A THOUSAND PLATEAUS: YARRA CAPRICCIO DESIGN THESIS 05 INTENCITY STUDIO LEADER _ BENJAMIN LAU MELBOURNE SCHOOL OF DESIGN MASON MO 980475 MAR-JUN 2022
CONTENTS 1.0 PRELIMINARY THESIS PROPOSAL Background Thesis Statement History of Urban Agglomeration Urban Element Study Urban Relationship Study Preliminary Design Brief Project Site Proposed Program Mix 2.0 CONCEPT DESIGN History of Melbourne Site Selection Site Analysis Theoretical Response Research Method Program & Theme Precedents Interface Study Parti Diagram Masterplan Speculation Evaluation 3.0 SKETCH DESIGN Precedents Vision(Program&Visual Response) Taxonomy Interface Parts Development Pedestrian Network Optimization Aggregation Tests Master Plan Site Plan Site Section Street View Evaluation 4.0 FINAL DESIGN Iterations Aerial Long Section Frontage Site Plans Themes and Sections 5.0 APPENDIX Bibliography
1.0 PRELIMINARY THESIS PROPOSAL Background Thesis Statement Philosophy Background History of Urban Agglomeration Urban Element Study Urban Relationship Study Preliminary Design Brief Project Site Proposed Program Mix
Figure 1.1.1 Frames, Synecdoche, Melbourne (Mason, 2011)
BACKGROUND Most of time architecture falls into a trap of problem solving, without realizing the importance of puzzle making. An experiment in alternatives may reveal a shift of focus, a new problem to be noticed. Instead of starting with an issue, the thesis starts with 3 subsequent questions: If the 20th century was all about mobility, will 21st century be all about ACCESSIBILITY? How can we change the way we move and access sites and spaces in an urban environment which we need and DESIRE? How can we re-think SPACE PLANNING and URBAN INFRASTRUCTURE for the 21st century for improved CONNECTIVITY?
Figure 1.1.1 MushRoom Manifesto (Mason, 2011)
THESIS STATEMENT Neither going high(Skyscrapers) nor going wide(Urban Sprawl) is sustainable as an urban development model catering to urban densification and accessibility needs. The arborescent topology between spaces failed to service the rhizomatic network of social relationships and a variety of desires.
CAN CITY BE AN ELEMENT OF ARCHITECTURE?
How can a city transform from a COLLECTION of items to a CONNECTION of items? Can city elements reflect the topology of human RELATIONSHIPS and DESIRES? If the practice of architecture is creating boundaries, can there be a CITY WITHOUT ARCHITECTURE? This thesis will investigate EXISTING RELATIONSHIPS between urban elements, and examine possibilities of NEW TYPES OF CONNECTIONS to increase accessibility to different urban conditions, an alternative urban model.
PHILOSOPHY BACKGROUND DELEUZE AND GUATTARI Body without Organs Smooth and Striated Intensive & Extensive Thinking Rhizome MEREOLOGY Ludwig Hilberseimer Daniel Kohler
‘BODY WITHOUT ORGANS’ As in description by French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, organs are functional entities without a topdown hierarchical organization. The absence of stratification reveals the potential of a body to become a desiring machine. This brings the question to master planning of a city: Can city be planned? Does the master exist? If the interaction between urban objects is constrained by a fixed intention, how could they possibly meet the desire of the inhabitants? ‘THE SMOOTH AND THE STRIATED’ In the final chapters/plateaus of [A Thousand Plateaus], D&G discussed about the connection and difference between smooth and striated spaces. The analogy to felt and fabric shows the difference between an always differentiated entanglement between fibres and clear orthogonal weaving between threads. The systematic tolerance to integrity failure and capacity for expansion are manifested through the difference in intensive and extensive natures of these two types of spaces. By introducing a dimension of time, it is the difference between nomadic and the sedentary. How can a city constantly facilitate the establishment of connections instead of blocking such dynamics by continuously creating boundaries?
‘RHIZOME’ -Principles of connection and heterogeneity: Points in a rhizome can be connected to each other and form a network, a field of difference; -Principle of multiplicity: the multiple of elements form a new whole that generates new quality than the individuals; -Principle of asignifying rupture: a broken rhizome can start up again and reform or form new links; -Principles of cartography and decalcomania: a rhizome can not be predicted by an existing model. Instead of a map, it does not represent the real but interact with the real.
