IV. CITY FORM We have the opportunity of forming our new city world into an imageable landscape: visible, coherent, and clear. It will require a new attitude on the part of the city dweller, and a physical reshaping of his domain into forms which entrance the eye, which organize themselves from level to level in time and space, which can stand as symbols for urban life. p.91 kevin
ACCEPTOR
How much culture can a city bear before it loses its ow n id ent ity & orig How much global culture does a city have to have t ina of lity and becaomes impersonal & disagreeable? un ctio na sp art of the modern, globally-oriented world?How do you forge new urban solutions that are surprising , di stin MASS THINKING ctiv e?
10 Moshe Safdie’s Habitat 67’ could be studied and utilized as a model for future developments—as it already has. Instead of building clusters of suburbs, one could use Habitat as an agent to recreate healthy, liveable and dense cities. Habitat was originally designed for an Expo as a radical utopian microcity. Now, there are residents occupying it. “Turn-of-the century visionaries offered divergent recipes for the future city, and their attitudes toward density and urbanity varied enormously.” In the end, Moshe Safdie did accomplish his Arcadian visions of incorporating his key themes of modularity, integration and densification into architecture.
urban centers seem only able to develop in accordance with ‘uniform’ thinking & traditions of global market concepts one market, one world, one method = one solution
“Cities are our most environmentally-friendly places to dwell, as well as our biggest cause of rampant consumption & waste...Canada’s cities can help resolve the urban paradox and make our urban metabolisms healthy”
.: a city = anonymous, impersonal, uninhabitable Metropolis 1927
5 “In December of 1967 I believed anything could be done. I also believed that everything was going to be easy, because Habitat had been so complicated that anything else in the future would have to be relatively simple.” As stated above, Moshe is a fantasist when it comes to creating architecture. He believes that after ‘successfully’ completing one project, its’ properties could be applied to latter creations. Without doubt, learning from one’s errors and or achievements can be an appropriate way of starting a new project. Despite the contextual displacements, why then, do all of Moshe Safdie’s designs have a similar scale associated with them as well as a reoccurring theme of the utopian vision?
Cedric Price MVRDV Archigram
an object that is perceived by millions of people of widely diversrse class and character
a product of many builders who are constantly modifying the structure for reasons of their own
a powerful symbol of a complex society
Chodząc po japońskim orgodzie w mieście Wrocławiu śni że jest w Kioto śni tak przez pół wieku Rozewicz - 14 Lipca
CITY
UTOPIA
vision
=
moving elements
+
4 “Environment is culture and culture is archetypal; it grows from deep within you, embodies long-lived feelings towards shelter, family, community and self. To me the word ‘house’ calls up images peculiar to my early environment” In this quotation, Moshe Safdie refers to this early environment as his city of birth and childhood, Haifa. Safdie’s initial work reflects the typology of this culturally dense city—the city of interaction. Habitat’s architectural form is a pure reflection of Haifa. “The openings are few—pairs of windows here and there. When you look out over the Old City, eight parts of what you see is solid walls and only two parts is openings” Can these formalities
stationary parts
Utopia n. an imagined perfect place or state of things Thomas More: Utopia: it was described as enjoying a perfect social, legal, and political system, based on Greek ou ‘not’ and topos ‘place’] utopian: adj. Characteristic of Utopia; idealistic Also known as Arcadia, The Golden Age, Heaven.
Brands give products, services, places and events an added symbolic value, which elevates then above themselves, and makes them more than they are in a material or functional sense, an expression of an ideal or a lifestyle, and thereby gives them an extra value in an economic sense too.
“CITIES ARE HARDER TO PREDICT AND
strategic linear spots, elements intensive a few not used or foci, juncimportant considered tions, places paths may as paths, of a break be imaged boundarin transtogether as a ies, lateral portation, simple struc- references, convergence ture, as long outlines, of paths, as they have walls, shores, moments of a consistent railroad cuts, shift, congeneral reclosing one centrations, lationship to region off a focus or one another from another symbol
Paris
OR MANIPULATE THAN PRODUCTS”
Copenhagen Rotterdam
orchestrating a unique experience
Toronto Amsterdam, “Almere = the new Amsterdam”
not simply an economic activity; it’s a manner of introducting order & certainty into what is in principle a chaotic reality
a mark
BRANDING
mediumto-large sections of the city, have a 2D extent, observer enters ‘inside of’, have a common recognizable identifying character
7 In 1970, Moshe Safdie established his office in Jerusalem. During this period, he deals with progressive contextualism—a way of thinking globally about a building. He takes on a significant urban design project for the city of Jerusalem between the years of 1971 to 1985. Unfortunately, this large scale masterpiece was not built. This proposal for the Western Wall Precinct on Judaism’s holiest site dealt with density, modularity and interaction in a natural manner. It is not simply a utopian super structure placed on any site. In fact, the design is composed of stepped terraces, public places, spaces for meditation and prayer, archaeological sites and institutional zones. All these programmes blend into the city’s surroundings without disrupting the landscape. Moshe’s attempt to designing a timeless building that is true to the present as well as the past is clearly distinguishable in this project.
