management. Analyzing where current design is pathological and attending to it presents opportunities for systemically introducing healthy biosystems, signaling our intention to learn, grow, and evolve biomimetically. Theory Thinking Nature Consulting one definition of immanent (holding within) and bonding it with the similar sounding, but differently rooted, imminent, we hybridize both words. Immanence, gleaned from Deleuze and laminated for this text with its near-opposite, imminence, denotes withheld potential, emergence, development, and evolution. Further, by sequencing and splicing immanence and imminence as monad-immanence, we create a kind of genetic word mutation, a friction, an oscillating thought-field. Seemingly a mere word game, this etymological graft aids an old-growth, metaphysical idea embodied in the word “monad,” helping it evolve, break, and resurface the widespread, bipolar concept that the environment—nature—is simultaneously dead and alive.
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SITE DOCUMENTATION UQ 143
Yet, nature is only alive. I think we must reorder our generally limited perception of it in order to widen definitions of species, molecules, and forces, understanding them as coalescent with generative ideas linking life to human-made objects (design and architecture included). Then, by examining the role of minerals and elemental forces and recognizing their organic, life-sustaining nature (understanding them as indispensable to consciousness), we implicate human thinking as a force of nature. And that further implicates idea-extensions in craft, horticulture, industrial design, architecture, and planning as naturally derived. The usefulness of such linguistic extension, of course, lies not only in confirming our physical being in nature but also in comprehending our thought process as a force of nature. What Deleuze calls “our nature” underscores this process: nature not divided into “alive” and “dead.” Thought not understood as a cosmic phenomenon. Instead we may recognize that thought and thinking are parts of nature, that consciousness and thought are environmentally dependent, that ecology relies on the cultivation of thinking and critical observation, the harvesting of ideas morphed into objects. Therefore, “our nature” is central when discussing Nature’s nature. Our understanding of human consciousness and, by extension, its design production is epistemologically clarified, helped with a biological foundation locating thought and building as genetically driven. With a genetic base we can then comprehend human impulses to build as analogous to constructions by our counterparts in the wild, witnessed by nests, hives, and mud works.
park Road TRANSIT ANALYSIS Kristen Fitzgerald 2005 1 Figure Ground Diagram 2 Figure Ground Diagram 3 Movement + Space Usage
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PUBLIC MOvEMENT
MINOR TRAFFIC
MODERATE TRAFFIC
PRIvATE ZONE WITH MINIMAL TRAFFIC
PARK RD RAILWAY CAR + PEDESTRIAN WALKING ZONE
4 Figure Ground + Existing Urban plan zoning CONSERvATION
LIGHT INDUSTRY
LOW-MED DENSITY
FUTURE INDUSTRY
RESIDENTIAL
PARK
HEALTH CARE
LOW DENSITY
EMERGING
GENERAL INDUSTRY
5 Method of Travel to work: bus + train use in the suburbs < 3% OF POPULATION
6 Method of Travel to work: bus use per suburb 3
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7% - 9%
11% - 13%
9% - 11%
7 Method of Travel to work: car use per suburb 40% - 47%
51% - 53%
47% - 49%
53% - 55%
49% - 51%
8 Method of Travel to work: train use per suburb <3%
5% - 7%
3% - 5%
9 Method of Travel to work: ride/walk per suburb 5
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5% - 7%
11% - 13%
7% - 9%
13% - 15%
10 Street axes through site PRIMARY STREET AXES SECONDARY STREET AXES
2005 park Road BUS ANALYSIS Tony Loong 2005 11 Bus Route
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BUS INTERCHANGE
DISTRICT BUS ROUTE
LOCAL BUS ROUTE
BUS STOP
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park Road RAIL ANALYSIS Katherin Khoo 2005 12 Rail lines CLEvELAND LINE BEENLEIGH / GOLD COAST LINE
park Road VIEW ANALYSIS prue Exelby 2005 9
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Designers understanding this evolutionary lineage have nature, alternatively with cultural history, as an under explored design territory to learn with. Our disposition to build cities, structures, and objects is, at a fundamental level, genetic—not very different from termites’ genetic disposition to build solar-oriented, naturally ventilating adobe megastructures. Genetic derivation ties our urbanism, architecture, and design together as biologically driven events stitching our cities securely into nature. Understanding a scenario such as this might alarm us into practicing environmentally conscious safebuilding while simultaneously illustrating needed safeguards preventing design from destroying the work and environments of other species. While the descent of industrialization, manufacturing, and materials leaves little trace of nature in today’s building and design industry, its evolutionary course, begun with stone tools, sticks, hides, and mud, nevertheless continues, if in a mostly repressed and unrecognized form. I think we can take a global look at the contemporary buildings of homeless people worldwide, or study the spontaneity of urban organisms from colonias and favelas to witness genetic building impulses manifested in constructed form. Architectural shelters built with indigenous environmental materials—collected cardboard, plastic, fabric, rope, adobe, metal and wood scraps—testifies to a universal, genetic disposition to build. Homeless and adaptive shelters demonstrate material and structural inventiveness evolving with minimal resources and tools for immediate environmental protection. For understanding this process and illuminating its biological workings—genetic impulses translating ideas into physical works—biologist Richard Dawkins’s book The Extended Phenotype is indispensable.3 Our Nature / Nature’s Nature Rajchman tells us: “What the young Deleuze found singular in Hume’s empiricism is then the idea that this self, this person, this possession [individual consciousness], is in fact not given. Indeed the self is only a
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