characterized by its sense of lightness, the rapid cycles of building/demolition, and thus by a high degree of ephemerality.

SURVIVING TO CREATE Stephen Vogel Detroit, one of the richest regions in the USA, has suffered the ultimate in shrinkage.

This condition however, creates an open laboratory for social and physical experimentation that attracts hardy residents, expanding corporations, self-reliant urban pioneers, artists and musicians. Often those seeking a different way of life than that advertised daily in the mass media as “the American way of living”.

It is a city of contrasts: of hope and despair; of potential and frustration. The city is ripe with opportunities for cultural experimentation - with or without the approbation of government.

Source: Book - Urban Ecology Detroit and Beyond

Empty Sign boards in the City of Detroit

Discourses on Urbanism: Urban Ecology

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THE URBAN ECOLOGY OF GLOBALIZATION Kyong Park

Disposable Cities The deurbanization of Detroit is a state of dramatic loss of population and economy. It has been taken over by an ecology of globalization.

Moving Cities Detroit is not simply shrinking, it is also moving: from the point of its origin towards its peripheries. Similar is the case for East Germany. Moving cities, following the vectors of capital dynamics, therefore gain new territories and leave non-transformative physical elements, such as architecture, behind to nature. The city no longer remains a place of settlement, but rather one of movement. A globalized financial system, or “Paper enterpreneurialism”.

Source: thedesignevangelist.com

Michigan Theatre, Detroit, USA

Cultural Impacts of Moving Cities Urban ecology of capitalism, the essence of investment is disinvestment: - Dominance of economic space over life space; resources are no longer counted as cultural or social accumulation - Temporariness of the city becomes permanent

Source: leipzigshrinkingcity.wordpress.com

Shrinking cities world wide

- Homogenization of the built landscape destroys the unique urban cell; it is designed to accommodate homogenized labor and capital

Shrinking Nations Like cities, the founding nation-states of the EU are actually shrinking, with a de-economization caused by depopulation. The idea of the state is not only being challenged by multinational corporations, but also by migrations from economically excluded zones and colonial territories. New supranational and de-territorializing regimes are defined by constant flows of movement (money, technology, people and goods) along the circuits of productions and exchange, in the wake of the demise of the nation-state, along with social and political principles.

Source: www.gizmag.com

Domínguez’ concept depicts compactly planned cities atop vast mobile structures, capable of crawling to new locations

A Genesis A movement in architecture and urbanism has been developing outside of architecture and urbanism. Architecture is the new political effigy; site and object of violent social reactions.

Source: www.gizmag.com

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24260 THE FUGITIVE HOUSE iCUE Escaping Detroit, where over 200,000 homes have been set on fire or demolished since 1960, the Fugitive House’s survival comes with a condition. It must be invited for only temporary visits, always finding another host city to be reconstructed.

It is both produced by the temporality of modernism, and discarded by modernism.

Source: Book - Urban Ecology Detroit and Beyond

Source: Book - Urban Ecology Detroit and Beyond

Orleans , France 2001 Sindelfingen , Germany 2001 The Hague, The Netherlands 2002-04 Hamburg, Germany, 2002 Karlsruhe, Germany 2003 Dessau 2003-05 Sheffield , UK 2004 London, UK 2004 Leipgzip, Germany 2005

Source: Book - Urban Ecology Detroit and Beyond

Source: Book - Urban Ecology Detroit and Beyond

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THE SLIDE FOR HOTEL NEUSTADT Thalia Theatre Hotel Neustadt was an international festival, with 23 contributions, submitted by 153 international artists, including the Thalia Theatre. It dealt with city shrinkage, life in a tower block, life in a hotel, and the integration of neighbors. The cooperation between architecture and theater created a possibility to change urban rules, and to establish new forms of communication.

Source: Book - Urban Ecology Detroit and Beyond

Source: Book - Urban Ecology Detroit and Beyond

Source: Book - Urban Ecology Detroit and Beyond

THE SLIDE saved Halle Neustadt

18 floors - new kind of entertainment

Source: Book - Urban Ecology Detroit and Beyond

Source: Book - Urban Ecology Detroit and Beyond

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Source: Book - Urban Ecology Detroit and Beyond

WORDS, IMAGES, AND SPACES: A LANGUAGE FOR A NEW CITY iCUE A Language for a New City was inspired by an anonymous street sign with the word "Economy" that pointed at nothing. iCUE posted eighteen signs with different words on telephone poles and empty houses.

Forward Memory Create Community Future Imagine

Dream

Inspire

ECONOMY Construct Ecology

Utopia Will

Evolve Sustain Visions Protect Truth

Source: Book - Urban Ecology Detroit and Beyond

Source: Book - Urban Ecology Detroit and Beyond

Source: Book - Urban Ecology Detroit and Beyond

Source: Book - Urban Ecology Detroit and Beyond

Discourses on Urbanism: Urban Ecology

Source: Book - Urban Ecology Detroit and Beyond

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05

URBANISM: WORKING WITH DOUBT Steven Holl

In this book, Steven Holl tries to focus on the macro scale of cities through the lens of architecture.

