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    How to Build Cities and Destroy Motorways: A radical perspective on environmental design
    How to Build Cities and Destroy Motorways: A radical perspective on environmental design
    How to Build Cities and Destroy Motorways: A radical perspective on environmental design
    Ebook177 pages1 hour

    How to Build Cities and Destroy Motorways: A radical perspective on environmental design

    By Alessandro Melis and Liam Donovan-Stumbles

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    About this ebook

    Over thousands of years, human beings have built habitats in response to their increasingly complex needs. The ultimate form of these habitats is the modern city: a feat in which the benefits are self-evident. However, the city has grown into a paradoxical phenomenon. Providing for the present compromises the ability to provide for the future.
    The unidirectional metabolism of the city is consuming the world’s resources and disrupting the climate system at a rate that is not sustainable. Cities need to undergo profound physical and systemic changes if they are to provide for the future needs of human beings.
    This book critically examines the implication of the environmental crisis on conventional methods of urban development and architectural thinking. In contention with conservative ‘green’ building schemes, this work undertakes a radical and systemic renegotiation of environmental, population, and life-quality issues in architecture and urban design.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherD Editore
    Release dateSep 25, 2018
    ISBN9788894830170
    How to Build Cities and Destroy Motorways: A radical perspective on environmental design

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      Book preview

      How to Build Cities and Destroy Motorways - Alessandro Melis

      Alessandro Melis, Liam Donovan-Stumbles

      How to Build the Cities and Destroy the Motorways

      A radical perspective on environmental design

      How to Build the Cities and Destroy the Motorways

      A radical perspective on environmental design

      By Liam Joel Stumbles & Alessandro Melis

      scientific committee

      Fabrizio Aimar – Università di Torino

      Eric Goldemberg – Monad Studio

      Léopol Lambert – The Funambulist

      Marta Magagnini – Università di Camerino

      Fabio Quici – Università di Roma

      Donatella Scatena – Università di Roma

      Lars Spuybroek – Nox Studio

      Copyright D Editore © 2018. All right reserved.

      D Editore

      Roma

      Contacts:

      +39 320 8036613

      www.deditore.com

      info@deditore.com

      ISBN: 9788894830170

      Questo libro è stato realizzato con StreetLib Write

      http://write.streetlib.com

      Indice dei contenuti

      Acknowledgements

      ABSTRACT

      INTRODUCTION

      A political position

      A manifesto

      PART ONE

      Introduction

      SCIENTIFIC BACKGROUND

      EMBODIED ENERGY

      A RADICAL RESPONSE

      PART TWO

      INTRODUCTION

      METABOLISM

      THE AUSTRIAN PHENOMENON

      PART THREE

      INTRODUCTION

      URBAN SYSTEM CONCEPT A

      URBAN SYSTEM CONCEPT B

      DEVELOPED DESIGN

      DETAILED DESIGN

      URBAN STRATEGIES

      PART FOUR

      INTRODUCTION

      HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

      INTENT

      TECHNIQUE

      TECTONICS

      CONCLUSION

      BIBLIOGRAPHY

      Note

      Acknowledgements

      We would like to thank:

      Sjaan Askwith, Mike Davis, Adam Hunt, Uwe Rieger.

      ABSTRACT

      Over thousands of years, human beings have built habitats in response to their increasingly complex needs. The ultimate form of these habitats is the modern city: a feat in which the benefits are self-evident. However, the city has grown into a paradoxical phenomenon. Providing for the present compromises the ability to provide for the future.

      The unidirectional metabolism of the city is consuming the world’s resources and disrupting the climate system at a rate that is not sustainable. Cities need to undergo profound physical and systemic changes if they are to provide for the future needs of human beings.

      This book critically examines the implication of the environmental crisis on conventional methods of urban development and architectural thinking. In contention with conservative ‘green’ building schemes, this work undertakes a radical and systemic renegotiation of environmental, population, and life-quality issues in architecture and urban design.

      While the conservative stream of architecture implies an endogenous and therefore linear model of development, this work implies a heteronomous (open) model in which architecture reforms in response to major societal and technological changes. Associative thinking is employed as a research tool that allows diverse experiences and knowledge to converge. This perspective is applied to the environmental crisis for the purpose of rethinking the increasingly complex relationship between environmental impact and urban development.