Figure 1.1.2 Typologies_MushRoom (Mason, 2011) A Thousand Plateaus(Deleuze, Guattari, 1987)
Figure 1.1.3 Rhizome_MushRoom (Mason, 2011)
Figure 1.1.4 Rhizomatic City_MushRoom (Mason, 2011)
Figure 1.1.5 Urban_MushRoom (Mason, 2011)
‘MEREOLOGY’ Mereology is a study of the PART TO WHOLE/PART TO PART RELATIONSHIPS. When urban is interpreted as ‘being situated in a city’, it can be understood as the resonance of itself. In a city, the number of parts can be finite, but the number of whole is infinite. Since the configuration is unlimited, variation is not found in figure, but in its figuration. When the part of a city is fixed, the diversity of space comes from endless possibilities of nesting and grouping of heterogeneous elements. This provides a way of seeing the city as a dynamic series of relationships, instead of loose objects. A relationship occurs at the interface between two entities, where the design should focus, as the connectivity to be established between urban objects.
Figure 1.2.2 Mereological City(Lab-eds, 2017)
Figure 1.2.1 Interface Activation
Figure 1.2.3 From Object to Field(Lab-eds, 2011)
Figure 1.2.4 Scendobia (Wen Liu, Guangyan Zhu, 2017)
This is an exploration of re organizing city grains into a three dimensional whole. More importantly the way the result being understood, evaluated and assessed. Criteria include accessibility, solar and light condition, circulation, connectivity, etc. These can be assisted with digital tools
URBAN ELEMENT STUDY Elements easily found in a generic city are listed on this page. They are extracted from any specific context as it is ironically ‘Generic’, which every modern city ‘should’ have as many perceives.
URBAN RELATIONSHIP STUDY Using food and dishes as an analogy, this study explores different types of urban conditions, relationship between urban items. Question here is: Does a city need a container(a plate/bowl/pot/frame/shelf)?
HONG KONG -CITY WITHOUT GROUND-
The Multiple ground planes of Hong Kong makes it a ‘city without grounds’. As the experience of’ Elevated Concourse→through a Building→Another Concourse’ can be achieved without setting one’s feet on a bottom ground plane. It hence becomes a pedestrian city which the upper levels of buildings are activated, where informal ownership of a public space occurs and social enclaves starts to emerge. There is always a process of ‘becoming’, where private spaces become a thoroughfare, where concourses become additional public spaces.
Figure 1.2.5 Cities without Ground (Jonathan D Solomon, Clara Wong, Adam Frampton 2012)
Figure 1.2.6 The evolution of streets_Informal Settlement (Dovey Kim 2022)
THE DILEMMA OF STREETS Throughout the development of early cities, the functions and drawbacks of street emerged. In Catalhoyuk, there was no street, where rooms and spaces are compactly connecting to each other, where people access space from the roofscape, due to defensive reasons. 4000 years later in Ur, streets emerge from rooms. Spaces near the roads become more accessible, internal circulation routes continue to bleed into spaces without the resemblance of a road, but natural path shaped by walls. After another 2000 years of progression, in Merida, roads become dominant in urban planning, with a obvious sign of land division and clear boundaries created by those roads. However, informality tends to grow within such a rigid planning. Here’s the dilemma of streets: If building more roads is no longer the answer, how can we increase accessibility(weaken boundaries) without creating more boundaries.
The precedent of RMIT demonstrates how streets can become an element of a building. Internal streets or road extension into the building not only provides circulation path and easier accesses, but also an activation of the interfaces along the street. It also provides interaction to outdoor environments, both visually and acoustically. Photographs in the following pages are taken by myself during my experience of using the spaces at RMIT. Different urban conditions outside the building on Swanston street finds its reflection inside the building as an amalgamation of internal urban conditions, such as stages, landscape terrains, honey comb modules, etc.
PROPOSED PROGRAM MIX Hold on... Are we still thinking about program? Or should it be activities, experience, enjoyable moments? Can architecture emerge from a collection of interfaces between these city moments: Waiting for a cup of coffee at the corner of a building; Watching the world passes by on a tram; Riding through a laneway with all the graffiti surrounding; Smelling the food from a distance hidden at the back of a building; Under the railway bridge and feel the vibration of trains come and go; ... Infrastructure and Services Vegetation Water Body Pigeons ...
SITE(OPTIONS) Inner CBD Laneways (Niche spaces to be cannibalized and re-activated) Fishermans Bend (Underdeveloped potential District) Birrarung Marr (Linear Landscape along the river)
DESIGN THE INTERFACES INSTEAD OF THE OBJECTS What can be the facilitator of connections between two independent spaces/activities/programs? The following pages look into festival/theatre/stages for inspirations. Can these cultural activities become the interface, the skin of spaces behind. A skin which is more important than the content under/ inside.