Using his own projects, he illustrates his ideas about how the fusing of landscape, urbanism, and architecture has become a new ground for exploration.

THEMES: 1. GEO-SPATIAL 2. EXPERIENTIAL PHENOMENA 3. SPATIALITY OF NIGHT 4. URBAN POROSITY 5. SECTIONAL CITIES (TOWARD NEW URBAN VOLUMES) 6. ENMESHED EXPERIENCE: PARTIAL VIEWS 7. PSYCHOLOGICAL SPACE 8. FLUX AND THE EPHEMERAL 9. BANALIZATION VERSUS QUALITATIVE POWER 10. NEGATIVE CAPABILITY 11. FUSION: LANDSCAPE / URBANISM / ARCHITECTURE

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BRIDGE OF HOUSES New York City, NY 1979

Existing superstructure of an abandoned elevated rail link.

New character of the area as a place of habitation.

Offers a variety of housing types.

Source: Book - Urbanisms: Working with Doubt

Sections

Provides a collection of housing blocks offering the widest possible range of social-economic coexistence.

At one extreme are houses of singleroom-occupancy type, offered for the city’s homeless; at the other extreme are houses of luxury apartments.

Source: Book - Urbanisms: Working with Doubt

Source: Book - Urbanisms: Working with Doubt

Bridge of Houses shapes a public promenade, 1979

West 21st Street toward the Hudson River

Discourses on Urbanism: Urbanism

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Source: Book - Urbanisms: Working with Doubt

Protected desert landscape beyond new urban edge compared to uncontrolled sprawl E-108

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SPATIAL RETAINING BARS Sectional Cities Phoenix, Arizona 1989 A series of spatial retaining bars infer an edge to the city, and a beginning to the desert. The loft-like living areas in the structures’ upper arms hang in silent isolation, forming a new horizon with views of the desert sunrise and sunset.

Communal life is encouraged by entering and exiting through courtyards at grade.

Work is conducted electronically from loft-spaces that adjoin dwellings.

Cultural facilities are suspended in open frame structures.

Source: Book - Urbanisms: Working with Doubt

Flexible cultural building frame

Source: Book - Urbanisms: Working with Doubt

Sectional urbanism

Source: psssm.tumblr.com

Discourses on Urbanism: Urbanism

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Source: Book - Urbanisms: Working with Doubt Flexible cultural building frame

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LINKED HYBRID Sectional Cities + Urban Porosity Beijing, China 2003-2009 The project formulates a porous urban space, inviting and open to the public from every side. As a “city within a city,” the new place has a cinematic urban quality; around, over and through multifaceted spatial layers. The project has programs that vary from commercial and residential to educational and recreational, providing a threedimensional public urban space.

The ground level offers a number of open passages for residents and visitors to walk through with small-scale shops. On the intermediate level of the lower buildings, public roof gardens offer tranquil green spaces. At the top of the eight residential towers, private roof gardens are connected to the penthouses. A series of elevators act like a “jump cut” to another series of passages on higher levels.

The project goal of the public sky-loop and the base-loop is to constantly generate random relationships; functioning as social condensers, offering a special experience of city life to both residents and visitors.

Source: Book - Urbanisms: Working with Doubt

Sketch of the project

Beijing 1900 (1) shaped by the ancient rule: that new buildings could not be tall enough to look over the walls of the Forbidden City. Together with the giant block size set in the grid, this gave birth to the hutong courtyard typology. After 1980 Beijing grew vertically and outward (2). With isolated towers and “gated communities” (3) Horizontally connected and porous buildings.

Source: Book - Urbanisms: Working with Doubt

Discourses on Urbanism: Urbanism

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Source: Book - Urbanisms: Working with Doubt

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Source: Book - Urbanisms: Working with Doubt

Three public circulation loops: at ground level, on top of the lower buildings, and the loop of skybridges

Source: Book - Urbanisms: Working with Doubt

A variety of functions in the semipublic bridge loop connecting eight towers via eight bridges Discourses on Urbanism: Urbanism

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06

WATER URBANISMS: EAST

Kelly Shannon and Bruno De Meulder, editors

WHAT IS WATER URBANISM? The ambition of water urbanism is to contribute to a base of the city, where hydrological issues are dealt with in a natural, integrated and socially-just way.

Qunli Stormwater Park

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Painting on Chinese Traditional Cities along a River

Why is water critical?

Whether in cities, villages or otherwise, the settlement of man requires the tapping of water sources for distribution in one way or another: consumption, pollution, drainage and so forth to be organized, maintained and managed.

Why Asia?

Waterways were important for transportation, defense and livelihoods. They represent profits, power and danger, while they were centers of public life.

The vast scale of urbanization in Asia is a challenge. Asia has a deeply rooted habit of using rivers as collectors and carriers of waste.