      The design component of this work speculates on the future potential of emerging technologies such as drones and 3D printing for detaching environmental destruction from urban renewal. Resulting concepts include cyclical and adaptive urban systems that aim to grow, mutate, and reform built fabric into climate-sensitive and adaptive architecture, while simultaneously reducing the impact of the renewal process and improving the urban, spatial, and aesthetic quality.

      Design experimentation ranges from 1:1 structural realisations to simulations of behavioural production systems. The project culminates in a future urban vision depicted through an experimental representation technique that aims to shift the viewer through time and perspective.

      Model of 1st Order

      INTRODUCTION

      The Pequod arrives in the Pacific Ocean, which Ishmael feels is the most serene, mysterious, and sacred of the seas.

      Ahab, however, doesn’t feel any of this holiness; he’s getting more and more keyed up for his fight with the White Whale.

      Herman Melville, Moby Dick

      A political position

      This publication is a discipline crossover. Situated among architecture, science and fiction, it proposes future city scenarios, representing an interpretation of the post-human condition, following the present crises. It focuses, therefore, on the architectural image in its most radical form and as an instrument for the analysis of future scenarios.

      During the years 2013-2016 at the School of Architecture and Planning (University of Auckland), efforts were made to align design-based research and disruptive technologies. The idea of this text is largely tied to the spread of a research approach that fosters the findings of these three years of work.

      The research has come to a stream of radical experimentation that has produced a series of outputs, including Urban Mutations, in collaboration with members of the so-called Open Media Lab, involving the colleagues Uwe Rieger, Mike Davis and Adam Hunt.

      Urban Mutations can be considered as a synthesis of the aforementioned research, where design is articulated around the need to radically transform the city into a new organism. To achieve this goal, we have to rethink the urban fabric and its relationship with the troposphere in order to transform the degenerative existing settlements into virtuous open systems reacting to climate change. A radical spatial re-configuration of the built environment can offer opportunities for the positive development [1]/ transformation of the current energy intensive metabolism into power generation as well as for the conceptualisation of a revolutionary design. No longer will architecture define an object, a unique and recognisable item, but will entail hybrid landscapes generated by specific variations of the urban continuum, also involving autopoietic processes aimed at the adaptation to extreme environmental conditions (flooding, desertification, etc.). Hence, a crossdisciplinary approach to architecture, experimental techniques of representation, technology innovation and the use of advanced digital tools will become essential to control an extensive number of variables and to the development of a discipline focusing on the scenarios analysis.

      Thus the drawings here are the visualisation of potential future scenarios, elaborated also according to the associative thinking and describing the boundary territories in which hybridisation replaces the conventional distinction between nature and artificiality, offering opportunities to explore new forms of urban resilience.

      The present text is, therefore, an imaginary Conradian journey into the Heart of Darkness, in which the climatically extreme territories are crossed, thanks to disruptive technology and radical drawings, to meet the trader of ivory of a discipline often unreasonably conservative. It is the attempt to bring to light the need for a visionary maximalism that exceeds the conventional dichotomy between utopia and dystopia.

      The project focuses on two main scenarios.

      In the first scenario, it identifies the peri-urban motorway system as the largest source of emissions; hence, it proposes its conversion into an alternative infrastructure through the use of large-scale digital fabrication machines.

      The second hypothesises a process of transforming materials from the Auckland Central Motorway Junction (AMCJ) to return to the Central Business District (CBD), a new layer that has the function of climatic protection and the integration of existing functions through a process of re-naturisation.

      Even if based on the solid foundations of the research, with this text, we also intend, as authors, to explicitly express our position, equally distant from Neoliberism, and from continental philosophy, Marxism and Hegelianism as endogenous products of the society ossification.

      The aspects that have a clear political relapse are firstly the need for a radical change in society, which questions the current economic paradigms determined by an oligarchic control of the global market tending to self-conservative, and, secondly, the consequent difficulty or inability of scholars to communicate with decision-makers.

      Regarding the first aspect, we have been frequently told by political representatives that a new utopia would be too expensive. Financial investment at a global scale for alternative forms of colonisation of our troposphere, new infrastructures, and reconceptualisation of cities do not fit economically in comparison to the eventual advantages. It is, therefore, ultimately too complex to transform the oil-based economies into renewable energies-oriented societies in a short frame of time.

      Nevertheless, even a limited literature review can clearly show how an impressive large amount of money has been invested in keeping a concentrated political and economic power in the hands of a limited element of society. Gigantic infrastructures are built to extract oil from the mud of Alberta and from the bottom of the oceanic crusts, while enormous quantities of concrete are used to build bold motorway bridges to

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