2004 Toowong
BRISBANALITY Oliver Valle + Emilia Ferri
How do Brisbanites envision their city in 10, 20, 30 years? With an estimated influx of 1,500 people a week, will the current infrastructure be able to accommodate this increase, or can it take on a new role? Does the quarter-acre lot that has become emblematic of the Brisbane “lifestyle” offer the greatest number of possibilities, socially and economically? How can public-space interventions at the architectural scale have an impact at the local, communal, and regional scales? The project’s intention is to explore the notion of city center and to bring forth the potentials of underdeveloped river areas and suburbs as additional nodes fostering new social, economic, and urban interventions.
SUBURB
RAIL
ROADS
Brisbane receives 1,500 new residents a week. With an estimated resident population of 13,604 people in 2001, Toowong was the largest SLA in the inner-west region, with 1.5% of Brisbane city’s population. Brisbane’s Center Formula: Footprint + Height = Center footprint = tangential rectangle height = max 250 meters
FERRY
EDUCATION
BUS
INDUSTRIAL
GREEN
SHOPPING
Under Brisbane’s City Plan, there is only one city center: the CBD. The others include: 1. Major centers: those that are often but not always dominated by a single major shopping mall 2. Suburban centers: a local shopping area comprising small shops and supermarkets 3. Convenience centers: four to six small shops, e.g. bakery, newsstand, pharmacy, greengrocer, takeout restaurants, etc. Toowong has been identified as a city center by Brisbane City developers. We identify Toowong as a unique and important urban center because of its following features: A. Unique position in proximity to the waterfront B. Intermodal transportation (rail, bus, ferry, bicycle, car, pedestrian) C. Diverse fabric of housing (house, six-pack, apartment, townhouse) D. Proximity to the University of Queensland E. Abundant greenscapes F. Potential for exchange, interaction, 1 Site construction 2 Threshold diagram 3 Physical crossing diagram 4 Armature and enclave diagram 5 Urban field diagram 6 Site plan and urban section
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MEgAFORM AS URbAN LANdSCApE Kenneth Frampton Since 1961, when French geographer Jean Gottmann first employed the term “megalopolis” to refer to the northeast of the United States, the world’s population has become denser, with the result that most of us now live in some form of continuous urbanized region. One of the paradoxes of this population shift is that today we are largely unable to project urban form with any confidence, neither as a tabula rasa operation nor as a piecemeal aggregation to be achieved through such devices as zoning codes maintained over a long period of time. The expansion of highway infrastructure throughout the world continues to open up former agricultural land to suburban subdivision. Despite this endless development throughout the world and most particularly in North America, there remains the occasional capital city where some kind of urban planning process is still being maintained, such as Helsinki or the recent refurbishing of Barcelona, which is another example of an exception to the megalopolitan norm. In the main, however, the urban future tends to be projected in terms of remedial operations, as these may be applied to existing urban cores or, with less certainty, to selected parts of the megalopolis. Meanwhile the urbanized region continues to consolidate its hold over vast areas of land, as in the Randstadt in the Netherlands or the TokyoHokkaido corridor in Japan. These urbanized regions are subject to sporadic waves of urban expansion that either escalate out of control or enter periods of stagnation. It is a predicament that confronts the urbanist with an all but impossible task, one in which civic intervention has to be capable not only of sustaining a sense of place but also of serving as an effective catalyst for the further development of the region.
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PROPOSAL CU 105
Owing to the dissolution of the city as a bounded domain, dating from the mid-19th century, architects have long been aware that any contribution they might make to the urban form would of necessity be limited. This resignation is already implicit in Camillo Sitte’s remedial urban strategy of 1889, his book, City Planning According to Artistic Principles, in which he attempted to respond to the “space-endlessness” of the Viennese Ringstrasse by recommending the redefinition of the Ring in terms of bounded form. Sitte was disturbed by the fact that the main monuments of the Ring had been built as free-standing objects, and he recommended enclosing them with built fabric in order to establish relationships similar to those that had once existed in the medieval city, such as that between the parvis and the cathedral.
