The Mercurial City William Ly
Contents: Reflection What is the City? What is Time? Mining the City Conflation, Interpretation and Amplification Change over Time Variations/ Development Diurnal/ the 24hr Peak Urban Rules Dotted Lines Final The Temporal City
Reflection: Completing the Temporal City has been my greatest challenge. The content has been rousing and provocative, the tutors supportive and classmates encouraging. However, I found myself back in isolation, in lockdown, facing the same struggles as the year before. Issues I believed I had resolved. Yet, despite my interest in the week’s discussion of time and the city, my engaging with time soon became detached and self-destructive. This inevitably bled into the attitudes that drove this project, turning a desire to rehabilitate the city’s inaccessable and unseen areas into a pessimistic, parasitic layer. It is abundantly clear to me that this project has not met the ambitions I had for it, not answering my questions or intervening with new dynamic problems.
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What is the City?
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The city is an collasped experience of time. It is an archive of past uses and a predictor of future events. Our interpretations of it are filtered through data sets that eternally expand into a turbulent cloud of controlled variables, uncertainty and unknown unknowns. The city is in a cycle of decay/ growth. A suspended phase unable to reckon with accelerating technologies and cultures. This inability coincides with a shrinking attention span, leaving each change in the city without resolution, without catharsis. There are no true ends in the city, nor clean beginnings. The Temporal City
The city centre is shifting away from offices towards more residential occupancies. Car use is decreasing, and vehicularly scaled spaces will be reclaimed by pedestrians. The city is embodied energy and carbon.
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What is time?
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Time is experienced through the extreme present. External factors changing so rapidly as to mire our perception of time into stagnancy and repetition. Change over time requires resilience and adaptability. Specialisation and prolonged attention ensuring death. Yet our time is increasing monitered and micromanaged, while simultaneously expected to be flexible and accomodating. Time relates to built form through the concepts of ruin and construction. In the city large enough to experience both at once, the city is also cast into the extreme present. The Temporal City
My perception of time is shattered.
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Mining the City
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Data Sets The city of Melbourne’s Open Data platform was mined to identify trends and DNA, on specific blocks and in the CBD. Key datasets included:
Floor Use: Comprehensive and quantifiable Trending from offices towards residencies
Accessibility: Volatile and unreliable Rated from 0 - 3 -0: Not rated due to no data or not considered publicly accessible -1: All entrances have steps -2: One entrance with ramp -3: Main entrance at grade, with ramp or no steps
Pedestrian Data: Comprehensive but geographically limited to sensor locations
Predictable swells around public transport and during peak hours
Age and Height: Contextual information
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CBD Floor Use (ΔT)3
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Floor Use: Block 33 (ΔT)3
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Floor Use: Block 55 (ΔT)3
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Floor Use: Block 77 (ΔT)3
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Pedestrian Data: Sample 18/6/21 (ΔT)3
2019 High Accessibility Rating
2019 Rated 1 to 3 The Temporal City
Accessibility Mapping 2009 - 2019 (ΔT)3
Density of Residencies from 2015 - 2019 The Temporal City
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Conflation, Interpretati
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ion & Amplification
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The ambiguity and unreliabilty of the accessibility dataset permits creative manipulation. Disregarding the ‘not rated’ designation, the 0-rating is treating as inaccessible. Hence these zones will be amplified targeted as starting points for the new intervention. Amplification of ‘inaccessible 0-rated’ zones (ΔT)3
Bounding Skyline (Existing)
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Intersections with the inaccessible zones
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Change over Time
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The inaccessible zones are then intersected with the existing skyline to give contextual boundaries, and provide an order of changes over time.
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Variations Regenerating the CBD
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Aggregated volumes are tested to represent displaced floor usages. First concentrated on the buildings that have experienced the most change over time.
Then tested as boundary forming elements, aggregated along the zones of inaccessability.
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Ruin/ abstraction is tested as another way of representing changes in function or disuse of space.
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Diurnal or the 24-Hou
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ur Peak
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Urban Rules
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Dotted Lines
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A physical relationship between the pedestrian data sensors and sole occupancies is architecturalised.
Revealing the corrolation of city activity, observation and work.
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As builfing floor uses/ programs fail and change, an equivalent amount volume is displaced into the public realm.
Reinforcing diversity of public
program
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Proposition
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The final proposition manifests as a Mercurial layer that propogates across and above the existing city. As building information is destroyed, both physical and meta data, it undergoes a phase shift into this layer. Program is ambiguated and dispersed locally, forming a free space that accomodates future use/ misuse.
The mercurial nature of this layer is parelleled by a second intervention of geometric additions, that act as bridges and circulation points.
From ground to cloud and building to building. Both systems are adaptable canvas is different ways, ready to embrace individual rehabilitation.
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The Temporal City Ian Nazareth | David Schwarzman RMIT Architecture Semester 2 2021 https://www.temporal.city/