{"id":6498,"date":"2019-09-06T16:29:04","date_gmt":"2019-09-06T15:29:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.gre.ac.uk\/architecture\/?page_id=6498"},"modified":"2019-09-06T16:29:04","modified_gmt":"2019-09-06T15:29:04","slug":"march-unit-19-2019-20","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/blogs.gre.ac.uk\/architecture\/march-unit-19-2019-20\/","title":{"rendered":"MArch Unit 19: Stranger Attractor: Non-Specific Urbanism 2.0. John Bell & Simon Miller"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

\u201c<\/em>There\nis nothing more poetic and terrible than the skyscrapers’ battle with the\nheavens that cover them. Snow, rain, and mist highlight, drench, or conceal the\nvast towers, but those towers, hostile to mystery and blind to any sort of\nplay, shear off the rain’s tresses and shine their three thousand swords\nthrough the soft swan of the fog.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

– Federico Garcia Lorca<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“No matter\nwhere you go, there you are.” <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

– Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Context\n<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In\nmajor cites across the world there has for many years been a growing fictional population, one which hides behind masks of seeming\nurban engagement, mixing more or less effortlessly into their polycultural\nmultifarious environments. This population does not\nwork, neither does it create meaningful communities: it does however produce\nconsiderable wealth. This para-population, present in all significant\nconurbations has become indispensable to the life of metropolitan centres.\nWithout it, many such areas will cease to function as we currently understand\nthem and decay and decline will surely follow. This population appears to be\nmade up of citizens; many even look like residents, ready to defend old urban\nvalues, but they are not. They are doppelg\u00e4ngers whose role, wittingly or not, is\nto facilitate the termination of ‘old city urbanism’ by deception. Their\npresence disguises the flight of commerce and industry. They are a form of\ncamouflage that hides urban emptiness. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

We\ncan now say that everyday city life has become co-extensive with theme park\nfantasy urbanism: the authentic historic city has ceased to exist – it has been\nreplaced by a simulacrum. Your task, should you choose to accept it, is to\ndesign that simulacrum.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Programme<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The\nfictional population is, as you will have surmised, is one composed of tourists\nof one kind or another. We have to accept the desire to travel is not going to\nchange – whether by plane, train or Carbon-neutral yacht, the rise of the\ndoppelg\u00e4nger is inevitable. How can this desire be married to urban programmes\nwhich have the capacity to serve both real and fictive populations? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Metropolises consume huge amounts of resources: supply grids are\nalready becoming strained. In these hyper-dense environments, a rational\nresponse is to look to localised production and to sustainable material and\nenergetic cycles. Architectural and urban design then becomes explicitly linked\nwith the ecological, or metabolic. We will consider density and verticality\nwithin a network of relations which entrain many aspects of dwelling,\nconsumption and production, so as to speculate on the gaining of a measure of\nurban autonomy. We will see socio-commercial aggregation as tending toward the\nsymbiotic rather than parasitic and seek to develop proposals which respond to\nboth the spectacular and the quotidian. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Non-Specific\nUrbanism<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is neither a duck, in the Tufte\/Venturi sense nor is it Architecture Parlant, <\/em>it is distinct in that it\u2019s primary function is to excite interest, to engender a sense of wonder, to be the opposite of ordinary. The attractor object is seldom if ever site-specific, it is a celebration of self, hermetic and figural. Always morphologically extravagant, however this in itself is no longer sufficient, in our view. Rather than merely catering to the fictive population\u2019s transitory interest, it must also be of worth to the real population in some regard, for whom otherwise the edifice soon becomes no more than a tired joke.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Site<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Near Future, Downtown Anywhere\u2026 In order to begin, we will develop heuristic models of near-future dynamic urban systems, focusing on opportunities for greater responsiveness, flexibility and programmatic diversity alongside forays into the ludic, extravagant and bizarre. These models will then be used to inform organisational, architectonic and urban strategies for hybrid, strange attractors. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Precedents<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The\nTulip<\/a> (will probably return\u2026) London, Fosters –\nFunded by Safra Sarasin, a Swiss private bank.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Vessel<\/a>, Hudson\nYards NY, Heatherwick\u2019s $150 million staircase to nowhere that owns your\nphotos.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Garden Bridge<\/a>, London –\na bullet dodged\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

ArcelorMittal Orbit<\/a> – London\nAnish Kapoor\/Cecil Balmond get knotted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dongdaemun Design\nPlaza<\/a>, Seoul – ZHA + Samoo parametric blobscape.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Ring of Life, Fushun<\/a>:\noriginally intended to include a bungee-jumping platform, but the plan was\ncancelled when the ring was found to be too high to jump from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tianzi Hotel, Hebei <\/a>– a slightly dodgy\none this – in many ways\u2026One of many buildings Xi Jinping would rather did <\/a>not exist\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Subsidiary<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of the 42 million overseas visitors who came to Britain last year, half did not leave London. In effect the city welcomes double its native population in visitors every year, and at peak holiday times nearly half the population of the central area will consist of ‘fictional’ citizens from overseas. Today tourism exerts a powerful influence over urban policy in Britain. It has prompted government measures to expel beggars from city streets – as a result of opinion polls that show that a high percentage of foreign visitors are disturbed by their presence. It also forms foreign policy. Although long since amended, thanks to the persistence of information on the internets, we can discover that the 1997 edition of \u2018Britain an Official Handbook\u2019 published by the Central Office of Information explained which kind of tourist is desired, and which is not. ‘One high-spending US tourist outweighs a coach full of day-trippers from across the Channel arriving with packed lunches and an itinerary of free attractions who merely clog up the streets and end up costing the country more money than they bring in.’ <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A\nrare moment of institutional candour\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

TL;DR<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

We\nwill design hybrid urban visitor attractions+. \nWe will go on a unit trip, time and destination tbc.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Entering\nthe Evolo Skyscraper Competition is an option.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cThere is nothing more poetic and terrible than the skyscrapers’ battle with the heavens that cover them. Snow, rain, and mist highlight, drench, or conceal the vast towers, but those towers, hostile to mystery and blind to any sort of play, shear off the rain’s tresses and shine their three thousand swords through the soft […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-6498","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gre.ac.uk\/architecture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/6498","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gre.ac.uk\/architecture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gre.ac.uk\/architecture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gre.ac.uk\/architecture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/28"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gre.ac.uk\/architecture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6498"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gre.ac.uk\/architecture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/6498\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gre.ac.uk\/architecture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6498"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}