The city in the Age of Hyperobjects I

Peter Trummer Design Research Project @SCI-Arc 2016

CREDITS:

Peter Trummer with Begüm Baysun Wiliam Virgil AND Javier Cardiel

Jonathan Cooper Esra Durukan Dennis Dong Yeop Ham Yagmur Kaptan Meeghan Lee Yen-Ting Lin Siva Sephery Marco Tadros

The City in the Age of Hyperobjects

Research Brief

Methodology

The Aircraft Carrier

The California Plaza

The Mall

The LA Block

The Fake City The Mountain

The City in the Age of Hyperobjects

As architects but also as humans that live in the greatest artifact of our culture, that is cities, we have to pose the question: What happened to urbanism? Every generation has to ask this question anew and redefne its answer. The last time this question was raised within the discipline of architecture was in the late 90’s, when OMA’s Rem Koolhaas and Sanford Kwinter investigated how neo-liberal capitalism and globalization have transformed our cities.

“The City in the Age of Hyper-objects” is a design research project, which revives the question of urbanism. The feld of investigation is the architecture of the contemporary city.“Hyperobjects”1, a term coined by Timothy Morten, refers to entities that defy our traditional understanding of things due to their spatial and temporal scale for example contemporary forms of capitalism, investment strategies of real estate assets or global warming. They have the capacity to withdraw even more from us, the more we know about them. Humans are responsible for their existence and they afect our daily lives in cities.

The design research on “The City within the Age of Hyper-objects” studies how capitalism shapes the contemporary city and its buildings. This research project wants to discover new architectural typologies produced by such hyperobjects. The goal of this project is to defne a new realist approach within the discipline of urban design. The results of this task aim to contribute to the larger cultural debate of how to approach the contemporary city according to the emerging post-humanist zeitgeist.

1. Timothy Morton, “Hyperobjects - Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World”

Research Brief

How does density look like: Los Angeles

The intention of the Design Research Program of the City follows one simple question: How does Density look like? The aim of the Design Studio is to develop a research on the city, which is neither driven by a scientifc approach of following abstract foor area ratio (FAR) studies, nor is it guided by empirical case studies how Architects and Researcher can understand how Cities produces densities. Rather what the research aims for is understand the city as a Hyperobject1. Hyperobjects are to what Timothy Morten refers to as things that are massively distributed, very large relative to humans, weather directly manufactured by humans or not, have a signifcant impact on us humans and that we struggle to understand them. We discover we are stuck to them and realize as more as we know about them as more they withdrawn from us. What if humans do not design Cities anymore? What if the city becomes its own author? What if the City designs itself?

Today we built cars without drivers and buildings without inhabitants; we try to make cities smart; turn every urban entity into powers stations and have built after 9/11 more high-rise buildings then ever before. We don’t really know why we do that nor what we are doing, when we work with the city. Our actions on the city is driven by Hyperobjects, like capital fows, real estates investment models, global warming issues and are driven by what Henri Lefebvre called urbanization: the global tendencies to live exclusively in cities anymore. The city has turned into a hyperobject which afect our lives, which we know it is there, but have no idea what it does. If we ask: What is the aim of the city, what does the city do, we can say that the cities own aim since the birth of its appearances was to place urban entities in close proximity to each other. The city agenda therefor is to densify. Throughout its history the city knows three models of densifcation.

The pre-modern city

The pre-modern city, known as the ancient cities of the Greek and the Romans, have placed their Cities within walls. Inside of the this wall, all human spaces either for public purposes or privately owned once were placed next to each other and became separated by walls.

The modern city

The modern city, know as the industrial city, has placed our spaces within a grid or within a park. The city separated its functions and its buildings from each other by a space of circulation. The purpose of these public space was to contain all the spaces of inhabitation. Our spaces therefore became vertical, unifed by voids and the wall became replaced by air.

The postmodern city

The post-modern city, known as our neoliberal city, is the city of PostFordism. Within the postmodern city, the public spaces moved into the private ones. Instead of placing spaces next to each other, the city became a diversifed mass, whereby any function, program or event became stacked onto as well as into any other function. As Frederic Jameson, has argued in the Case Study of the Bonaventure Center in Los Angeles: the postmodern city has moved the public space into the private one. The material of unifcation was not air anymore, but the condition of air, mechanically controlled environments. The densifcation of the city seems to have one intention: to unify objects, from next to each other to onto and into each other. If we believe Gilbert Simondon argument of the individuation of technical objects, like the city is, then cities have the tendencies to join, fuse und melt their spaces into a new whole. How does such a new whole look like? This is the research question of the studio.