Today, water is again a part of a more integrated approach to the urban condition in which the natural force of water is combined in constructive interplays with the civilizing character of cities.

Discourses on Urbanism: Water Urbanisms

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PART 1: CONTEMPORARY POSITIONS Part 1 consists of several case studies at different scales in China, Thailand, Indonesia, and Vietnam. They are organized around the narration of the destructive impact of engineering-centered approaches on the environment, in dealing with water management.

Case Study: Sanlihe River, China As industrialization and urbanization progressed, the Sanlihe suffered the same fate as other rivers throughout China.

Beginning in the 1970s, it became the city’s backside, a neglected space, a sewer and waste-disposal site that no longer resembled a river. The water disappeared and its meaning as a life source vanished.

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Sanlihe Greenway: Recovery of the Mother River An ecologically-sound recovery of the Sanlihe River became the catalyst for improving existing and establishing new urban development. Under the high embankment of the Luan River, a pipe controls flow to the Sanlihe and a riparian wetland system. Flooding is mitigated while storm water runoff is collected, purified and disseminated throughout the wetlands.

Everyday Recreational Space Project amenities include everyday recreational space, and access to fishing sites because it is a popular local pastime.

Likewise, native grasses and wild flowers require little maintenance along the riverbanks and recreational trails.

“Big Foot” Aesthetics The Sanlihe Greenway’s luxurious vegetation is representative of “big foot” aesthetics, rooted in productive landscapes and everyday cultural practices, as opposed to “little foot” or traditional Chinese gardens and ornamental urban horticulture. The metaphor references the ancient practice of foot binding. Big foot aesthetics celebrates the beauty of the natural and ordinary.

Step-Stones to Tree Islands The Sanlihe Greenway’s water-centered public spaces integrate stormwater management, habitat restoration, and pedestrian and bicycle paths. Streams flow around tree islands and preserved plantings. Paths of stones organize pedestrian access to particular areas.

Pictures of Sanlihe Project Discourses on Urbanism: Water Urbanisms

Source: Water Urbanisms East

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PART 2: PRACTICES REVISITED Part 2 explores three main topics: The role of water in the landscape.

How those circumstances create the need for better water management.

How whole cultures were based on those water practices.

Case Study: Subak in Bali, Indonesia The traditional human-nature system is dependent on syncing natural cycles with biophysical processes. Take for example the original rice growing calendar.

The introduction of pesticide and an expansion in the tourist industry triggered interruptions to the original cycle of rice paddies, causing water pollution and aquifer privatization.

The Subak Rice Growing Calendar The 180-day rice growing cycle has been adapted over millennia to optimize seasonal precipitation levels and rice productivity. Balinese cultural and ceremonial life is completely intertwined with the growing of rice and its seasonal cycles.

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The Subak Nutrient Cycle Monsoon rains falling on Bali leach nitrogen, phosphate and potassium from the volcanic soils of the sacred mountains to provide fertilizer transported via the subak irrigation canals.

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The project sought to: Retrofit ancient agrarian landscapes with bio-cultural conservation and educational programs that translate across the scale of watersheds. By coupling the micro-scale design of interpretive experience and climate comfort amplification with the macro-scale design of livelihood preservation and ecological conservation, once myopic tourism interventions will perform multiple functions.

Retrofit underutilized museums by adjusting boundaries that extend visitor perceptions into the landscape as the spiritual and ecological are enfolded with this new museum territory.

Physiological manipulations cool environs to increase visitor comfort in extreme conditions.

Landscape interventions create responsive microhabitats that amplify the interpretive ancient archaeological and sacred cosmological experience. By choreographing a series of landscape interventions that engage the river, sacred views, wind, ambient sounds and other atmospheric conditions, physiological changes reinforce the other-worldly nature of the experience.

An understanding of ecological relationships and species symbiosis assists farmers in producing organic rice and supporting the rejuvenative subak rice terrace cycle.

Discourses on Urbanism: Water Urbanisms

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PART 3: EXPLORATIONS AND SPECULATIONS Part 3 includes several short design projects. They focus on the design aspect of hydrological urbanisms.

These designs generate new approaches to integrating water, nature, and urbanized areas into a single system.

Case Study: Ecological Shoring, Bangladesh Rising sea-levels are causing conflicts of competing land uses for agriculture, industry, housing and economic growth.

In Bangladesh, this is mitigated through innovative design: the re-growth of mangrove trees and the restructuring of the brick industrial landscape is envisioned as a functioning constructed wetland.

Each pocket of space within the woven design serves a purpose for marshland, water distillation, fish ponds, clay mixing, brick drying, agricultural growth or pedestrian circulation.

