RE VIEW PRINCETON- school of ARCHITECTURE rumor- SPRING 2010 ---------------------------------------------
Rumor 01.02 MEGASTRUCTURAL LANDSCAPES: LINEAR CITY Jesse Reiser & Nanako Umemoto, Princeton University; Kuma Kengo, Tokyo University
Background It can be argued that Kenzo Tange’s Tokyo Bay project in 1960 is the last major piece of planning in Japan led exclusively by an encompassing architectural vision. The ambitions and scope of the Tokyo Bay project were necessarily large and comprehensive, ranging from the macro to the micro: from the effects of planning down to the specific architectural character (style) of the project itself. As such, it encompassed the full environmental, social, political, and aesthetic possibilities of which architecture is capable. Such a vision is utopian in the best sense of the word. The project embodies not a flight of fancy but rather a radical empiricist desire to project, in eminently concrete terms, a possible world. Today, Tokyo has a new set of urban challenges requiring a new set of solutions—these problems still deal with a lack of space, but are also accompanied by reduced densities, pollution, and an ongoing energy crisis. Landfill capacity is close to exhaustion due to space constraints and over four million tons of household waste is dumped into Tokyo Bay each year. Although the government has adopted a pro-incineration policy for decades, this has led to greater environmental problems. With over 2000 municipal incinerators, Tokyo is the current global leader in dioxin release, recently being cited as the producer of 40% of the world’s output. A new vision is needed for the future of Tokyo— one that can come much closer to Japan’s legacy of environmental respect and responsibility by using the ambitions of the Tokyo Bay project as a departure point for new speculations on the future of the city.
Linear City Within this new set of urban problems, the issue of the large public infrastructural project comes into question. The project site, the Kawasaki Artificial Platform and the Tokyo Bay Aqualine, is a bridge-tunnel combination across Tokyo Bay. It contains the world’s longest vehicular tunnel and was built at a cost of $11.2 billion. The Aqualine is a hybrid structure composed of a 4.4 km bridge and 9.6 km tunnel underneath the bay. At the bridge-tunnel crossover point, there is an artificial island with a rest area consisting of restaurants, shops and amusement facilities. In the middle of the tunnel, a tower uses the bay’s almost-constant winds as a power source to supply air to the interior. Since the nineteenth century, infrastructure has been overtly utilized as a model resulting in the amplification of systems of movement, distribution, and control. While the proliferation of these systems has necessarily been attendant to modernization, they are rarely questioned or seen as anything other than discrete components of a hierarchy no greater than its parts, circulatory systems for nodal aggregations of culture. The potential of designing new transportation technologies lies in the wider implications and effects of the system. The implementation of high-speed rail technologies creates a spectrum of possibilities and effects ranging from the global to the local, from the level of regional planning and development to the local structures that such technologies carry forward and promulgate.
STUDIO BRIEF Contrary to a more limited view which would understand the introduction of high-volume/ high-speed arteries as merely being able to provide a faster connection between point A and point B, these technologies will have unprecedented effects on urban and ex-urban development. The studio task is to develop new flexibility strategies, both locally and globally. These necessarily would link large-scale, top-down strategies with small-scale, bottom-up models of development. It is a supersystem containing many subsystems. In this context, the local is never merely local, but rather a coherent part of a greater whole. For a system to be truly flexible and adaptive it must arrive out of a logic of feedback between the general and the specific and viceversa. This methodology fundamentally develops infrastructural logics that allow for the playing out of a certain range of possible urban outcomes. Built into this model is the capacity to handle change over time, as opposed to more traditional planning strategies which only provide fixed templates for limited sets of desires. This new Linear City must move past the ideological stance of Metabolism (pure expansion) to more contemporary concerns of intelligent urban growth combined with sustainability or environmental necessities, such as power generation, refuse treatment, desalinization, bioremediation, urban regreening, or restoration of ecological habitats.
Super Jury May 10, 2010 Organizers
01.02 p.01
Jesse Reiser Princeton University Nanako Umemoto PennDesign/Pratt
Guest Critics Enrique Walker Columbia University Catherine Ingraham , David Ruy, Wiliam Mcdonald Pratt Christine Boyer , Hani Rashid, Carles Vallhonrat
Princeton University
Kengo Kuma Tokyo University Takashi Yamaguchi Osaka Sangyo University David Gouvernour , Ali Rahim , Hina Jamel PennDesign Xu Weiguo Tsinghua University
Student Presenters
Tokyo University Architecture School PennDesign Landscape Architecture School Pratt Urban Design and Architecture School Princeton University School of Architecture Osaka Sangyo University Architecture School Tsinghua University Department of Architecture
Robert Cha, “Linear City for Tokyo Bay.”