Frederic Jameson, has argued in the Case Study of the Bonaventure Center in Los Angeles: the postmodern city has moved the public space into the private one. The material of unifcation was not air anymore, but the condition of air, mechanically controlled environments.

The densifcation of the city seems to have one intention: to unify objects, from next to each other to onto and into each other. If we believe Gilbert Simondon argument of the individuation of technical objects, like the city is, then cities have the tendencies to join, fuse und melt their spaces into a new whole. How does such a new whole look like? This is the research question of the studio.

Methodology

Methodology of Replacement

If density is a question of how to bring objects in close proximity to each other, the design studio raises the question of how do urban entities meet in order to unify. If you look into the example of the Bonaventure Center in Downtown LA, the intention of the project was unite two diferent urban entities: a high-rise tower and an Italian Piazza. What happened when a public space moved into the tower, it had to change its content. When it was a space of collective memory and expression of political gathering before, it turned into a privatized owned and controlled and secured interior void afterwards. Something similar happened to the High-rise Tower. When the Piazza moved into the Highrise Tower it changed its form. The Buildings turned from a solid object into a topological torus.

When two entities meet, like describe above, it seems as in order to become unifed, each of the entities have to lose their form or their content in order to melt together. What happened is that the content and form of an object becomes replace by the form or the content of another object.

The resulting methodology for the design studio will be based on the thesis of replacement. The methodology of replacement can be found in various theoreticians and the studio will take a closer look to Gilbert Simondon examples in his text On the Mode of existents of technical Object, we will ask if Graham Harman to give us an introduction to his text On Vicarious Causation and we can fnd the idea of replacement in Russian Formalism. This methodology will be used in all the phase of the studio research project:

Studies of Densifcation

The frst phase of the research studio is to study forms of densifcation. These forms of densifcation can come from any discipline and will be analyzed on the thesis of replacement.

Techniques of Replacement

The second phase of the research project is to formulate techniques of replacement based on the previous studies and to test these techniques on

architectural examples. This phase of the research project will be guided by a workshop in which two entities will be unifed by replacing their form and content. The representation will be in 2d drawings.

Application on the scale of the city

Within the third Phase of the Design Research Program, the techniques of replacement will be applied on the scale of the city. Each team will choose a series of urban entities, buildings, streets, parks and garages and will try to unify these entities into one new entity. The resulting 2d drawing will be presented at the Mid Term review.

The last Phase of the design research project is to visualize the new model of density in a photorealistic image, an image that places the project back into the context of the city.

The four phases of the research project will be guided by one LAB, which allows the participants to learn techniques of representation in order to visualized their idea. At the same time a seminar will be given be the tutor on 9 postmodern positions on how architecture has been thought from the viewpoint of the city and forms the disciplinary context of the Design Research Project.

The Aircraft Carrier

Javier Cardiel

The reference I use as main device, for generating a high density city, is the Santa Monica Pier. I understood the project as not only pursuing the acceleration of high-densifcation, but also extending the city. Being an extension of the city is the main feature of a pier, a way of creating artifcial-land!

The aim was to use real buildings and architectural objects to design a “new” city based on existing references . This is why the secondary device used is Aircraft Carriers. An aircraft carrier is an independent artifact that represents a strong relationship among “city”, “density” and “artifcial-land”. By accelerating my main device (creation of artifcial–land, like a pier) and using aircraft carriers generated a mega-artifcial-island that has life both in exterior and interior.

In order to make the project real and plausible, I adapted the city to Aircraft Carrier’s deck organization and subdivisions by using its actual layout and applying the urban regulation with respect to the carrier’s original layout. Every deck deals with property in a diferent way.

From an urban fabric like New York City or Los Angeles in which there is a grid division of land between public and private space, between street and housing; hallway and rooms. Other case is the central piazza or big open public space as Central Park in New York City, the public space is delimited by private portions of land; this sample has a diferent nuance in the carrier’s case because there is a straight relationship between open public space and private, there is no such existence of streets. Last situation is a special case of communal houses; public space is shared by a certain number of houses or private spaces, middle areas are owned by diferent people, which means there is a free movement through shared pieces of ground.