The Sundarbans Mangrove Forest

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MECHANISMS: Policy, Root Structure, Tides, Ecological Systems, Soil Erosion, Patternings, Infrastructure, Landscape Ecologies, Agriculture

The brick industry of Bangladesh converts mangrove-lined shores into flood-prone industrial sites

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Cellular Network of programmatic modules with water as the linking medium

Natural Habitat Program module along the shoreline

Programmatic modules

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EVALUATION Water urbanism is one articulation of landscape urbanism as it uses the structuring capacities of the landscape. It is at the same time ecological urbanism in that its ecological function is only one of the layers that the water system carries. It aims to generate social, cultural and economical values.

River City Banjarmasin, 1916 Since its foundation in 1526, Banjarmasin, located near the confluence of the Barito and Martapura rivers, has been a water-based city. According to legend, the city once had 107 rivers, creeks and canals.

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ON LANDSCAPE URBANISM

Center 14: On Landscape Urbanism is a book which calls for the field of Landscape Urbanism so be considered as its own discipline. The book is divided into three parts: Origins, Essays, and Assays.

Architecture

Urban Design

Landscape Urbanism

Urban Planning

The book is of pivotal importance to the thought paradigm of utilizing landscape as the primary framework element of our cities.

Landscape Architecture

I: ORIGINS

This section re-presents sixteen original articles considered by the editors to be foundational to the discipline. The articles are presented chronologically, and embody a wide ranging discourse, covering topics in ecology, criticism, methodology and urbanization. Most are written by authors who did not and could not know that their work might one day be appropriated within the present discourse. These articles have

Dean Almy

Editor of Center 14 : On Landscape Urbanism Associate Professor of Architecture, Director of the Graduate Program in Urban Design Professional degree in architecture at Cornell University, and a postprofessional degree in architecture and urban design at The University of Texas at Austin Walter B. Sanders Fellow at the University of Michigan in 1989 Partner of Atelier Hines Almy Architects

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been frequently cited in literature and are both distinct from and complimentary to the recent series of exploratory articles that attempt to codify landscape urbanism’s current definitions; brought together for the first time in a single source ready for textbook use. The hope is that the diffusion of the landscape urbanism meme, which has embedded itself into studios and seminars throughout the academy, will thus be expanded.

A DISCUSSION ON THE INDIVIDUAL IN THE CITY Joachim Schneider “Landscape is primarily... The sensual impression a person has that is created by a section of the surface of the earth including the sky above.�

According to Schneider, landscape has been romanticized as being the antithesis of city; it is comprised of rolling hills, trees, and rocks.

He argues that we must discover the city as landscape. We must question if people are a part of the landscape.

Landscape is not a mechanism by which cities are generated due to economic reasons, but is instead a glue or binding agent that occupies the inbetween space. Schneider argues that landscape is not an afterthought of city making, but actually thrives in this liminal capacity.

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II. ESSAYS The second section is comprised of a series of articles that attempt to bridge the divide between theories of landscape urbanism and its practice.

These articles range from illuminating precedents for a reinvented practice, to the documentation of new spatial propositions.

“We have chosen not to reprint material that has been widely disseminated and available through other journals. Some of the authors’ work is primarily on the ground, outside academia; the work of others is firmly entrenched within it, or is attempting to position itself at the intersection, perhaps even looking to redefine professional practice.�

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PRECEDENTS FOR A NORTH AMERICAN LANDSCAPE URBANISM Charles Waldheim Waldheim argues that landscape is the fundamental building block to city-making, not architecture.

Considers landscape urbanism as a city in the landscape as opposed to landscape in the city.

Explains two projects to make this case: Broadacre by Frank Lloyd Wright and New Regional Pattern by Ludwig Hilberseimer.

Explains that Broadacre City was a critique of the capitalist-centralized industrial city, and that Frank Lloyd Wright advocated for de-centralization.

New Regional Pattern was on the forefront of de-centralization and the building of federal highways arguing for a low density pattern of settlement units following the highway system.

Both projects were in response to the economic injustices and unhealthy conditions of the industrial city. Outside of the socio-political context of these projects, both examined the role of representation.

His critique of these projects is that there is too much responsibility put onto the architect by society; they lack in the dimensions of ecological discourse.

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III. ASSAYS “In March 2002 we invited five teams of practitioners, each comprised of landscape architects and architects, to Austin and gave them twenty-four hours to investigate an interdisciplinary and collaborative approach to the problem of the margins of our city.

The intention of this demonstration was not to arrive at solutions, but simply to expose some of the underlying assumptions and methodologies behind the work of contemporary Landscape Urbanism.

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Center 14: On Landscape Urbanism is not meant to be definitive. Its aim is to supplement the existing literature of the discipline, and to expose its roots. We hope that it demonstrates the potential behind the methodologies landscape urbanism might employ to address the most difficult design and planning dilemmas presently facing the urban project.�

THE GOVALLE DEMONSTRATION PROJECT MICRO-MANIFESTOS, AGENCIES AND REPRESENTATIONS Anuradha Mathur + Dilip Da Cunha

The primary objective for Mathur and Da Cunha was to challenge the concept of landscape as merely being an infrastructure projecting a scene.

