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dubai + Gold Coast DUBAI IN EVERY CITY Aimee Chang 2006
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We live in a world of bipolarity: of the global village and the peripheral node; of total domination and pluralizing anthropology; of the traditional and the contemporary; of the constructed and the natural; of designing an icon for a city at the desk of an architect in another country. Dubai is one outcome of this bipolarity, where the poles remain at their extremes. There exists, however, the potential for crossbreeding in architecture to produce something new. Global systems are not taken at face value, but eaten, digested, and reproduced as something alternate to and capable of feeding back on the system. Might an architect critically appropriate a dominant culture through stealth occupation of existing market modals? 1 Tower typology 2 Generic Suburban Sprawl: Dubai 3 Generic Suburban Sprawl: Gold Coast 4 Dream Home Selection Matrix: Choose a plan + elevation 5 Q1 Typical Floor Plan 6 Q1 Jewel Floor Plan 7 Climate Zone: passive heating + cooling 8 Local labor and materials: red cedar + rosewood 9 A jewel in the jewl box: The Palm Deira and The Palm Trump 10 Unit Selection Matrix: Choose a barcode, Standard Marketing Graphic, unique architectural unit 11 Entry 12 Bedroom
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and the Rasego humid area, can be today interpreted as the empty center of a wider diffused area, where a rural society used to meet for village fĂŞtes and animal fairs. The second research project, above the spring line, concerns the dry plain, where the need to prevent flooding goes together with the necessity to irrigate the cultivated fields profiting from the presence of hundreds of gravel pits.
Ultimately, within this scenario, the question and the proposal for the reuse of the abandoned gravel pits translate into an extraordinary opportunity to rethink the territory, its landscape, its construction modalities, and the activities that today directly involve it. The pits, the canals that connect them to waterways, the pathways that would run their
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PROPOSAL CU 71
What If? What would happen if all the gravel pits in the Treviso province were to be utilized as basins for flood prevention for excess fluvial flood waters and as reservoirs? The quantities that come into question are relevant. Almost 80 million cubic meters of water could be collected within the new basins— representing about half the capacity that the Vajont dam held (150 million cubic meters). After the terrible tragedy of the Vajont dambreak in 1963, the utilization of the Piave river’s water (for electric energy and agriculture irrigation) went on, as if the available quantities had not changed, and the diminishing of a river that was increasingly lacking water continued, especially in the summer months. Today the water deficit of the Piave river, which comes out of the balance between use and resources, including vital minimum runoff, is 50 million to 60 million cubic meters. The holding capacity of the existing gravel pits could instead be sufficient for guaranteeing the necessary water for agriculture in periods of drought, significantly reducing the drawing of river waters in the more delicate periods of the fluvial ecosystem. This would also avoid the drawing of waters from the mountain basins during the summer months, when they are frequented by many for recreational and sports activities.
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