In my opinion, density looks like multiple cities. From my understanding through the analysis done along the project, density is diversity. Within the city, “density” does not mean only compact, lots of buildings, dwellings, windows, citizens… but, in a sense, it means anyone can live in the way they want to live. Density should look like multiple cities inside a bigger one.

Santa Monica Pier, Santa Monica, CA

The California Plaza

Jonathan Cooper & Marco Tadros

Los Angeles is a city of great diversity, which gave us a chance to fnd a new LA that is embedded in Los Angeles that we can understand and simplify into rules of intensity that we can accelerate to get to our density, We explored the bunker hill area for the public to private relation that is already intense in the bunker hill area.

Using the California plaza, along with other references from the bunker hill area, to form our precedent study to answer the question “How to densify Los Angeles?”. This precedent allowed for several diferent interpretations of the densifcation dilemma to be formulated and implemented.

These interpretations include a new reading of the relationship of “public to private” and “private to public”. Examples of this include a public stairway that starts on the public sidewalk that leads to a private part of the building that extends over and covers the public street below. Furthermore this private building has columns that support it that are built on public space forming a “new Infrastructure” idea. The next reading comes from a public plaza that is carved out of the top of this same private space, that is accessed from the other side of the building from the public street.

These sets of rules were used as a guide to help inform the placement of the new infrastructure.

First step was choosing a fairly generic site with enough variety in urban grain and road hierarchy to allow for diferent types of implementation. The frst implementation of the rules was looking for appropriately sized building from the built environment of Los Angeles with a proportionally sized mass to cover, bridge, or extend over the diferent road/Public spaces in the site. The second rule was re -creating that public space on top of the added building, by carving out a public space. The next step was creating secondary connections between buildings to make an interconnected mass that has connections to diferent public and private parts of our site and buildings.

By doing so our rule becomes the inhabiting of infrastructure to create a new type of infrastructure that duplicates the space by moving the “right of the public space” to the top of the added building. And reuses the “privately owned public spaces” to create publicly owned private spaces that originate from that transfer of rights vertically and horizontally.

Two California Plaza, Arthur Erickson

California Plaza was a winning entry in an international developer/architect competition for the redevelopment of 11 acres of land (four downtown city blocks) in the Bunker Hill Redevelopment area of Los Angeles. The proposal includes over a million square feet of offce space, 750 units of condominium housing, a 400-room luxury hotel, 82,000 square feet of retail space; and a 33,000 square feet Museum of Contemporary Arts. The project urban design concept is to integrate the project’s diverse uses with the surrounding area and provide an active link between the down-town offce core andthe Music Centre, at opposite ends of the site. The solution incorporates cultural, recreational and commercial activities, which combine to create a new public and commercial focus for the greater Los Angeles region.

Source: Arthur Erickson, California Plaza

The Mall

Esra Durukan

“Eating oysters with boxing gloves, naked, on the 9th foor”. Rem Koolhaas calls this unusual club scene the nature of metropolis and and he claims that the citizens of this world would desire and adapt juxtaposed conventional events.

In Los angeles juxtaposed diversity of events can be found in Americana mall, in Glendale. Lake next to a fea market next to a nike store next to a mini tram and tram plays Michael buble song, while fake snow is snowing but it’s 80 degrees you are in your fipfops.

However in Americana mall events are organized to create a specifc ambience. It planned to look like collective urban environment and it gets this idea from 19th century Paris, urban character Flaneur. Mr. Flaneur wonders around the city kiosks for painters, parks where people socialize and music pavilion for volunteer musicians. Like the reason in Americana mall music is playing behind the bushes. To set the mood. And if you wanted to live in urban this is what you do. So Americana is strangely sneaking in Flaneur’s urban lifestyle into a 21st century of Los Angeles.

This project is interested in acceleration of intense diversity of conficting and fragmented events that desired from its citizens. Taking up a city block that has mono-functions, mostly residential and couple retail spaces. And breaks the foor to foor relation of Koolhaas’s Athletic club to more 3 dimensional relational spaces.

Lot boundaries would be kept and owners can introduce any program in their lot, but also can share larger programs with neighbours also. That way, local density spots would be created collectively and spreaded throughout the city where not just increase the value of the block but surroundings also.