They also challenged the “urb” of the urban condition by questioning what other settlements are available to designers.

They did not acknowledge the edge condition, but saw it as a lace in its own right.

They claim that Landscape Urbanism is less about a specific landscape and more about suspending it within the particularity of place.

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TYPOLOGICAL URBANISM Lee and Jacoby, editors

Image source: www.wiley.com

Book Cover

www.gsd.harvard.edu Image source:Typological Urbanism Projective Cities. Architectural Design

Christopher’s Additional Typologial Researches

www.gsd.harvard.edu

www.serie.co.uk

www.gsd.harvard.edu

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TYPE & TYPOLOGY In the editor’s introduction, they explain the nuance of typology: “There are three essential predicaments of the relationship between architecture and the city. Firstly, architecture merely responds to the rapid changes of urbanism.

Secondly, urbanism forms in emerging mega cities in developing countries are very different from the Western models. Finally, architecture is incentivized by market economy. So the relationship between city and architecture has to be rethought.”

Typology is a discourse, theory, treatise (method) or science of type.

Its reduction to categories of use is limiting, as buildings can change their functions over time. The essential quality of change and transformation, rather than its strict classification or obedience to historical continuity, endows type with the possibility to transgress its functional and formal limitations.

Type is an element, an object, a thing that embodies the idea. Type is abstract and conceptual rather than concrete and literal.

This notion of type as model, graphically reducible to diagrams, introduced precepts, classification, taxonomy, repetition, differentiation and reinvention.

Durand and Quatremere classified buildings into diagrams or models according to their genres.

Image source:Typological Urbanism Projective Cities. Architectural Design

Bolam Lee, Multiplex City Seoul, South Korea, Diploma Unit6 Urban Strategy for Design

Image source:Typological Urbanism Projective Cities. Architectural Design

Max von Werz, Open Source Fabric, Bilbao, Spain, Diploma Unit6: Urban Plan

Image Source:Typological Urbanism Projective Cities. Architectural Design

Urban Plan Fragment

Image source:Typological Urbanism Projective Cities. Architectural Design

Bolam Lee, Multiplex City Seoul, South Korea, Diploma Unit6

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THE CITY AS PROJECT: TYPES, TYPOLOGICAL OBJECTS, TYPOLOGIES Marina Lathouri In “The City as Project: Types, Typological Objects and Typologies” Marina Lathouri provides a critical and historiographical discussion of type’s role in defining the architectural object and its relationship to the city.

Cities (including suburbs) have different stakeholders. Typology is a response to the city context. OMA, Toyo Ito, and SANAA’s recourse to typology is necessary in dealing with urban context.

Typological Urbanism, in conclusion, brings together arguments and projects that demonstrate a commitment to the empowerment of the architect to once again utilize his or her disciplinary knowledge. It is a re-engagement with architecture’s exteriority and architectural experimentation, governed by reason and (re)inventions,

underpinned by typological reasoning, answering not only “how to”, but also “why do”.

Urbanism is the expansion of human settlement, driven primarily by economic pursuits, while the city is the consolidated, concentrated settlement that precedes the “urb”.

“Building as an element of ‘permanence’ is able to act as the typological repository of a city’s history, construction and form.”

Image source: Typological Urbanism Projective Cities. Architectural Design

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PENANG TROPICAL CITY, MALAYSIA, OMA João Bravo da Costa Distinct building types are grouped together to form “islands of exacerbated difference” as yet another enactment of Koolhaas’ idea of the ‘Cities within the City’ developed with OM Ungers in 1977.

differentiated urban environment by allocating architectural and urban types. Architectural types (hotel, apartment tower, parking garage) are concentrated in clusters. Starting form a simple set of typological rules, each cluster can be further developed by a different architect.

Typological distribution of program is a method of giving shape to a

“The urban environments are

characterized by typological combinations (not individual buildings). This is a method focused on types rather than on objects - a typological thinking concentrated on an intermediate scale of operation, reaching into infrastructural generality as well as architectural specificity.”

-João Bravo da Costa

Image from Typological Urbanism Projective Cities. Architectural Design

Image from Typological Urbanism Projective Cities. Architectural Design

Image from Typological Urbanism Projective Cities. Architectural Design

Image from Typological Urbanism Projective Cities. Architectural Design

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Program Diagram

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SINGAPORE BUONA VISTA MASTERPLAN COMPETITION Toyo Ito and Associates In writing about their own project, the architecture firm Toyo Ito and Associates explain that: “[The] project develops the use of prototypical elements - albeit in a more ‘fluid’ manner - that bears traces to his preoccupations with the problems of collective form that typified the Metabolist movement of the 1960s in Japan.”

Image source: Typological Urbanism Projective Cities. Architectural Design

Design Masterplan

Continuing:

“In [the] proposal, the city is envisioned as aggregating into a continuous whole, fusing infrastructure, building, open spaces and services into an integrated piece of architecture.”

