The Edge Making City
Urban issues to make the 21st century megastructure
Urban issues to make the 21st century megastructure
http://issuu.com/cateavi/docs/avitabile
– How to densify and shrink cities to make them more sustainable?
– How to make recognizable urban limits and edges on administrative borders?
– How to make the utopian linear megastructure of the 21st century?
This paper will try to answer to these questions, giving a design proposal which is only one of the possible formal solution to an urban program which provides rules about transportation (railway, motorway and water), water management, use of alternative energies, economic development and social policies.
Using the distinction that Colin Rowe does in Collage City between the utopian abstract Cartesian world of Superstudio and the Robert Ventury vision of Disney World as symbolic American Utopia - my dissertation will explore a prototype of city which keeps together the principles of urban sustainable design and architectural design of mega structures.
The duality of Disney World as townscape and the images of Superstudio as science fiction exhibit the extremes to which the two critiques of the ville radieuse have reduced themselves.
This thesis will try to explore the opportunity to build up a strategy for a prototype of sustainable city which might accommodate the ideal (the science fiction as mega-buildings, lightweight throwaways, plug in variability, integration of buildings transport, movement systems and tube) and what we believe the real has to be.
According to what Colin Rowe says, " these two visions are different but complementary in fact if on one hand Superstudio proposes the elimination of the formal structure of power, Disney World is an attempt to furnish the resultant vacuum". Similarly if the linear macrostructure will make the edge and the city border, densification and shrinking involve different urban roles and economical interventions which make this urban strategy real and feasible.
This project is the attempt to make the 21st century megastructure addressing some urban issue taken from the reality of San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles. The site is along San Fernando Road named also Route 99 which cuts the backbone of the Northeast San Fernando Valley trough the communities of Sylmar, San Fernando City, Pacoima, Sun Valley, Burbank and Glendale before hooking up Route 66 and dropping in San Gabriel Valley.
“Megastructure are the architectural idea of encasing an entire city in one building”. Few of them became built environment, mostly remained paper architecture and commonly architectural expression of totalitarian regimes of modern history.
Consequently, for a new type of megastructure intended as the urban alternative to the lack of borders and clear limits due to sprawled cities and dispersed metropolis, this paper sets up the post fascistic scenario of Camelot split from Los Angeles city within San Fernando Valley.
In terms of design proposal Camelot embodies the idea of a defensive long linear megastructure, a science fiction, conceptually based on the historical precedent of the Edgar Chambless Road Town, the Le Corbusier plan for Algiers, the Paul Rudolph Lower Manhattan Express way and the Superstudio utopian abstract Cartesian world.
This peculiar linear city is made by the extrusion of one section which doesn’t change accordingly to the specific part of the site it is passing through. The wall of Camelot has been built along the new city administrative borders of San Fernando Road and Ventura Boulevard, the first facing San Gabriel Mountains, the second Camelot geographical borders of Santa Monica Mountains. These protecting densified lines consolidate the agricultural heritage of the Valley and its communities. The valley becomes a garden limited by the these two strong edges.
With the edge making city displacement towards science fiction, the design proposal lack in diversity and shows clearly all its limits. The goal is getting to an urban strategy and architectural solution which takes on board equally the science fiction and the townscape visions.
In Collage City Colin Rowe says “ it becomes necessary to conceive a strategy which might accommodate the ideal (science fiction) and which might plausibly respond to what we believe the real to be (townscape) ”.
In Collage City Colin Rowe says “ it becomes necessary to conceive a strategy which might accommodate the ideal (science fiction) and which might plausibly respond to what we believe the real to be (townscape) ”.
This site offers an amazing variety of urban events characteristic of the sprawl vocabulary which Dolores Hayden brilliantly reported in A field guide to sprawl (W.W. Norton & Company, New York – London 2001). According to her list of urban sprawl episodes, this paper analyses the Route 99 reporting the existing ground conditions, the frequent traffic areas, all the San Fernando Road communities and population social backgrounds, human and physical geography.
Further some key words, taken from the general issue of urban sprawling, build up the vision of townscape of the edge making city in terms of related arguments to make this project deals with the crude and the obvious like a new Disney World Enterprise.
The concepts of depopulation, enterprise zone, edgeless cities, densification, linearity, and water power are part of a complex urban design idea which improve the Camelot design proposal to get to a strategy based on diversity, a spine of different infrastructures and flexible variable land uses.
Inevitably when the urban approach evolve into an architectural attempt to make the form of the edge making city, the weakness of the design proposal obliged this research to make a critique and shift the issue again to an urban scale.