Downtown Athletic Club, Starett & Van Vleck

The Downtown Athletic Club stands on the bank of the Hudson River near Battery Park, the southern tip of Manhattan. Built in 1931, its 38 stories reach a height of 435 feet. Large abstract patterns of glass and brick make its exterior inscrutable and almost indistinguishable from the conventional Skyscrapers around it. This serenity hides the apotheosis of the Skyscraper as instrument of the Culture of Congestion.

The Club represents the complete conquest - foor by foor - of the Skyscraper by social activity; with the Downtown Athletic Club the American way of life, knowhow and initiative defnitevely overtake the theoretical lifestyle modifcations that the various 20th-century European avantgardes have been insitently proposing, without ever managing to impose them. In the Downtown Athletic Club the Skyscraper is used as a Constructivist Social Condenser; a machine to generate and intensify desireable forms of human intercourse within the metropolis.

Source: Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York

19th Century Paris

21st Century Los Angeles

The LA Block

Meeghan Lee & Dennis Dong Yeop Ham

The occupants of a city rely on the essential contents of one. Such essential contents of a city consist of specifc spaces that distinguish its function and purpose.

Widely known as the “City Within A City,” the Westin Bonaventure in Downtown, LA is John C. Portman’s most famous portrayal of a city in a single building. As it refects the regular city, the building holds spaces of dwelling, ofces, shops, recreation, parking, infrastructure and other places for leisure. What would be perceived as an outdoor public space is now spatially enclosed as a privatized public space. Infrastructural roads and sidewalks are raised and wrapped around the interior as ramps and bridges. Programmatic volumes morph into diferent forms as it adjusts to create a centre atrium in which the people will be able to openly gather and habituate.

This project is an approach to densify the city of Los Angeles to its utmost capacity in an organized manner of the block-grid of downtown LA. Mimicking the language of the composition of the Bonaventure, each block of the city has a diferent interpretation of the “city within a city,” by integrating various buildings of diferent program and function that exist in the city. As the individual buildings mingle and intersect with each other, fgural voids then hold their presence as it acts as the privatized public spaces of a city. Some mini cities at each block may be tight as they situate elbow-to-elbow. These moments create pathways from city to city, as well as bridges and extensions of certain parts of the cities connect each block to each other.

Yes, this limits exposure to the outside to those who occupy these mini cities. However, being a city, these new bodies still give access to fresh air- but within the premises. A new level of density is achieved as each body pulls the population to an area. This area of dense population is then distributed throughout the whole city at each block thus creating a new language of densifcation. This project is not a multiplication of facilities of quarantine, it is the act of politely densifying an already-dense city to its maximum capacity.

As a contrast to the rectangular offce towers that surround the site, the design for this 1,354 guest room convention hotel consists of fve low-rise, glass -clad cylindrical towers. The project serves as a unifying centerpiece for the Bunker Hill Area of Los Angeles.

Westin Bonaventure Hotel, John Portman

Encompassing an entire city block, the hotel complex features a podium base containing a large ballroom, two junior ballrooms, 28 meeting rooms and an exhibit hall, totalling 121,000 sf of meeting space. Other amenities include restaurants, shops, boutiques, a cafe, and a revolving rooftop cocktail lounge.

Source: www.portmanusa.com

The Fake City

Yagmur Kaptan

Like in most cities of the world, capitalism has profoundly impacted Istanbul, propelling projects of increased density, scale, and height. Investors, driven by the incentive of maximized profts, are the primary drivers of Istanbul’s transformation. Their actions are facilitated by a unique local condition - what I call rant urbanism – rant is a Turkish word for acquiring unearned income. In Istanbul, rant urbanism is a process by which public and private entities conspire to enrich themselves by sacrifcing the needs of the public. This project explores the potential outcomes of rant urbanism as an example of the global fnancial urbanism of the 21st century.

For many years large swaths of undeveloped green space owned by the government were freely accessible to the people of Istanbul. Investors have targeted these areas because most of them are highly desirable and centrally located in the middle of the city. Through corruption, bribes, and payofs, developers are gaining access to previously protected land owned by the government. This is the phenomena by which new capital has been injected into the previously stateowned areas of Istanbul. These properties now have become very valuable and government ofcials have been tempted to sell of the properties in exchange for under the table payments. In fact, the government went so far as to change the zoning laws and allow development in exchange for equity in the projects. Now the government has become a partner in these capitalist ventures.