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2004 Toowong
BRISBANALITY Oliver Valle + Emilia Ferri
This project challenges the notion of “city center” by redefining the relationship between city and its existing centers through the filter of mobility and density. Mobility here is not limited to just movement in regard to multiple transit points but also the movement of information, people, and, most important, ideas. 1
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By deemphasizing the dichotomy between the CBD and the surrounding suburbs and redefining the city as an urban field, we can begin to understand the physical environment as a heterogeneous field/zone/ arena of flows and exchanges that are interwoven in a comprehensive fabric of infrastructure, built form, and landscape. This patchwork reveals and unpacks the hidden potential for new public domains while addressing issues of density and new civic identity. Creating new civic amenities such as a new library and plaza and emphasizing a new identifiable entry point, Toowong will operate on multiple scales. On a local scale, the entry becomes a way-finder and gateway into a new pedestrian riverfront promenade and park that can serve pedestrians as a gathering place for leisure. On a metropolitan scale it demarcates a redeveloped entry corridor that runs through a reactivated streetscape and provides Brisbane with a new library. On a global level it links the city to potential university and research facilities. Open plazas can offer a multiuse space for activities such as outside markets, festivals, and exhibitions. The riverfront promenade will also introduce new uses by providing pedestrian accessibility that encourages a cross-river dialogue between the district of West End and Toowong by the installation of a new pedestrian and bicycle bridge and additional ferry stations. Existing Brisbane city centers have been defined by a formulated system of building footprint and the heights of retail market developments. We have reinterpreted the notion of “city center” not through political or economical boundaries but through a patchwork of 1 Urban marker: entry 2 New Toowong urban space 3 Riverside Walk 4 Viewing platform 5 Pedestrian loop 6 New urban space
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Inspired by Sitte’s revisionism, I have coined the term “megaform” to refer to the formgiving potential of certain kinds of horizontal urban fabric capable of effecting topographic transformation in the megalopolitan landscape. It has to be admitted at the outset that this term may read as being synonymous with the term megastructure, as this was first coined in the 1960s. In my view, the two terms may be differentiated in terms of the relative continuity of their form. Thus while a megaform may incorporate a megastructure, a megastructure is not necessarily a megaform. One may illustrate this distinction by comparing the Centre Pompidou in Paris, which is surely a megastructure, to Arthur Ericson’s Robson Square development in Vancouver, which is ultimately a megaform, largely due to the way in which its continuously stepped layered form modulates and unifies the existing urban fabric of downtown Vancouver. This particular example also happens to have been enriched by a fertile collaboration between its architect, Arthur Erickson, and landscape architect, Cornelia Oberlander. Our capacity to imagine megaforms may have originated with our first experiences of the world as seen from the air. This, on his own admission, was the catalyst behind Le Corbusier’s Plan Obus for Algiers of 1931, directly inspired by the volcanic topography of Rio de Janeiro, which he first surveyed from the air in 1929 (Figs:7,8). This panorama led him to imagine a continuous urban form in which one could no longer discriminate between the building and the landscape. A corollary to this topographic approach was to treat the built fabric as a form of artificial ground, upon and within which the occupant would be free to build in whatever way he saw fit. Hence while postulating the continuity of the megaform, Le Corbusier left its interstitial fabric open and accessible to popular taste. In its failure to conform to any received urban model the Plan Obus was hardly a feasible proposal from either a productive or a cultural standpoint. It was totally removed, let us say, from Joseph Stubben’s codification of regularized urban space as set forth in his book Die Stadtebau of 1890. Nor did it owe anything to the perimeter block type, as this would be applied to urban extensions from around 1890 to 1924, of which Berlage’s Amsterdam South plan of 1914–30 is a prime example (Fig. 9). At the same time it did not conform to the Zeilenbau rowhouse model, as was adopted in the Weimar Republic and elsewhere from around 1924 onwards.
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PROPOSAL CU 107
For our purposes, the megaform may be defined as displaying the following characteristics. (1) A large form extending horizontally rather than vertically. (2) A complex form which, unlike the megastructure, is
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