Transportation Mania

TRANSPORTATION MANIA QI/MINXUE

SCI-Arc Graduate Thesis 2020

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STATEMENT 02-03 ANTONIO SANT’ELIA 04-09

ARCHIZOOM ASSOCIATI 10-17 EARTH ART 14-17 YONA FRIEDMAN 18-23 LUDWIG HILBERSEIMER 24-29 DINGBAT HOUSE 31-37 CITY TEXTURE IN THE FUTURE 38-41 DINGBAT HOUSE-EVOLVED VERSION 42-47

QI MINXUE

Cornerstone, Paper Model, Minxue Qi, 2017

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STATEMENT In the near future, transportation-based architectural design is going to be one of the most important design method in cities. gWith the changes in vehicles themselves comes changes in the infrastructure that must coexist with them.

To operate as efficiently as possible, the infrastructure will focus on increasing connectivity, which will make this kind of infrastructure play more common roles in people’s daily life than it does today. Transportation hubs in the future will serve not only purely utilitarian purposes, but will also be multifunctional for working, playing, and living, etc..

The concept of city texture will be more crazy than ever, that buildings no longer need to be organized/grouped by grid because future vehicles will navigate themselves and calculate to get most possible routes of destinations. Cities no longer need “grids” to construct human-adaptable roads to support their dumb driving behaviors, but “orderly chaos” to focus more on how do people want the architecture be without caring too much about the space transportation will take.

This idea, that we may group buildings without grids, reflects a broader cultural shift that may no longer have its roots in today’s classification.

For the future residents in Los Angeles, the dingbat apartments which blankets the urbanized flatlands of Southern California since 1950s are going to have their new lives. The idea of building dingbat apartments was to adapt living space with high demands of personal vehicles. For the future, super dingbat apartments will appear in a new different way but still get the old spirit of adapting people’s life with transportation changes.

The thesis will be a series of displays that people’s life react to architectural space, building reacts to future vehicle types, and city reacts to the whole new transportation method.

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manifesto of futurist architecture by Antonio Sant’Elia

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“Supertall buildings of enormous scale and mixed uses may be better understood as selfcontained cities in a global context instead of buildings in an urban context”. Urban centers throughout the world are influencing the design of the supertall buildings as “a city within a city” and “a city in the sky”. “Tall buildings have the versatility to accommodate uses other than the standard office, residential and hotel functions that currently predominate”. Surprisingly, in the city of Whittier, located in Alaska, instead of providing a local solution to build sustainably in an extreme northern climate, all activities of the town take place in a single apartment. This unique concentration of activities and housing makes it the most important building of a small town, giving it the name of town under one roof.

We need to replicate the existing facilities and essential elements of life at the ground plane up in the sky; this means that the ground plane needs to be treated as an essential uninterrupted and a duplicable layer at the same time. The duplicated layers, on the other hand, should be, in a supportive way, rather than blocking out light and view and sucking out life away from the street. Variable conditions in the climate and environment also will be needed for a holistic approach to consider the urban setup as a whole and beyond an individual building.

Città Nuova II Rednering, ATKINSON+CO, 2018

To sum up, transforming the conception of place that was brought about by high-rise buildings catalyzed the disruption and loss of place in modern architecture. The interpretation of place in critical regionalism ideas is more based on classic deception of the place and, thus, fail to cover the current hybrid multi-layered definition of place versus space. Today’s highrise architecture can be best understood only through pluralism. It must be asserted that due to the massive scale of high-rise buildings, they often contribute to serious place-making problems which require more advanced building technology and an integrative design in which summon architects, engineers, and constructors.

Concrete 2018

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backbone,

ATKINSON+CO,

Città Nuova I Rednering, ATKINSON+CO, 2018

Nostalgia for the future, ATKINSON+CO, 2018

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Power Station, Antonio Sant’Elia, 1914

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The City of the Future, Hundred Story City in Neo-American Style, Francisco Mujica,1930

Perspective drawing from La Città Nuova, Antonio Sant’Elia, 1914

House with external elevators, Antonio Sant’Elia, 1914

In Sant’Elia’s vision for the city of the future: “It must be built high on the edge of the ‘turbulent abyss’: the streets will no longer be on the ground floor like doormats, but buried underground with multiple floors, metal ramps and fast Moving walkways are connected to form a network that is intertwined with metropolitan traffic. “

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no-stop city by Archizoom Associati

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No-Stop City model, Archizoom Associati, 1969

Roof Garden, Archizoom Associati, 1969

No-Stop City, Archizoom Associati, 1970

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The No-stop City is an instrument of emancipation.

Branzi explains: “The idea of an inexpressive, catatonic architecture, outcome of the expansive forms of logic of the system and its class antagonists, was the only form of modern architecture of interest to us‌ A society freed from its own alienation, emancipated from the rhetorical forms of humanitarian socialism and rhetorical progressivism: an architecture which took a fearless look at the logic of grey, atheistic and de-dramatized industrialism, where mass production produced infinite urban decors.â€? The City frees us with its blankness, its featurelessness, allowing us to be anyone anywhere.

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No-Stop City / Interior Landscape, Video, Archizoom Associati, 1969

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Homegeneous unit*n, No-Stop City, Archizoom Associati, 1969

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We were described as a space where the interior of the city is broken by the natural scenery mountain, an endless and no feature, and people live as campers. The interior of this space is full of rocks, household appliances, and small pieces of nature are brought into the artificial world. Tents, appliances, and motorcycles indicate that people’s basic needs have been met. Other drawings show bedrooms are in an infinite grid.

In addition, in the No-Stop City, factories (production places) and supermarkets (consumer places) are used as basic spatial models.