Image source:Typological Urbanism Projective Cities. Architectural Design

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Image from Typological Urbanism Projective Cities. Architectural Design

Image source: Typological Urbanism Projective Cities. Architectural Design

Concept Diagram

Image source: Typological Urbanism Projective Cities. Architectural Design

HNC Typical Plan

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FORMERLY URBAN Julia Czerniak, editor

FORMERLY URBAN questions what the formerly urban condition means for architecture today: What are the challenges Rust Belt cities face? How can citizens, communities, municipalities, legislators, institutions effectively operate in a post-industrial setting? How can emergent landscapes be a generator of new cultural forms or conditions?

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AUTHORS MCLAIN CLUTTER is an architect and writer who teaches at the University of Michigan Taubman College. His recent essays have appeared in Grey Room and MONU, and the work of his design practice, Master of None, has been exhibited internationally.

JULIA CZERNIAK is a Professor of Architecture at Syracuse University and the inaugural director of UPSTATE: A Center for Design, Research, and Real Estate. She is also a registered landscape architect and founder of CLEAR, an interdisciplinary design practice. Czerniak’s design work, complemented by a body of writing, focuses on urban landscapes.

DON MITCHELL teaches urban, cultural, and Marxist geography at Syracuse University. He is the author of The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space (2003) and, most recently, They Saved the Crops: Labor Landscape and the Struggle for Industrial Farming in Bracero Era California (2012).

EDWARD MITCHELL is principal of Edward Mitchell Architects and co-founder of Komanda, an architectural research group. He is an Associate Professor at the School of Architecture at Yale University, where he teaches theory and design and is director of the post-professional M.Arch. II program.

HUNTER MORRISON is Executive Director of the Northeast Ohio Sustainable Communities Consortium, a regional planning coalition. He has been the Director of the Center for Urban and Regional Studies, Director of Campus Planning and Community Partnerships at Youngstown State University, and Planning Director for the city of Cleveland.

MARC NORMAN has a master’s degree in Urban Planning from UCLA, and is vice president at Deutsche Bank in its Community Development Finance Group. In this position, he provides loans and investments to organizations serving low-income communities throughout the U.S. MARK ROBBINS is former Dean of the Syracuse University School of Architecture and the university’s Senior Advisor for Architecture and Urban Initiatives. He was previously Director of Design at the National Endowment for the Arts, Curator of Architecture at the Wexner Center for the Arts, and an Associate Professor in the Knowlton School of Architecture. He received a fellowship in the visual arts at the Radcliffe Institute and a Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome. His book Households was published by Monacelli Press.

DAVID GRAHAME SHANE is a critic, historian, and Adjunct Professor of Architecture at Columbia University and Cooper Union, both in New York. He has lectured extensively in Europe, the United States and Asia, and published widely in architectural journals. His books include Recombinant Urbanism: Conceptual Modeling in Architecture, Urban Design and City Theory (2005) and Urban Design Since 1945: A Global Perspective (2011).

CHARLES WALDHEIM is the John E. Irving Professor at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. Waldheim coined the term “landscape urbanism”to describe emergent practices at the intersection of contemporary urbanism and landscape. He is a recipient of a Rome Prize fellowship from the American Academy in Rome and has served as the Cullinan Chair at Rice University, a Sanders Fellow at the University of Michigan, and a visiting scholar at the Canadian Centre for Architecture.

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LANDSCAPES M.O.

Julia Czerniak “How does landscape appear and perform when constrained by maintenance and management – muscled instead by ecological, socioeconomic, and political forces?”

–page 151

Themes include: Urbanization patterns Metropolis to the megalopolis Working with the “machine age” infrastructures Creating urbanity in “weak market” cities What does shrinking cities mean for architectural pedagogy?

Image source: beltmag.com

Rust Belt territory map

route traveled and cities visited

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YOUNGSTOWN, OHIO One of the ten best towns to start a business Intriguing utilization of an event space Efforts to make it happen are what activates the space “Designers are masters at programming space ……..imagining program is not enough.

Designers must think beyond the rather simple question of what to do toward the more complex one of how to get things done through non profits, the development community, the public sector, finance, real estate development to help facilitate it” – 154

CLEVELAND, OHIO Designed bus lanes and other features to make the system legible Interesting moment in which LEED ND is leveraged (ex. Upper Chester and St. Luke’s Hospital wanting to achieve it)

Image source: Formerly Urban

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DETROIT, MICHIGAN Poster-child for the formerly urban Fascinating landscape succession within the residential vacancy The Urban Homestead Sectors (CDAD)

Comes with an energy component and tax abatements The idea of the naturescape which would require low maintenance yards, boosts air quality, and wildlife habitats

Opportunities to live in parts of Detroit that are heavily vacant and formed by a successional landscape

Detroit Zones Image source: Formerly Urban

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Dutch Elm Disease (1920s - 1990s)