In addition to the developers and the government reaping great beneft from these projects, so do the lenders, investors, and the buyers. As property values increase everyone gains. As the cost of lending remains historically low, these projects become even more attractive as rents increase every year while cost of capital remains stagnant. In response to public opposition to the development of these lands, the government conceded by including public spaces in these new ventures. By giving this “public” space to the people, the government hides behind the appearance of doing the right thing while at the same time the public is grateful, although in reality, these spaces are not truly public but rather they are retail spaces built with the intention to further line the pockets of the developers and the government. In this sense, the government is saying to the public that as long as they give up their rights to these properties, they will get in return “fake public” places that they can only actually enjoy as shoppers and that are in fact are truly owned by private companies.

In these types of projects, we can see the emergence of new design principals. These projects rely heavily on constructed spaces that appear public but they are efectively privately-owned public spaces that can be seen in many cities today. The public, in fact, sustains the privately-owned space by spending money there. This public space serves as a kind of pedestal support or a plinth upon which the upper structures rest. These spaces at the base can include shopping malls, entertainment spaces or other retail venues, and is constructed in principal for the beneft of an artifcial collective. It is in fact a place of consumerism and a generator of capital for private interests. On the roof of this public plinth there is an artifcial park which in principal has the diagram of Le Corbusier’s “Tower’s in the Park”. Above the public plinth, generic residential towers emerge which serve the new wealthy elite. Even though the diagram is the same, the park in Le Corbusier’s diagram belonged to the public realm which means not only residents of the towers but also the general public had free access to this space. But in this project this artifcial landscape is only accessible to private residents.

This new real estate typology relies heavily on techniques borrowed from the vernacular urban model of Istanbul in that it is a heavily mixed-use model. In the traditional model, the people who work on the street level keep the capital they earn to re-invest in their neighborhoods and where they live. In this new model, the capital does not remain local and the stakeholders do not have a stake in the locality. The other main diference is in terms of scale. There is no longer a traditional relationship between the shopkeeper on the street and the home upstairs. In the new model, the apartments are completely cut-of and detached from the street. There is no longer a relationship, neither physically nor economically.

Taking this new paradigm as a starting point, I developed a new diagram which I call “Financial Capital City”. The new diagram bears some similarities with Rem Koolhaas’s “Captive Globe” diagram because of the relationship between the plinth and the towers. But in this new typology generated by purely private speculative concerns, the diagram is completely reversed. In Rem’s post-modern idea, the ideology exists on the top, above street level, and there is a generic city underneath. This generic ground plane represents a state that belongs to the public and general infrastructure, in contrast to Koolhaas’s diagram where the globe represents the universality of all localities. The “Financial Capital City” diagram represents the notion of money as the universal engine of all cities. In this case, there is no common infrastructure on the ground plane. Instead, there is just an artifcial base which provides a kind of cover for what is really taking place above. It only creates the appearance of public space and access to nature on the ground when in fact it really provides the cog to lubricate the well-oiled and cynical fnancial machine that continues to drive the construction of these projects.

In response to these driving forces, I embarked on a research path to understand the various diferent public functions and typologies that could be assembled with in the public realm. By juxtaposing diferent programs such as schools, hospitals, prisons, restaurants, theatres, churches, ofces and other functions, I created the most extreme environment for this public use.

Everything happens underneath the artifcial public space. I adopted a multicolor strategy in order to highlight that this is an artifcial landscape and secondly, with all these diferent colors I wanted to highlight the diversity of my interior through color abstraction. Unlike the towers, which represent a generic kind of infrastructure, the plinth space is a more complex destination space, with exciting venues to attract elite clients. This public space becomes the focus of the unique and the particular. These public spaces serve the purpose of providing additional luxury venues that increase the desirability of the apartment complexes and add to their value.

Finally, on top of this artifcial garden there are residential towers. I show the towers as generic even boring to accentuate the duality between the plinth and the towers. By distracting the public with the attractions of the multifunctional environments, the developers can quietly pick their pockets without them realizing. The towers are identical to each other in order to communicate the branding of these assets as high value commodities. Another reason to have them identical is, as economies become more efcient, housing becomes an investment commodity to be easily traded. By designing generic “luxury style” apartments, with all the typical high-end amenities, that look generic, “fungibility” is provided to customers that they can easily buy and sell units on line, without even the need to visit the space. Also, having all these same towers lowers the cost of design and construction.