point-reference, they are external, simply defined as a physical object, signs, store fronts, trees, doorknobs, urban details, clues of identity
8 Moshe Safdie sees interaction as a key component to his creations. The Western Wall proposal is not the only project dealing with the idea of clustering. A 1971 competition proposal for the Centre Pompidou in Paris is evidently based on human interaction. The architect designed the building so as to facilitate gathering with the incorporation of coincidental meeting plazas. “Urban historian Spiro Kostof defines pre-automobile cities as ‘ places where a certain energized crowding of people’ took place. Historical cities provided intense and active meeting places for commerce, the exchange of ideas, worship, and recreation.” Paris is an example of this historical city. Moshe Safdie found that it was vital to maintain this interaction amongst people, artists, tourists within a new public building. “Now as roles in society become ever more specialized (and thus more isolating) , our basic need for interaction increases”
“Nowadays ‘city branding’ is associated primarily with the economically-inspired desire to position cities more positively in the midst of a scaled-up, more mobile and flooded market of locations and destinations. Cities have to be shaped more emphatically, thematized and brought to the attention of the more mobile and less location-dependent companies, inhabitants and visitors.”
interaction:
A Pattern Language Christopher Alexander on Density Rings p.156
density:
n. 1. the degree of compactness of a substance 2. Physics, the degree of consistency measured by the quantity of mass per unit volume 3. the opacity of a photographic image 4. a crowded state 5. colloq. Stupid denseness n. French dense, Latin densus
Cradle-to-Cradle “If humans are truly going to prosper, we will have to learn to imitate nature’s highly effective cradle-to-cradle system of nutrient flow and metabolism, in which the very concept of waste does not exist” p.103
PATH
“People want to be close to shops and services, for excitement and convenience. And they want to be away from services, for quiet and green. The exact balance of these two desires varies from person to person, but in the aggregate it is the balance of these two desires which determines the gradient of housing densities in a neighbourhood”
major difficulties in the city ima
Image of the City
The very concentraU.S. city centers: tion on habitual travel piling-up of blank along a path, as by office structures a transit line, will reinforce this familiar, same ubiquity continuous image of traffic ways & kevin p.96 parking lots common experience of a momentary loss of orientation when coming off a freeway ramp smog & haze, were frequently mentioned as the torment of the city dweller...dulling the People adjust to their surroundings and extract structure and ide environmental colours ntit yo ut o f the material at hand “Yet even such a seemingly chaotic set of surroundings does in fact have some sort of pattern, and people seize upon and elaborate this pattern by concentration on minor clues, as well as by shifting their attention from physical appearance to other aspects”
bacterial mass
6 The San Francisco State College Student Union proposal plan of 1968 illustrates the building as a bacterial mass inhabiting the city block. Although the proposed design does not relate to its surroundings, the architect makes it clear that a twenty thousand student campus is meant to be its own microcity. The design has formal similarities to his earlier Habitats; stacked geometric volumes being one of them. New York’s 1968 Habitat proposal also dealt with parallel themes of mass-production. This project in itself is a mega structure. It straddles the perimeter of land by a body of water. This sail-like form does not fit into the New York cityscape at all. Similarity within Moshe Safdie’s work is evident, yet the context constantly varies.
METHYLOXALOACETATE
metabolism: all the chemical processes that occur within a living organism, resulting in energy production (destructive metabolism) and growth (constructive metabolism) adv. Metabolically Green metabole (line ontop) ‘change’ metabolize is the process of be processed by metabolism
Metabolism: an architectural movement & philiosophy of change with utopian schemes: city as an organism which changed at various rates. Comparison of buildings & cities to an energy process found in all of life. Taoist philosophy of cosmic change and eternal growth; endless variations
Superstudio Constructivists The Metabolists: 1959- Japanese architects and city planners –who provided flexible, extensive structures, organic growth, laws of space and functional transformation held the future for society and culture. Designed adaptable plug-in mega structures.
