Free Association Design (F.A.D.) A Corporate Landscape Urbanism. “Hiding its presence from public view, the cell tower camouflaged as a palm tree becomes an appropriate icon for the private infrastructural network of our day” [image source] In Varnelis’ Infrastructural City, Ted Kane and Rick Miller’s chapter “Cell Structure” provides a systemic view of corporate urbanism. The authors explore this urbanism by mapping the operations and spatial discontinuities of corporate cell phone towers in Los Angeles. In so doing, they reveal a much broader pattern in contemporary cities: “Unlike previous developments, this new infrastructure is not planned by publicly directed municipal entities, but rather is developed by competing, privately operated corporations…the rise of privately funded infrastructure and the subsequent decline of public control represents a new corporate model of urban planning, with implications for the future development of the city.
But the label doesn’t really matter. Corporate Ecologies: Network Systems and a Multiple Site Condition. Tetrapods, Entropy and Excess. [Tetrapods on the coast of Poland, source] Engineered for coastal breakwater armoring and hard stabilization, tetrapods have proliferated along coastlines over the past 70 years. As an image search on Google or Flickr quickly demonstrates, there is a unique aesthetic pleasure in observing how piles of these concrete forms cohere, shift and collectively morph over time.
Sort of like a manifestation of Plato’s dream of an anthropogenic pile of boulders, or very heavy industrial tinker toys; macro molecules performing at a mega-fauna gravity scale; the glue-like congealing of intricate forces of entropy; the design of deceleration. [Tetrapods in Japan, source] As mentioned earlier, Cabinet Magazine has a short interview with one of these hard-working Tetrapods (No. 16 – 2- 77) pictured in the photograph above (“Introduction to the Silence of the Dams“).
[Flow modeling source] Similarly, computer modeling illustrates ever more complex diagrams of the dynamics of Tetrapods with fluid forces. Minimalism and Infrastructure. “We need to develop new narratives to understand and appreciate urban watersheds and how they function” -David Fletcher, Flood Control Freakologies, The Infrastructural City [Army Corps of Engineer's channel flow model, circa 1940] Minimalism, as an artistic movement, is characterized by a particular set of aesthetics and sculptural works.
‘Minimalism’ refers to the idea of reducing the artwork to the minimal amount of surfaces, shapes and textures, avoiding references to anything beyond itself as a physical, spatial object. This includes the avoidance of an embedded narrative, metaphor and context. The minimalist genre is just as often applied to design, including Mies’ influential ‘less is more’ axiom. In its heyday, minimalist sculpture largely thrived in the rarefied, architectural vacuum of gallery space. [Donald Judd, untitled] But minimalist works placed in landscape exhibit more dynamic sets of relationships that actively test the conceptual and physical limits of the work.
Spontaneous Communities and Incremental Housing. “…social and cultural bonds can breathe life into dead spaces regardless of how mean or inhospitable they are. But it also tells how physical form endures, and is hard to retrofit once constructed. Innovative means of transforming the physical fabric of these fragmented landscapes must be invented” -Susan Rogers Some interesting posts: Susan Roger’s piece on the emergent community of Gulfton in Houston, or Superneighborhood27 chronicles the transformation of an abandoned, stereotypical post-WW II middle suburb into a thriving, diverse community (over 40 nationalities) that is currently 5 times the average density of the Houston metropolis.
In this particular instance Houston’s notorious lack of urban planning or strict zoning policies may have served as a retrograde asset, allowing the new residents to customize and create a compact, multifunctional community without adding new buildings. Can architects rethink political and economic systems in the context of these conditions? Like this: Urban Transects #3. …One more transect study worthy of note (memory triggered upon reading Infranet’s recent posting of their arctic port studio: Frozen Cities, Liquid Networks brief) is from landscape architecture student Brock Hogan, which he did for the Hypermobility studio I taught at RMIT in 2008.
The site for the investigation was a terrain vague between sites, sandwiched between the Port of Melbourne (shown above on the left), where a significant portion of the Australia’s material flows arrive and embark, and the new Docklands housing and entertainment redevelopment (shown on right). The two programs come together at the highly degraded and polluted Moonee Ponds Creek and the overpass of the Bolte Bridge: a site of poorly bundled infrastructure. The studio sought to find ways to restore the creek and to cross program linkages between these infrastructures and the adjacent luxury development rather than construct the typical, green space “buffer”. (click images for larger view) Like this: Urban Transects Revisited. “I argue that planned and unplanned horizontal conditions around vertical urban centers are intrinsically neither bad nor good, but instead natural results of industrial growth, results that require new conceptualizations and considered attention, and that these must be in hand before potential solutions to any problem discovered can be effectively addressed or devised” -Alan Berger from Drosscape Two urban transects compared: The image above and the two below are from Alan Berger’s Drosscape.
The top image shows the horizontal spread of Atlanta, GA from 1990 (dark grey) to 2000 (light grey). The image below (what Berger calls a dispersal graph) is a study of four radial transects of the city (the magenta, blue, yellow and orange lines) from the center to the edge of Atlanta. Th image below is a spindle chart showing the change (orange) growth (red) and decline (yellow) of manufacturing relative to distance from Atlanta’s center. Comparative city shapes image from MetaCity Datatown.
Urban Transects Revisited #2. Thanks for all the comments on the urban transects revisited post – an engaged and wonderfully broad ranging conversation. I think a common thread in the dialogue is that an urban transect has the most research and application value as a method of interpreting and intervening in the city when its multilayered, openly adaptive (both in relationship to the environments in which it is applied and to its own embedded methodologies), and expressive of spatial and physical qualities. In the spirit of that conversation, I’ve pulled together other transects I’ve come across that demonstrate a diversity of approaches to achieve different effects than the two transects already discussed.
These are the ones that have surfaced thus far – a mix of highly analytical to completely physical experiences. I was pretty surprised by what I found–a bit different from what I was expecting… The Dérive Guy Dubord’s “Naked City” Around the same time in the U.S…. Venturi, Brown, Izenour, Learning From Las Vegas.