2.0 CONCEPT DESIGN History of Melbourne Site Selection Site Analysis Theoretical Response Research Method Program & Theme Precedents Interface Study Parti Diagram Masterplan Speculation Evaluation
THE SITE AS AN INTERFACE BETWEEN CITY AND THE RIVER [DECOMPOSING URBAN ACTIVITIES]
be a transition from a Striated planned urban condition to a Smooth river condition? Before remixing activities the current activity condition needs to be deciphered, or like the fungi, decomposed. What
can
What element brings Melbourne together? Art and crafts/foods/the tram and train network/the laneway/ the heritages or I would say: Festivals!
FROM
NODE
BASED SYSTEM TO INTERFACE MORPHOGENESIS [CHALLENGE
ON
BASED
DISCRETE ARCHITECTURE]
In system thinking and Discrete Architecture, it is important to recognize it as a node based system, with parts as the node being connected by a rhizometic network. When this model is applied to building elements the network is the connections or joints. However when it is applied to a city, the network is often refer to streets and roads. Here comes the question: Could the network be more than just for transportation and mobility, how can it gear more towards creating higher accessibility without creating more barriers? Interface is the answer. Interface reflects desire and flow of activities at its peak, being referred by Deleuze and Guattari as ‘plateaus’. Can we let space form naturally by the interactions among interfaces(like the diagram drawn above)?
YES , BUT series by @gudim_public https://www.instagram.com/_yes_but/
IS ‘PROGRAM’ THE RIGHT ANSWER? [TO DESIGN INTERFACES]
When it comes to design interfaces, usually it is a natural result of two colliding entities/ spaces. But when interface is designed first followed by a formation of spaces, instead of program, what should we use to guide the design of an interface? IMAGE. This discussion sets under the premise of the intencity of activities occurs at the domain of interfaces. For instance, are people after the image of Melbourne as (used to be)’the most liveable city’ or the real Melbourne constantly occupied by protests, congestions and unemployment? The frontage of a city should at least provide such image of Melbourne being playful and artistic and so forth. It might be deceiving but an image of made believed can be more powerful than the actual content. An interface-based approach should free architecture from the obligation of being ‘honest’ and ‘functional’, but to focus more on its capacity as a narrative device, to tell and harbour activities of an urban life.
THEATRE/STAGE/CINEMATIC [ARCHITECTURE
OF THE
‘MAKE-BELIEVE’]
The BACKSTAGE is a classic example of a ‘make-believe’ world. This inspires the way an interface can be designed into. The nature of a festival or a play is not only to display a show, but also bringing people into a HETEROTOPIA, a reflection in mirror but not exact duplication of the real world. In the image above it is a study on the architectural manifestation of a man’s desire, from Synecdoche, New York by Charlie Kaufman(2008). Caden Cotard, a theatrical director who replicate the entire New York in an abandoned warehouse as a lifelong theatrical piece.
PRECEDENT
Antonio Manetti, Overview of Hell, in The Content of Dante’s Divine Comedy Described in Six Plates, 1506
[STAGE DESIGN
A CITY STARTS FROM A STAGE
AS A
NARRATIVE DEVICE: NORMAN BEL GEDDES’ STAGE SET
FOR
THE DIVINE
COMEDY (1921)]
If it is all about an image, about make-believe, should city design learn from theatre design?
Norman Bel Geddes. Project for a theatrical presentation of the Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri. Plan and axonometric section. New York, Theatre Arts, 1924
But instead of audience as the surrounding viewing the performer in the centre, it is the opposite. Every act of a citizen becomes part of the performance, when people are wearing an invisible mask as part of the social life, when they are fulfilling their duties, to work, to play, to live. Urban life is a big theatrical piece.
PRECEDENT
Drawing by Joseph Michael Gandy, The Bank of England in ruins, 1830
John Soane’s Bank of England (1788-1833)
INTERIOR URBANISM [INFINITE SEQUENCE
OF
INTERIOR SPACE: JOHN SOANE’S BANK
OF
ENGLAND (1788-1833)]
The Building is not designed to be a big block of city at the beginning. Instead, it is an incremental process of linking to new interfaces, or building new façades. Also, old façades become interior walls for internal streets. This is an example of street experience included in a building, or city becomes an element of architecture. John Soan, the Rotunda in the Bank of England, drawing by Joseph Gandy, built between 1794 and 1796
PRECEDENT
León Ferrari(1920-2013)
A FIELD OF ACTIVITIES [“THE ARCHITECTURE
OF
MADNESS”: LEÓN FERRARI’S HÉLIOGRAPHIAS]
A Section or a Plan cut through city planes should reflect a field of activities. This section through life might appear in normal ground plane of a city, but when it moves up, façades of skyscrapers become rigid walls disconnecting activities, creates isolations. This is also a critique on the Metabolism movement in the 70s, the idea of plug and play in a building scale/ in a daily life setting is both disturbing and requiring better technology. However, it makes more sense when the everchanging quality of Metabolism is happening in an interior scale, where the different clustering of fixed parts can generate different space conditions.