In a sense, cities are no longer a cultural unit, but It has become a material machinery site for the flow of production and sales of consumer goods. In addition to the infinitely extending mechanical grid, the rest is “one toilet every 100m�.

City = supermarket / factory

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land art/earth art

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A Line Made by Walking, Richard Long, 1967

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A Line Made by Walking, Richard Long, 1967

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Saha Line,Richard Long, 1988

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Land Art is also known as “earth art” and is also known as “earth art”. It is an art movement that began to appear in the 1960s and 1970s. As an art movement, land art is a phenomenon The theme is mainly focused on the rejection of commercialization of artmaking by some people in the artist community after the 1960s and 1970s. At that time, the entire European and American world was experiencing the hippie movement, Anti-war movements, feminist movements, and various social contradictions accumulated after the Second World War’s economic prosperity and affluent life broke out.

People questioned the alienation of the orthodox value evaluation system to people, distressed at the environmental crisis brought about by the industrial revolution, and asked about the meaning and value of life. Reflected in art history, modernism, which has fallen into rigid formalism, severely departed from real life, and encountered various criticisms of avant-garde art. And the uniqueness of the earth art is to consider the above issues with “natural” as the starting point. In the endless cities, the rich and endless landscape and strip-shaped horizons, like the works of earth art, express the results of the mechanized reproduction of the social environment.

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“mobile architecture” by Yona

Friedman

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Eiffel Tower, Yona Friedman, 1960

Spatial City, project, Perspective, Yona Friedman, 1958/1959, Moma, New York

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Spatial City, project, Aerial perspective, Yona Friedman, 1958, Moma, New York

French architect Yona Friedman (1923-), this purely utopian architect on paper has influenced many architects since the 1960s. thought of. Especially in 1958 he proposed the concept of “Mobile Architecture”. It can be said that the work of many groups including Archigram, Metabolism, Archizoom and so on has the visionary’s shadow.

For Friedman, the “mobility” does not refer to the lack of mobility of the building, but the “mobility” of the occupants, that is, to give the occupants the freedom of new choices. Friedman emphasized that the building should be mobile and his use could be changed by the occupants’ wishes. Only through “indeterminate” infrastructure can the “indeterminate” “mobile building” be realized, and the “mobile architecture” thus becomes the architecture of the “mobile society”.

Therefore, among Friedman’s three requirements of “mobile building”, the most important point is that the building can be modified according to the requirements of the occupants, which can be said to be the concentrated expression of the architectural thinker’s exploration at that time.

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Site plan,Vertical City, Ludwig Hilberseimer ,1927

Vertical City, Ludwig Hilberseimer ,1927

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Vertical City, Ludwig Hilberseimer ,1927

Vertical City is Hilberseimer’s response to Le Corbusier’s proposals for urban construction in the 20th century. It was published in “Building of large cities” in 1927.

In the project, the cities are stacked according to their functions. The design of the complex is to reduce the demand for traffic, thereby reducing the traffic in the city.

At the same time, in this plan, the entire city is endless and becomes a continuous system, instead of existing autonomously in the city as any building. The city seems to be a mechanical replica. -Stop CIty is the most prominent one. But one thing that needs to be explained is that, from the standpoint of value, Vertical City is a rational expression of science and technology. It is hoped that based on science and technology, human life can be more reasonable and effective. The latter is a kind of worry about the rapid development of modern science, which shows a terrible living situation of people under the extreme development of technology.

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dingbat house

research

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What is dingbat house?

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The dingbat house blankets the urbanized flatlands of Southern California like the chaparral covering the surrounding rugged hills and valleys. Emerging in the early 1950s this new native species of apartment structures found its niche in the building boom of the late ‘50s and ‘60s and quickly spread across the fertile expanse of postwar Los Angeles and the American Southwest. The dingbat easily insinuated itself into Los Angeles’ expansive grid of single-family residences, replacing individual homes and taking over entire neighborhoods, subtly, yet profoundly transforming the landscape of the city.

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Various facade types of Dingbat House, Photograph, James Black, 2011

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“Generic”

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While all of the variations are dingbat houses, the “Generic� dingbat house type can be thought of as a simple two-story box, with minimal setbacks for the side yard, and parking provided by carports either carved out along the front of the building or the back, or both. First floor units are directly reached from one of the sides, and stairs typically lead to a single-loaded access balcony/walkway leading to the upper units. Stairs are sometimes placed parallel to the building, and other times enter into the building to access the shared walkway or to provide direct access for two units, eschewing the walkway altogether. This is not so much the most common type of dingbat house, but rather the idealized model by which to compare the other types. Generic two-story dingbat house typically contains six to ten apartment units, depending on the unit sizes and lot coverage.

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Title city texture chage

city texture in the future

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automatically avoid buildings

automatically avoid pedestrians/any standing people

automatically avoid anything in its road in advance

the vehicles (in general) in the future will have its own navigation system which can avoid collision, which will make our cities’ texture more crazy than ever.

current city grid style. Straight forward, easy for human to obey traffic rules

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little by little, the city grid is becoming dense, the newly build roads are thinner than before. Straight forward, still moderate for human to obey traffic rules, at the same time driverless vehicles are involved step by step.

ultimately, no more roads, no more sidewalks, only piazzas with islands of buildings, people, anything but vehicles.

Driverless vehicles fully take in charge.

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Title New Generation Dingbat House

dingbat house - evolved version

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combine exterioir circulation with multi-level recreational space

move private parking to the back

shift blocks to make balcony for drone landing “drone ready�

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different elements of evolved dingbat houses

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feed new typologies into the different evolved dingbat house elements, build vertical road access, “dingbat style� spacing and per-unit shading

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elements assembly

vertical access

final

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