In conclusion, by accepting and engaging these strong capital market drivers that are shaping our cities rather than trying to resist them, we can enhance these development proto-types in new and creative ways. It is always in the best interest of all parties for developments to be successful. After all, successful free markets should provide exactly what the consumer desires at exactly the right price. Everyone wins when new projects thrive. This rant-urbanism is here to stay so why not engage it and evolve it so that it can be successful for all. Failed development projects are a blight to cities and can be seen from time to time as the cyclical boom and bust cycle of real estate development plays out. By engaging mixed use spaces and balancing the needs of private and public uses, this new typology can expand and enhance cities such as Istanbul rather than detract from them.

The City of the Captive Globe

The City of the Captive Globe is a rendering of Rem Koolhaas’s intuitive approximation of the architecture of Manhattan. This drawing, according to the architect, celebrates Manhattan’s “culture of congestion,” presenting a relentless grid as Manhattan’s overriding characteristic. Within this scheme, each city block is designated to embody a different value or philosophy, among these are many avant-garde movements previously thought of as incompatible. Each block, which is itself a city, is surmounted by a structure that represents its function or identity, for example, El Lissitzky’s Lenin’s Stand, Le Corbusier’s Plan Voisin, or Wallace Harrison’s Trylon and Perisphere for the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Koolhaas’s metaphor proposes an urban model in which unity accommodates heterogeneity.

Source: www.moma.org /collection/works/104696

City of Financial Capital

Zorlu Center, Emre Arolat Architecture

The Zorlu Center is at the junction of the Bosphorus Bridge European connectio and the Büyükdere axis that connects the city center with the business district Maslak in Istanbul. The ground is reconstructed by a topographical interpretation, with a kind of shell that is transformed into an in-between layer for the different functions combined in the complex. The shell starts from the Boulevard Levelrising towards south and east. It is split into two arms separated by level differences, in order to overcome the dichotomy between the private and the public.

Source: www.emrearolat.com

Terrace Tema, MM Proje

Terrace Tema is a brand new development with 2 towers of 30 and 40 foors respectively. The location offers panoramic views of the sea and the lake. The project is composed by 2 accesses and 417 apartments. The project has been developed by İNANLAR.

Source: www.Terracetema.com

The Mountain

Siva Sepehry

The Interlace, OMA

Thirty-one apartment blocks, each six stories tall and identical in length, are stacked in a hexagonal arrangement around eight large-scale open and permeable courtyards. The interlocking blocks create a vertical village of both shared and private outdoor spaces on multiple levels. While maintaining the privacy of the individual apartments through the generous spacing of the building blocks, The Interlace creates an interactive network of outdoor spaces oriented around the focal points of the courtyards, refecting and extending the natural surroundings.

Source: www.oma.eu

Dwellings with Set-Backs, Le Corbusier

In this plan the main arteries are shown as 150 feet in width, and forming squareblocks 400 x 600 yards in area. Every 200 yards lesser streets occur. The large islands sites thus formed could be enclosed by railings. Leading right up to the entrances are private roads with parking places for cars. Each fat has its own garage. There are gardens and parks everywhere. The amount of ground which is built over is 15 percent of the total area, leaving 85 percent of open space. The density of population is 120 persons to the acre as against 145 in Paris at the time.

Source: Le Corbusier, The City Of Tomorrow

Dongwoo Suk / Zhifei Chen

Residential Setbacks of the Urbanization of the Left Bank of the Scheldt / Le Corbusier

The Machine City

Yen-Ting Lin

This project envisions a form of urbanism composed of a series of hyper‐private gigantic blocks, each with its own entirely autonomous infrastructure. As a mini city that is roughly equivalent to four to six Manhattan blocks, each block has its own infrastructure, such as water supply, sewage treatment, energy supply and internal transportation systems. The urban model is not required to integrate into large public utility networks, and can freely extend through private aggregation. In this ”Machine City” proposal, the urban grid idea is reexamined and retroftted into a highly dense, mix‐used, and pedestrian‐friendly urban complex. Each block ofers what a city entails, including ofces, residential units, entertainments, street life, hotels, parks and recreational centers.