3.0 SKETCH DESIGN Precedents Vision(Program&Visual Response) Taxonomy Interface Parts Development Pedestrian Network Optimization Aggregation Tests Master Plan Site Plan Site Section Street View Evaluation
SHOPPING & CULTURAL DISTRICT AS A MEGA-BUILDING COMPLEX [洪崖洞HONGYADONG，重庆CHONGQING] Chongqing Night Walk | The Disney-esque Hongya Cave Shopping Area | China Megacity https://miro.com/app/board/o9J_ l3KR0Lg=/?moveToWidget=3458764523491775058&cot=14
Originally Stilted building typology commonly seen in Escarpment locations, Hongyadong is a cultural and shopping redevelopment in Chongqing. Built on steep hill-surface, the internal space is labyrinthine. But there are still 3 main circulation levels with stretched street across the site, bifurcating into multiple sub-levels and shops. This is a case where streets become important interfaces where activities like performing and trading happens, and the intensification occurs.
Joseph Gandy _Selection of public and private buildings parts
Ancient Intersection of the Via Appia and Via Ardeatina Giovanni Battista Piranesi, 1756
CAPRICCIO ARCHITECTURE [ARCHITECTURAL FANTASY]
Capriccio often takes existing structures and places them into re-imagined settings and characteristics. The paintings can be anything from re-imagining a building in the future as ruins, to placing a structure in a completely different setting than that in which it exists in reality. Architect David Mayernik cites 4 themes that are found in capricci:[2] Juxtaposing the subject in unfamiliar ways Imagining different states of the subject, such as a building in the future that has been ruined or worn with time Changing the size and scale of the subject. (Mayernik, David (2009). “From Painting En Plein Air to Inventing the Capriccio”. American Artist. 73: 21–29.)
roman-ruins-and-sculpture-giovanni-paolo-pannini-1758
USING [AMEBA] FOR TOPOLOGICAL OPTIMIZATION Instead of putting in loads and supports, entries and exits of the site are used as inputs, along with a tangent force along the perimeter. The tool uses BESO (Bidirectional Evolutionary Structural Optimization) to optimize structure by reducing unnecessary elements and reinforce main structural load paths. Iterations of optimization is shown in next page.
USING [WASP] FOR DISCRETE AGGREGATION Computational tools such as Wasp in The process starts from defining ‘parts’ constraints(Rules for connection, Proximity etc.) etc.), And use the
Grasshopper is used to test out combinatorial possibilities. in terms of connection and collider, followed by defining internal and external constraints(Overall Volumetric Boundary, Existing Conditions, solver to aggregate certain amount of parts.
MACHINE HALLUCINATION With the assistance of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, render images of the iterations are fed to the computer with prompt words and styles such as ‘Market’ ‘Village’ ‘Informal Settlement’ ‘Industrial’ ‘Festival’ etc. And images are generated for inspiration of what the geometric configuration of spaces can ‘become’. In 21 century designers should be able to use such tools to expand the imagination and reach new possibilities. More iterations and combinations are shown in the next page.
INCREMENTAL
4.0 FINAL DESIGN Iterations Aerial Long Section Frontage Site Plans Themes and Sections
BIBLIOGRAPHY Allan, Stan. “Deleuze and Guattari on Architecture,” Infrastructural Urbanism. New York:Routledge, 2015. Curtis, Adam. All Watched over by Machines of Loving Grace. UK, BBC Television, 2011. Accessed July 2, 2021. https://thoughtmaybe.com/allwatched-over-by-machines-of-loving-grace. Delanda, Manuel. Intensive and topological thinking, 2011. Accessed October 5, 2021. https:// youtu.be/0wW2l-nBIDg. Frampton, Adam, D. Solomon, Jonathan, Wong, Clara. Cities Without Ground: A Hong Kong Guidebook. ORO Editions, 2012. Friese, Jantje, and Baran bo Odar. Dark, Netflix Series. Germany, 2020. Accessed September 20, 2021. https://www.netflix.com/ watch/80236912?source=35&trackId=254743534. Guattari, Félix, and Gilles Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1987 Kurokawa, Masayuki. Eight Aesthetic Consciousness of Japan. Beijing: Zhongxin, 2018 Lim, CJ. Inhabitable Infrastructures: Science fiction or Urban Future? New York and London: Routledge, 2017. Schwartzberg, Louie. Fantastic Fungi, Netflix Documentary 2019. Accessed March 21, 2021. https://www.netflix.com/watch/81183477?source=35. Shelton, Barrie, Karakiewicz, Justyna, Kvan, Thomas. The Making of Hong Kong: From Vertical to Volumetric. London: Routledge, 2010. ...