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Brian McGrath
A highly topical text book that introduces the powerful technique of digital modelling to a wide audience
of students, architects, designers, planners and urban citizens and anyone else involved in the complex
decision-making processes involved in shaping the urban environment.
Drawing on two decades of teaching and practising urban design, Brian McGrath explores new theories
and technologies of digital modelling to create moving and interactive 3-d drawing situated within the
histories of urban theory, design and representation. The book is both theoretical and practical. For the
main examples Rome, New York and Bangkok McGrath draws on his own experience of living and
working in these three cities on three different continents. Analytical discussions of the cities combine
historical and abstract knowledge with the ground truth of empirical experience.
While a rich array of urban studies books have been published over the last thirty years, there is currently
no single book like this that brings together urban design theory and new digital technologies in urban
information mapping, modelling and 3-d simulation, as a way of understanding how cities transform and
differentiate over time.
Brian McGrath is Associate Professor of Urban Design at Parsons, the New School for Design in New York.
For many years, he also taught urban design at Columbia. He has taught internationally in Taiwan,
Denmark, Hong Kong and Thailand, where he was a Fulbright Senior Scholar in 1998-99. He recently
completed a research fellowship at the India China Institute at the New School. McGrath is co-author with
Jean Gardner of Cinemetrics: Architectural Drawing Today (2007) and co-guest-editor of Sensing the
21st-Century City: Close-Up and Remote (2005), both published by John Wiley & Sons.
Brian McGrath is that rare writer and teacher who can portray the complexity of the city without reducing
it to simple stereotypes. Grahame Shane, Adjunct Professor of Architecture, Columbia University.
Brian McGrath is an urban inventor who has developed nuanced techniques to approach the impossible
complexity of representing the city. This book shares those techniques while also transporting the reader
deep into some of the world's most intricate urban fabric. Keller Easterling, Associate Professor, Yale
School of Architecture.
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Brian McGrath
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Table of Contents
8
Prelude
Digital Modelling for
Urban Design
52
Chapter 1
Archaeology
120
Chapter 3
Genealogy
196
Chapter 5
Schizoanalysis
19952005: An Archaeology of
248
Conclusion
Modelling Urban
Design Futures in
India and China
Modelling Discourse
Globalisation
Liberalisation
Spectacular Feedback
Archaeological Modelling
Organisation Man
Manhattan Island
Bangkok: A Genealogy of
224
Chapter 6
Desire
Lifestyle Centres
Simultopia
Bangkoks CSD
Pathumwan Intersection
Collateral Space
32
Introduction
The Spectacularisation
of Urban Design
Correlative Space
Ground Zero
Chitlom Station
Timing
Attentive Circuits
84
Chapter 2
War
Scientific Archaeology
Collaborating
Freedom Tower
Interfacing
Other Representations
Spoils of War
Diagramming
of Difference
Ratchaprasong Intersection
162
Chapter 4
Trade
Complementary Space
and Shanghai
Complementary Space
Virtual Itineraries
Gaming
Texting
Chapter 1
Archaeology
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54
55
56
57
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National Capital
19th-Century Fabric
Modern Institutions
20th-Century Fabric
Christian Capital
Medieval Fabric
Disabitato
Churches
Imperial Capital
Topography
Ancient Monuments
Ancient Roads
58
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archaeological analysis of
Financial Capitalism
Subways
Zoning Districts
59
Industrial Capitalism
Early Grids
1811 Grid
Mercantile Capitalism
New Amsterdam
Topography
Farms
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64
65
Model of 20th-century
neighbourhoods which
Aurelian Walls.
66
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67
78
Collateral Space
Collateral space is an associate or adjacent domain
formed from other statements that are part of the same
26
group. Grahame Shane has called such spatial
formation the creation of urban enclaves, bounded areas
which comprise special districts based on a common
collective imagination of a civic body or group of urban
27
citizens. Collateral space defines the group and the
group defines the space and must necessarily exclude
others outside the boundary of the enclave. Ordering and
coding through spatial position, time and significance is
important in the collateral space of enclaves. This is how
urban design becomes a statement of the power of a
certain groups discourse it moves from description of a
cultural norm to the prescription of a bounded spatial
logic. This book will compare models of the collateral
space created in three specific urban localities: the
Roman Forum (Chapter 2), Manhattans skyscraper
business districts (Chapter 4), and BangkoksCentral
Shopping District (Chapter 6). For digital modelling for
urban design, collateral space introduces the construction
of digital archives to carefully analyse new construction
in relation to existing built or natural conditions, in order
to examine what in war is called collateral damage the
unintended consequences of military action.
79
90
91
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92
94
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93
In 1932, Mussolini
inaugurated the Via dei
Imperiali, connecting his
headquarters at Palazzo
Venezia to the Coliseum and
beyond. The medieval fabric
was demolished to make way
for his tree-lined boulevard.
95
109
110
111
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112
134
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113
135
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Chapter 3
Genealogy
Online fly-through of
Manhattan Timeformations,
www.skyscraper.org/timefor
mations (2000).
122
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123
set-back law.
124
125
Manhattan Timeformations is
a genealogical modelling of
urban design as a
bureaucratic rather than
master planning discipline.