In the 21st century, societies around the world appear to be continuing to develop the ideologies of neoliberalism by becoming increasingly privatized. Iconic environments of 21st century urbanism, such as Dubai have foregone the provision of public utilities like a shared sewage system. This project considers a near future urbanism in which every urban block can truly stand alone. Unlike a closed market manipulated by the government and imposed heavy restrictions on planning development, once infrastructure becomes privately created and is no longer invisible structure, at the scale of the city block, each “machine city” generates its own value and ofers an ideal opportunity to develop personalized infrastructural identity, transforming into a space of aesthetic expression. Competition might also arise between blocks. Each block is described as a visual infrastructural aesthetic, because it works towards its own vision and creates abundant opportunities for individuals to develop unique identities. In this way, each block can also will determine its own unique life style. Each block can enjoy more autonomy and freedom to leverage resources, and focus more on economic growth and efciency. Organically, each block fosters its own individual characteristic and specialization.

This new building prototype functions as a city within a city. The dimension is around 300 x 200 meters. In this gigantic block, the base is a parking lot, and highly compact infrastructure is built inside of it, including water supply,

sewage treatment and energy supply, ensuring that each individual block is selfsufcient. Inter‐block transportation is also available to not only facilitate trafc fows, but also make traveling more convenient between blocks. On the new level of “Machine City”, each building has two typologies. There are commercial programs that can provide daily use and public spaces that connect to the public transportation, and on the top of them are a multitude of housing options and employment opportunities. Therefore, it is a unit inside a unit, a city made up of blocks within a block. It’s a systematic way to organize the entire city into module units. In this way, each block has its own purpose and theme to make it function diferently from others. When urban population increases, it is more efcient to just add more block prototypes to the existing infrastructure. Hence, the idea is highly applicable to fast growing cities like Dubai, where most areas are undeveloped but the demand to develop is high. This block prototype fts well in this era of rapid urbanization, because of its own infrastructure and circulation.

From another perspective, the “Machine City” model challenges the existing understanding of what constitutes public and private. With the emerging idea of hyper‐privatization, the public property between private lands become private, and more private investors share whole properties. This city block is able to assert its autonomy by building its own self‐sufcient infrastructure, which further improves efciency, provides newly privatized services, and benefts investors. Also, all buildings are located within walking distance, about a 15‐minute walk for a round trip. This model promotes commercial activities, encourages social interactions, and elevates space efciency.

This “Machine City” proposal intends to create a highly dense city block through collectiveness of personalized infrastructure while enriching the lives of city dwelling, providing people with new life styles, as well as job and entertainment opportunities. It organizes a city through individual blocks. Each block carries its own identity, and together brings diversity to the city. It re‐defnes the relationship between individual blocks and a city. Blocks are also inter‐connected that create a more comprehensive unity.

Live-work housing, Hengyang Wings group

The houses, covering an area about the size of three football pitches, were built in 2009 on the roof of a multi-storey construction materials and furniture mall in Hengyang. Pictures show the houses – with bright blue roofs and pastel yellow walls – mixing architectural styles, with wraparound verandahs and some having vaguely Germanic towers attached. They are divided by white picket fences, while trees and bushes grow in their courtyards and along the pathways between them.

Source: www.scmp.com

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Main Station, C. Y. Lee

The Taipei Bus Station integrates a business hotel, an international shopping center, high-end offce buildings, and metropolitan residential units into a composite city development program on top of the function of a bus depot.

Integrated with the residential, hotel, offce, commercial, transportation, arts, and leisure functions, this new city center provides an all-encompassing living network.

Source: www.cylee.com

Redium Parcel

Taipei

Peter Trummer is University Professor at the University of Innsbruck and holds the Chair of the Institute of Urban Design – ioud.

This book has been fnanced by the Institute of Urban Design – IOUD, University of Innsbruck.

All content was produced by the EDGE “Design of Cities” program at the Southern Californian Institute of Architecture - SCI-Arc, for a design research project directed by Peter Trummer and assisted by Begüm Baysun and Wiliam Virgil in 2016.

Participants: Javier Cardiel, Zeynep Cinar, Jonathan Cooper, Esra Durukan, Dennis Dong Yeop Ham, Yagmur Kaptan, Meeghan Lee, Yen-Ting Lin, Siva Sepehry Nejad, Adrienne Ott, Hyoseon Park, Marco Tadros

Editor: Peter Trummer

Production: Peter Trummer, Sven Winkler

Layout: Peter Trummer, Sven Winkler, Sophie C. Krause

IMPRESSUM

2017

IOUD

Institute of Urban Design / Universtität Innsbruck Univ.-Prof. Peter Trummer Technikerstraße 21c 6020 Innsbruck AUSTRIA