In reflecting on Albertiâs setting out of the ancient city and the Wellâs predictions on the late 19th century cities âdiffusionâ,therin lies in the former an establishment of a determinate boundary, in the latter incremental growth as to be distorted by accelerating processes. Albertiâs edge was one of accretion, Wellâs, of erosion. Each denotes across the vault of history the scale of man and his direct relationship to the city as a planned or growing entity. It is in the last century that the âhorse and foot stridesâ have been taken over by infrastructures which have distorted the city into an abstract system whereby the forces driving it forward are no longer explicitly visible. It is partly the nature of these âinterfacesâ between man and his environment in contemporary urbanism which I have been seeking to understand in this work. As I described earlier a methodological disparity emerges in the space between the âurban driftâ and the âurban interface matrixâ .In this lesson maybe learnt about how to incorporate a time-based study of the specific in the broader context of shifting social dynamics. The final programmatic and spatial context for the design project has arrived from an initial âbottom upâ drift encounter through âtop downâ city analysis to a series of âbottom upâ observations on site. In this the final strategy has mediated between both methodological poles. I have illustrated how these methodological tensions can provide a fresh way of approaching research on the city. The âparasiteâ of the peri-urban although distinct remains part of the âlatticeâ of the metropolis and that of the rural.Its is a place of local flows such as agriculture, and of global flows such telecommunications industries.The âlatticeâ, here concerns a hybrid mesh of disparate sites in relationship at the cityâs edge.The architecture of my project finds it augmentation at the point where this mesh is punctured by a broader infrastructural network.I call this the âlocus of mobilityâ, a point where the local, the global and the mobile, the regional and generic co-exist simultaneously in juxtapositions of functions. It would be fallacious to contend that these relationships are not already existent to some degree,and this is the cusp of my argument -that this study has been about understanding and augmentating extisting processes and conditions in a creative way.It Is the intensification of these âsitesâ into one point which has been an ambition here, the search for a dynamic and mobile conception of place, within the apparent âplacelessnessâ of a globalizing world. This is a paradigm wherin we have witnessed simultaneously the invasion of the urban by the suburban,the reclamation of the city by its hinterland and the proliferation of absurd densities in agrarian settings.And in the âprivate landcapeâ of suburbia we have witnessed a period of mass-compartmentalization.However by no means am I proposing a broad re-confiugrtaion of an existant social and economic system, so much as the possibility of more diverse accretions of life in small pockets, co-existing in hybrids of private, civic, âindustrialâ and commercial functions.I have proposed through this work, a detournement of the existing into richer forms of urban relationships. It might condern itself with âsimple thingsâ,a place to buy local produce,to recycle or engage in informal trade.But In attempting to operate within the existing processes of the city and in accecpting the nature of the peri-urban context and of late capitalism itself , I am interested in the relationships inherent in collisions of seemingly disparite values and modes of being.Hybridism,in this instance the selective exploitation of proximity, is, for me is a way of examining and augmenatating the nature of human relationships architecturally.I consider this a cogent probe in a world so ardently driven forward by socio-economic relations and their concurrent secularizations.
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