132
133
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143
144
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145
214
215
216
217
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218
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219
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Chapter 5
Schizoanalysis
198
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199
222
Spectacular Feedback
Bangkoks CSD is not just a shopping district, but a
symbol of all the conflicts inherent in the global city of
disjunctive flows. In the following chapter, we will
present a schizoanalytical model of Bangkoks central
shopping district as a final example of digital modelling
for urban design. While urban design has traditionally
prioritised the physical context of an urban site,
schizoanalysis looks at contextualisation in a deeper
sense by considering the micro-politics of subjective
meaning. There is never any correct interpretation of an
urban context, and schizoanalysis uncovers the multiple
assemblages of codes and meanings which constitute an
urban site.
Schizoanalysis is located within the various
disjunctive flows which pass through any urban context.
These include the ecosystem fluxes of water, materials,
nutrients and organisms, but also the mechanical flows
which convey these materials as well as people,
information and ideas through cities. The informational
and media flows which constitute the semiotic flux of
contemporary life are accompanied by a continual sound
and visual track which complements the material and
human flows. It is the intersections and interstices
between these flows which constitute the object of
schizoanalytical modelling. Human perception and social
organisation occurs also at the intersection of these
flows, and schizoanalytical modelling can begin to
capture the relationship between human subjectivity and
the mechanics of flows. Urban design captures the
transformational capacity of redirecting these flows in
relation to human agency and social life.
152
201
2005
2000
1995
1990
1985
1980
1975
1970
1965
1960
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226
Canal ferry.
Kasemsan 1.
The early call to prayer drifts with the morning fog on the
Saen Saeb Canal. A taxi boats engine idles for a few
moments while picking up commuting passengers. As the
boat takes off, its wake splashes into the tiny lanes which
wind to the mosque. Across the canal, the monks from
Wat Pathum Wanaram make their morning rounds
through the Buddhist monastery community that lines
the small soi or alley that connects the canal to the
broad Rama I Road. People sit quietly meditating on the
cool floor of the temple. The first Skytrain of the morning
crosses the canal, a slowly moving arch of light turns over
Pathumwan Intersection before pulling into Siam Central
Station. The sound of train wheels on a steel track barely
filters through the thick temple walls. Traffic is stopped
at Pathumwan Intersection for a moment to allow
Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn to leave Sra Pathum
Palace to perform her Royal duties.
The icemakers on the narrow Soi Kasemsan 1 have
ground and bagged the blocks of ice which have been
stored in the ground floor of the shop house all night,
cooling the workers in their dormitory above. As they
have for four decades, they load their bicycle samlors to
deliver crushed ice for cool refreshment to the vendors
diagonally across in the shopping centre Siam Square.
The snack vendors have gathered in front of Siam
Paragon Mall, where they are allowed to sell freshly
prepared food, in small plastic bags wound tightly with
rubber bands, to the workers who will serve the
customers arriving after 10am, among them university
students coming for a coffee and doughnut before
heading off to class. This is morning in Bangkok
Simultopia, as the great arenas of globalisation, the huge
malls of Bangkoks central shopping district, prepare to
open again for the hundreds of thousands of daily
visitors, alongside diverse local activities from earlier
times which still persist.
Simultopia
Simultopia is a purposely ambiguous term coined to give
meaning to the complex experience of place in late
capitalist global cities. While -topia means place, simulimplies both the Modernist dream of simultaneity the
ability to understand multiple actions in one place and
Post-Modern theories of simulation and the simulacra,
which refer to copies without an original. Simultopia,
therefore, describes the mediated experience of
globalisation which includes both that of speed,
movement, transparency and simultaneity which
captivated historical Modernist aesthetics, and revisionist
notions of the phenomenology of place which grew in
reaction to placelessness of Modernist technological
1
space. The term resonates critically in two directions,
towards regressive utopian Modernisms which still
imagine heroic possibilities of human physical
overachievement, and theories of place which are
inadequate in describing the mediated experiential
possibilities of contemporary environments, societies and
psyches. In Bangkok it is used to describe the coexistence
of extremely localised environments along canals and
alleyways (sois), juxtaposed with the huge commercial
spaces of globalisation.
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228
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230
Pathumwan Intersection
We begin our digital cutting at the National Stadium
Station, the terminal station of the Bangkok Transit
Systems (BTS) Skytrain Silom Line. The broad concrete
platform completely covers congested Rama I Road the
most direct connection to the heart of Bangkok and
after crossing the three city moats to the west, ends at
the gates of the Grand Palace. But the concrete viaduct of
the BTS Skytrain terminates abruptly here, and you have
to contend with a multitude of road-based vehicular
options to travel to the historical centre of the city, unless
you know about the hidden municipal canal boat service
tucked at the end of the narrow sois that line Rama I
Road. Travelling eastward, however, has become quite
easy with Bangkoks first mass transit system. The Silom
Line travels east for two kilometres before turning south
past Lumphini Park, and snaking along the business
districts of Silom and Sathorn Roads, before terminating
at the Thaksin Bridge pier, where the Chao Phraya
express boat provides another way to the palace and
temple enclaves of Rattanakosin Island.
The station platform looks over the old National
Stadium and the green oasis of Chulalongkorn University
to the south, and the short, crowded sois of shop houses,
guest houses, bungalows and street vendors which end at
the Saen Saeb Canal. More than just a transit stop,
National Stadium Station is the beginning of a
schizoanalytical journey through the heart of Bangkok
Simultopia. This chapter will travel by cutting through the
layered space of the multi-level armature, as the Silom
Line transfers to the Sukhumvit Line at Siam Central
Station, before coming to a rest at Chitlom Station and
Central Department Store.
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