El Lissitzky
mega structure / super structure:
1 Moshe Safdie’s thesis A Case for City Living: A Three-Dimensional Modular Building System evolved as a foundation for many of his architectural as well as urban-scale projects. Based on the thesis, Safdie’s first development was brought to life as a one to one scale cluster of concrete dwellings known as Habitat 67’. This radically modern approach to housing encompasses an assortment of themes which include modularity, interaction and densification. Moshe Safdie uses these key words within his globally reoccurring
2 A drawing from 1962 by Moshe Safdie which was based on his thesis project, depicts overlapping infrastructure with vertically suspended strips of housing units evoking an Arcadian ideology. This representation is similar to the one of Harvey Wiley Corbett’s 1913 City of the Future. The title of Corbett’s drawing is a statement of a future dream—of a flourishing utopia. Habitat was conceived as a city within a city, integrating commercial, residential and institutional programmes into one complex. The structure was based on a purely modular and geometric design. With modularity, comes repetition, and with repetition comes the idea of technology. “Technology today means mass production, the assembly line, largescale organization, corporate structure…People recognize that our technology basically means doing things in great numbers, which means repetition, which implies the kind of organization that operates on centralized decisions ” Habitat was unmistakably designed as a machine to live in. Although Moshe Safdie intended the project to perform as a landscape surrounded by Montreal’s panorama, the structure hints at an industrial gesture with its’ spilled out cardboard-like boxes.
MEGALOPOLIS If we want to live in a sustainable world, we’ll need bigger cities, and more of them
1. ecological integrity 2. economic security 3. infrastructure & built environment 4. governance & empowerment 5. social well-being
DISTRICT
LANDMARK
ge :c on fus ion s, flo ati ng points, weak boundaries, isolations, breaks in c on tin uit y, am
1. The size of the political community. It is obvious that the larger the community the greater the distance between the average citizen and the heads of the government. p.72 “If you spend 8 hours of your day at work, and 8 hours at home, there is no reason why your workplace should be any less of a community than your home” p.223
3 Moshe wanted to create a high-density residence while providing inhabitants with a similar experience as the typical free-standing home that everyone sought after. “ …Our current environment clearly fails to satisfy many of our most urgent and basic needs. Never in recent history have we heard in the popular press so many calls to rebuild ‘community’; to create neighbourhoods in which we can walk; to control car-related pollution; and to conserve our dwindling stretches of natural landscape.” Mr. Safdie only addresses these issues within the micro-community of his mega structure. All dwellers of Habitat are equipped with a private entrance, a private garden, parking and skywalks. By stacking approximately one hundred and fifty cubic homes, an anti-thesis to urban sprawl is defined. What the architect fails to take in hand is the building’s relationship with the city as a whole.