1971

American Elm Ulmus americana Detroit lost half a million trees from 1950-1980 due to disease and attrition Czerniak brings up the idea of street names being erased over time but the ability of trees to be able to continue to define those lines, especially during the fall

1984

Detroit street with Elm Disease

Image source: Formerly Urban

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DETROIT DISABITATO Charles Waldheim

“For the architectural profession, the city of Detroit in the ‘90s entered a condition of meaninglessness precisely because it no longer required the techniques of growth and development that had become the modus operandi of the discipline” –Page 170

In ‘Detroit Disabitato’, Waldheim argues that architectural discourse has been bound up in an ideology dependent on growth, and it is time for the discipline to address the challenge of the shrinking city, and the type of urbanism it creates.

abandoned condition of Rome

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Detroit is the exemplar for urban decay.

In 1990 the city attempted to concentrate and decommission the most blighted sectors in the city. It was never executed due to major push back from residents.

In 1990 Detroit lost 1 % of its housing stock to arson, the same year the city funded the largest demolition program ever in American urbanism.

“Reconsidering the formerly urban as a unique framework for thoughts suggests the need to develop new models, cases, theories, and practices for these sites and subjects.”

Waldheim calls for us to take a close reading of the past in order to imagine new landscapes of cultural form. Origins in the west have a lot of relation to Detroit’s contemporary condition.

“Landscape might be usefully re-situated as medium and method through which the formerly urban might aspire to the social environmental, and cultural conditions of the urban, absent of its traditional architectonic forms” – Page 180

Image source: urbancoreography.net

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Meaning of Landscape Landscapes first began to be critically thought about during the Italian Renaissance when the elaborate depiction of “backgrounds” were depicted.

Origins of landscapes have been informed historically by depopulation, abandonment, and decay of urbanized territories.

Etymology of landscape: “the world itself ” –J.B. Jackson “The landscape is a portion of land which the eye can comprehend at a glance” Landscape as a way of seeing, or mode of subjectivity

Image source: 7 themes.com

searching for the meaning of landscape

Transformation of Landscape 1600s – English landscape established as genre of painting imported 1700s – Migrated from genre painting into a way of seeing the world or mode of subjectivity 1800s – In English, it referred to the land, if looked at in this way 1900s –Used to describe the activity of refashioning the land as if it were in a painting Image source: pinterest.com

romanticizing Rome’s abandonedness

Claude’s Landscapes Claude Lorrain – 1600s French painter living between the Renaissance and Baroque Eras Visual representation of classical Rome’s succession and abandonment

Liber Veritatis – “Book of Truth” compilation of Claude’s paintings He painted daily throughout the disabitato for the majority of his life.

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drawing of Rome’s abandonedness

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Disabitato – Uninhabited (Specifically referring to inside the Aurelian Wall in 16th-century Rome) A comparison to Rome’s forgotten landscape: Rome and Detroit both lost 1 million residents - Detroit lost 50% of its population over half a century - Rome lost 95% of its population over a millennium Rome devolved into a lawless wilderness of landscape succession; wolves roamed the streets at night, the Roman Forum was a place for livestock, infrastructure fragments were interspersed throughout the landscape.

Vineyards, orchards, vegetable gardens, nurseries, occupied the disabitato; a juxtaposition between landscape cultivation and succession.

Around the Coliseum, 420 plant species were documented, similar to the ghost gardens found today in residential parts of Detroit.

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CONVERSATIONS

MASTER OF NONE McLain Clutter is an architect, author and Associate Professor at the University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. Clutter’s design and scholarship focuses on the role of architecture within the multidisciplinary milieu of contemporary urbanism.

Image source: mclainclutter.com

Incentive Network channels private investment to sites that are critical in providing public access across the wide bands of infrastructure severing downtown Dallas from the waterfront. The scheme identifies areas where the divisive highways and railways rest on the ground, comprising the best opportunities to bridge across the infrastructure. In exchange for the opportunity to build at these increased FAR’s, developers must provide public access and amenities at the elevated bridge level.

Radical Railbanking is a project that hijacks, and radicalizes the tactics of railbanking by manipulating geodemography through the productive misuse of conventional GIS software. In doing so, the project attempts to locate a constructive position, relative to the hegemony of market segmentation geodemography from which the architect can operate. Radical Railbanking uses GIS to analyze and recombine development potentials that are latent in the spatial and statistical relationships between the land parcels along Detroit’s rails.

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CITY FORM DETROIT Virginia Stanard is an Assistant Professor of Architecture, and Director of the Master of Community Development at the University of Detroit Mercy. Her practice and teaching advocates community development through the collaborative design process.

Image source: cityformdetroit.com

One of the most admirable aspects of her work is it level of engagement and granularity spent with specific neighborhoods within the city. Most of the situations her projects engage are low-income settings that are catalysts for the neighborhood, by providing communities with basic urban amenities and interventions that amplify the neighborhood experience.

