LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE

Upper Pool Studios - Semester 2, 2011

Augmented Spatiality Do the wild thang Karres en Brands landschapsarchitecten La pavilion Little differences

Do The Wild Thang

Hybridizing Beijings Infrasprawl
Landscape Architecture Upper Pool Design Research Studio Studio Leader: Dr Charles Anderson
Maps of Beijing cannot be made fast enough. The speed of renewal defies any static representation. Even a perfect datashot from space would barely capture the reality of a city in transition.... The city leaps simultaneously outwards, inwards and upwards. While the goal is complete metamorphosis, in reality this is never achieved. Even a clear understanding about what shapes will emerge remains absent.... At the heart of Beijings current contradictions...is the fraught shift from mono-centric ring city to polycentric multicity.... Infrasprawl can be defined as, on the one hand, disruptions of spatial patterns created by excess infrastructure, and on the other, infrastructure that consumes more space than it can serve or generates more traffic than it can process. The city keeps getting bigger, but useful tissue gain is minimal. In the throes of marginal swellings, crude and dramatic upscalings, explosive and chaotic fragmentation, and congestion beyond the point of dysfunctionality, Beijing presents an opportune moment to rethink the social-spatial organisation of cities and to re-imagine the potential for emergent hybrid urban-infrastructural forms. This studio focuses directly upon Beijings infrasprawl and in particular its ring road organisation. Beijing is a city dominated and most commonly described by its ring roads. Indeed, pursuing a policy of massive highways in the middle of the city Beijings ring roads now consume approximately 30 square kilometers of land more than the entire down town area of Beijing. This infrasprawl not only gobbles up arable land and habitable space, and creates stark divides between neighbourhoods, it generates a vast randomised distribution of urban voids and gruesomely uninhabitable public space. Indeed due to the ensuing traffic congestion, this infraspawl paradoxically renders much of the city inaccessible and uninhabitable. Places are simply too arduous to get to and air quality is appalling. (Beijing is now rated the worlds most polluted capital with respiratory issues pandemic across the city and lung cancer the number one cause of death.) This studio seeks to develop design proposals for Beijing that, while engaging with the urban dynamics and realities of Beijing, aspire to conceive and evolve new urban forms or what could be called infrahybrids. Of particular interest to this studio are the ecological infrastructures being pioneered by Turenscape, Landscape Architectural Office in Beijing, the Ring Road reconfiguration proposals of Open Architecture Office, also in Beijing, and the work of BAU Architects, and Neville Mars and Adrian Hornsby. This studio will navigate its way through three interrelated phases. Phase 1 will comprise a series of experimental exercises exploring dynamic spatial organisation and systems modeling. Phase 2 will consist of data accumulation, readings and analysis and the generation of relevant base material. Phase 3 will involve the generation of design provocations / proposals for Beijing. NB. Due to the scale and ambition of this studio all project work will be inevitably and predominately group based. Day: Tuesdays Time: 1.30pm - 5:30pm Place: 45D

Image & quotes courtesy: Neville Mars, Adrian Hornsby, Li Juankun

KARRES en BRANDS landschapsarchitecten

Upper Pool Design Research Studio Intensive
This is a two week studio intensive led by Bart Brands / Marco Broekman from the internationally acclaimed landscape architecture practice Karres en Brands from the Netherlands. After some preparatory work in the preceding weeks this studio formally starts in Week 13 and nishes in Week 14. The K&B Studio is an intense and exhilarating experience - an opportunity not to be missed! All specic dates, studio location and studio details to be conrmed.

la pavilion
landscape architecture upper pool design research studio tutor Craig Douglas OUTR Research Laboratory This is an INTENSIVE design studio that will run: week 14 (Tues 26th October) - week 17 (Mon 14th November) This is an intensive studio that will examine the possibilities of ideas emerging from an investigation of site through a material thinking approach to design. We will be considering the site, and the designed response to site, as a complex and dynamic set of material and corpreal relationships continually constructed and destroyed through time. The brief is to design a landscape pavilion, and in part, the outcome will be to dene what a landscape pavilion may be as determined by an examination of your own work. There is an avalanche of pavilion precedents that we will interrogate in order to assist us to understand what a pavilion may be, and how we might explore it materially. The approach will be through a rigorous process of making that includes scale + scaleless models, 1:1 prototypes to be tested on site, and drawing.

PA - VIL - ION [puh-vil-yuhn] 01. an object of pleasure 02. entropy translated/transformed 03. dynamic bodily experience 04. a dialectice between the physical landscape and its temporal context 05. large or small 06. ?

Glue Pour, Robert Smithson, 1968