“1. Deconstruction of the traditional. Material production is paralysed throughout the country. The longing for a super-production. The first studio dreams. An ideology is formed containing two demands that are fundamental to further development: element and invention. A work that is to keeping with our age must contain within it an invention. Our age demands creations arising out of elemental forms (geometry). War has been declared on the aesthetic of chaos. An order that has entered fully into consciousness is called for.” p.121
habitat: n. 1. the natural home of an organism 2. a habitation [Latin, = it dwells: see Habitant] habiter French
big uit ies ,b ra nc hin
Above all, if the environment is visibly organized and sharply identified, then the citizen can inform it with his own meanings and connections. Then it will become a true place, remarkable and unmistakable. p 92 kevin
cluster: n. 1. a close group or bunch of similar things growing together 2. a close group or swarm of people, animals, faint stars, gems,
A Pattern Language: “People will not feel comfortable in their houses unless a group of houses forms a cluster, with the public land between them jointly owned by all the households” p.198 “Under such a system, the housing, whether in low or high density neighbourhoods, can gradually find its way toward an abiding expression of the cluster. And the clusters themselves will come to support a quality of neighbourhood life that, from our broken down neighbourhoods now, we can only dimly perceive.” p.202
MODULARITY Architecture: Form, Space, & Order Francis D.K.Ching “A clustered organization groups its forms according to functional requirements of size, shape, or proximity, While it lacks the geometric regularity and introverted nature of centralized forms, a clustered organization is flexible enough to incorporate forms of various shapes, sizes, and orientations into its structure”
gs , la
cks of character or differentiation. Influences on imageability of the city image: physical forms, social meaning of an area, its history, its name
ACTIVITY NODES
Keywords Raymond Williams, NY, 1976: “community of interests, community of goods; a sense of common identity and characteristics; more immediate than society…Community was the word normally chosen for experiments in an alternative kind of group-living…Community can be the warmly persuasive word to describe an existing set of relationships.” p.75
We will end this century as a wholly urban species. This movement engages an unprecedented number of people-two or three billion humans, perhaps a third of the world’s population-and will affect almost everyone in tangible ways. It will be the last human movement of this size and scope; in fact, the changes it makes to family life, from large agrarian families to small urban ones, will put an end to the major theme of human history, continuous population growth. Doug Saunders, Arrival City: The final migration and our next world p1, Affred A. Knopf Canada, 2010
9 Between the eighties up until the present day, Safdie strayed from the notion of repetitive modularity toward a more symbolist design approach. Habitat 67’ was “ an exercise in fractal geometry: beginning with a single vertical plane facing the view, and then breaking it up, undulating it, stepping it back—Fractalizing it with a particular end in mind” Projects such as the 2003 Peabody Essex Museum and the Khalsa Hertiage Centre in India still include the use of geometric volumes but they are presented at a larger scale and therefore become awkward shapes within the site. Moshe Safdie’s initial gestures of repetition and densification within mega complexes made more sense than his recent projects, which base their architectural formalities on symbolism. The architect began to generate purely formal gestures— circular, in particular. He begins to focus on the presence of the oculus as well as curvilinear pattern. Is this a continuation of his utopian vision? In the United States Institute of Peace Headquarters, the architect designs semi-circular canopies making the rectangular building underneath it look odd. The Marina Bay Sands Integrated Resort does not look integrated at all. A mixture of mismatched shapes and heights composes this development in Singapore. Moshe Safdie no longer creates super structures based on modularity, yet he still tries to maintain programmatic relationships to his previous projects, which include: skywalks, public plazas, semi-private gardens and circulation shafts.
A Pattern Language, p.166 “Create nodes of activity throughout the community, apread about 300 yards apart. First identify those existing spots in the community where action seems to concentrate itself. Then modify the layout of the paths in the community to bring as many of them through these spots as possible. This makes each spot function as a ‘node’ in the path network. Then, at the center of each node, make a small public square, and surround it with a combination of community facilities and shops which are mutually supportive.”
community: from Old French communete, reinforced by its source, Latin communitas, from communis ‘common’- commune, communal, communicate
A Pattern Language: “Individuals have no effective voice in any community of more than 500010,000 persons” Jefferson’s plan for American Democracy
mega 1. brilliant, excellent 2. enormous mega- 1. large 2. denoting factor of one million [Greek from megas ‘great’] super: forming nouns, adjectives, and verbs, meaning 1. above, beyond, or over in place or time or conceptually (superstructure, superimpose, supernormal) [Latin super- from super ‘above, beyond’]
NODE
FIELD RECONNAISSANCE
“…there are two discrete metabolisms on the planet. The first is the biological metabolism, or the biosphere—the cycles of nature. The second is the technical metabolism, or the technosphere—the cycles of industry, including the harvesting of technical materials from natural places.” p.104
EDGE
the reciprocal action of influence. to interact- act reciprocally; act on each other. inter- 1. between, among (intercontinental) 2. mutually, reciprocally (interbreed) [ Old French entre or Latin inter ‘between, among’]
That type of district which has a strong core, surrounded by a thematic gradient which gradually dwindles away, is not uncommon. Sometimes, indeed, a strong node may create a sort of district in a broader homogeneous zone, simply by “radiation”, that is, by the sense of proximity to the nodal point. These are primarily reference areas, whith little perceptual content, but they are useful organizing concepts, nevertheless -Kevin p70 The physical characteristics that determine districts are thematic continuities which may consist of an endless variety of components: texture, space, form, detail, symbol, building type, use, activity, inhabitatnts, degree of maintenance, topography kevin p.67
strategic foci
Connect 1969