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AKOAKI

Image source: modelmedia.com

Image source: modelmedia.com

Image source: pintrest.com

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Anya Sirota is an Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture + Urban Planning. Her interdisciplinary research broadly focuses on contemporary cultural production and its relationship to architecture.

With emphasis on experimental interventions, cultural infrastructures, and design in the public realm, her work critically re-evaluates ways that architecture can sustain heritage and participate in public discourse.

Sirota’s architectural practice, Akoaki, has created a unique niche in Detroit for its ability to straddle academic or idealized ambitions with smart, organized strategies of realization.

Her work focuses on emboldening the social and cultural productions that are already active on site, creating spaces that are simultaneously “cultural” and “productive”, without toil. Sirota’s sensitivity to the socioeconomic dynamics of the city renders her work extremely relevant to a fast-changing Detroit.

Her project O.N.E. Mile, in Detroit’s North End is centered around a renovated garage turned arts hub and events space. Through the thoughtful curation of image and programming, the project has taken on a life and narrative of its own.

KNÜVENER ARCHITEKTURLANDSCHAFT Thomas Knüvener is an architect, landscape architect, and Adjunct Professor at Texas A&M University.

His work engages the reformulation of infrastructural and institutional landscapes for public appropriation, highlighting issues of identity and perception.

Image source: architekturlandschaft.de

The :metabolon memorandum outlines a global perspective in the proposal for a combined architectural and landscape architectural solution to create a new image for a landfill during the Regionale 2010. Landfills are often “non-places” that exist in conflict with their context. The memorandum followed a strategy of openness on several levels, including community participation. A circular route was developed with many viewing stations inwardand outward-looking - the idea being to better understand place.

Image source: architekturlandschaft.de

Image source: architekturlandschaft.de

The extension of South Campus Hochschule Niederrhein in Krefeld is accomplished with a new building for the Institute of Energy Efficiency and the Department of Industrial Engineering. The size of the area, which holds space for further institutional building, provides the opportunity to organize future urban planning and landscape architecture. The Central Valley acts as a rainwater retention area, where rainwater from the atrium and roof seeps, a sustainable operation of the new building.

Image source: architekturlandschaft.de

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AUTHORS Manasvi Bachhav holds a Bachelor of Architecture Degree from Sir J.J. College of ArchitectureUniversity of Mumbai, India. She is interested in exploring the potentials of Architecture within the temporality of the urban context through multiscalar interventions.

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Travis Crabtree holds a degree in Landscape Architecture from Mississippi State University. His research focuses on productive landscapes as a formative element within distressed urban conditions.

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Jonathan Hanna is a graduate of the University of Michigan Bachelor’s of Science in Architecture program. Born and raised in Detroit, he participates in the rich tradition of making in the region, and plans on working and living in the city after graduation.

Mengyu Jiang holds a degree in Architecture from South China University of Technology.

She is interested in the design of inclusive communities, and the possibilities around new forms of urban governance.

Shao-Chen Lu holds a Bachelor of Architecture degree from Taiwan.

His research focuses on the relationship between architecture and urban space. Post-graduation, he plans to keep working on projects that interrogate the role of architecture in the reconfiguration of urban settings.

Nishant Mittal holds a degree in Architecture from the Maharaja Sayajirao University Baroda in India.

Interested in the agency of institutions and new forms of governance in the transformation of the distressed central city, he plans to stay in Detroit after graduation to practice as an urban designer.

Luneoufall Vital Gallego holds a degree in Architecture from Texas Tech University and is also pursuing a Master of Architecture from the University of Michigan, starting in Fall 2016. Her interest explores the limits between interpretation and design as agents for speculative futures.

Melia West holds a Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Notre Dame, with a concentration in Historic Preservation. With experience in corridor design plans, and walkable neighborhoods, she is committed to fostering a sense of place by building on existing assets and community initiatives.

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Zhe Zhang holds a Bachelor of Architecture degree from Suzhou University of Science and Technology. Interested in Asian cities with high density, he is returning to China to practice as urban designer and architect, also doing research on the relationship between urban culture and urban form in Jiangnan cities.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS To faculty and practitioners, for teaching us to look and see the many presents and futures that Detroit can sponsor.

McClain Clutter Associate Professor of Architecture University of Michigan Principal, Master of None Margaret Dewar Professor, Urban and Regional Planning Director of the Real Estate Development Certificate University of Michigan Larissa Larsen Associate Professor, Urban and Regional Planning and Natural Resources University of Michigan Claire Leavengood-Boxer Master of Architecture Graduate, 2016 University of Michigan Anya Sirota Assistant Professor of Architecture University of Michigan Partner, Akoaki Virginia Stanard Assistant Professor of Architecture & Director, Master of Community Development Program University of Detroit Mercy Partner, City Form Detroit Acknowledgements

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TAUBMAN COLLEGE architecture + urban planning

University of Michigan Master of Urban Design

2015-2016