Thesis Statement

“Roads? Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.”

-Dr. Emmett Brown in the film: Back to the Future1

Thesis Statement

Call it an architecture cliché, or an architectonic nightmare, or even a Zombie flick where CIAM modernists have risen to eat the grey matter of today’s Jane Jacobites. Freeways won, before they lost; and before that, trains carved huge railyards into an occupied urban fabric.2 And perhaps, had there not been a marriage of convenience between flight and field, we’d have leveled our cities to taxi planes through Time Square in our frenzied obsession with the future and its flying cars.3 Streets are canonical, untouchable, and invaluable, until they aren’t.

Our project speculates into a future where the street is no longer beholden to either human driven or privately owned and parked cars.4 5 Further, transferable air rights, indeed, air in general is viewed with a higher regard as the city breathes and the world seeks to sequester substantial swaths of CO2.6 With the anticipation of new vehicles and new spatial politics, comes an obfuscation of the line between building, dwelling, car, and street as they begin to coalesce into a single, coagulation.7 Independently intelligent, and collective in their aggregation, they hinge neither on single author nor design firm, but on the citizens’, themselves sensors, real-time needs and travel patterns.8

As architects, we often find ourselves eating cake to Patricia Moor(e) ourselves to the reality of a rapidly growing mass of underhoused and unhoused people.9 Our aim is to conceive an intervention that will free us from the arrested development inherent in contemporary design projects today, where a decade often separates completed project from the data on which its based.10 Instead, we propose a leveraging of modularity and mass production to decentralize design and aggregate an ever-evolving urban organism.

Our project plunders the sordid canon of urbanism, channeling a 3D Camillo Sitte-esque laboratory that experiments in 3D void spaces until the urban activity is maximized.11 Koolhaus, Jane Jacobs, and MOS are summoned to insinuate buildings and streets, asserting that they are in fact synonymous.12 13 14 Even “Kowloon Walled City” and “Desire Paths” are fleshed out in an attempt to register the tenuous distinction between inhabitant and designer in autonomous instances of architecture.15 But we were confounded by the implicit notion of nodality in Guy Debord’s The Naked City-his map of Paris privileging certain portions of the City of Lights over others- leading us to question whether the act of ‘drifting’ can really happen amid prescribed start and end points.16

This led us to attempt a subtle, seemingly oxymoronic, inversion of the twentieth century urban planning that hinged on the creation of contiguous focal points, places, into one of a continuous urban ether, space.17 In this way the architect might focus less on physically controlling the people themselves through signs, symbols, and hierarchy, and instead focus on layers of data that might contribute to design by interdisciplinary interplay. Before the inhabitants, is an infinite series of journeys-a blank canvas-ready to be designed with their feet.

But ultimately, we plucked one word from our furiously crumbled copies of Situationist literature that highlight architecture’s, and certainly our intervention’s, raison d’etre: possibility.18 Where historically engineers have taken charge and obsessed over precision, order, and timeliness, at the expense of nearly everything else people need to live, we have taken it upon ourselves to promulgate an architecture that is itself, to quote Peter Wollen’s Situationists and Architecture, “a dream journey…an invitation to break taboos.”19 Whether it is outrunning sealevel rise, drought, fire, storms, technological shifts, geo-politics, viruses, violence, perhaps even the planet itself, we must cling to and hold to the grander idea that our cities can and must move, drift, and drift with us.

Endnotes

1 Back to the Future (Universal Pictures Amblin Entertainment, 1985). 2 Samuel I. Schwartz, “Motordom,” in Street Smart: The Rise of Cities and the Fall of Cars (New York, NY: PublicAffairs, 2015), pp. 1-23. Here Sam Schwartz concisely describes the radical transformation of cities and their roads in response to the mass adoption of the automobile. 3 This statement is purely speculative, perhaps even frivolous, but think of the Jetsons and the tacit expectation that lingers in the public’s conception for urbanism sixty years later. To list one example see: University of Michigan. "A Jetsons future? Assessing the role of flying cars in sustainable mobility." ScienceDaily. www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/04/190409135923.htm (accessed August 3, 2022). 4 Iea. “Electric Vehicles – Analysis.” IEA, November 1, 2021. https://www.iea.org/reports/electric-vehicles. 5 Marshall, Aarian. “As Waymo v. Uber Ends, Robocars Enter the Era of Reality.” Wired. Conde Nast, February 9, 2018. https://www.wired.com/story/uber-waymo-trial-settlement-self-driving-cars/. This is not at all inconceivable. Combine the electrification of cars, with the increasingly cost-feasible adoption of autonomous vehicles. 6 “Transferable Development Rights.” Transferable Development Rights - DCP, 2015. https://www1.nyc. gov/site/planning/plans/transferable-development-rights/transferable-development-rights.page. Air is an interesting inflation of space, or should I say void. Regurgitating a Modernist polemic, does it have design consequences beyond the containment and distribution of the fluid, air, itself? Our project asks whether dissolving the interior/exterior modernist binary can enhance the qualities of each with diluting them with the other. 7 Hopefully, we have visually conveyed an interest in if not melting these four primary elements of the city into something new, we have at least woven them into a new urban fabric. This action is in response to straight and narrow conception of the street, and that it visually queues the subject to find the object in a

single, distant, vanishing point. How does repositioning the terminus of an interweaving of urban spaces change the way the space is experienced? Are new modes of representation necessary? 8 Jennifer Gabrys, “Publications,” Jennifer Gabrys, May 27, 2022, https://www.jennifergabrys.net/publications/. Predicated on the work of Jennifer Gabrys into the use of citizens as sensors, we propose a far more invasive set of data gathering that would allow citizens to vote on the spatial evolution of the city simply by moving. 9 Patricia A. Moore and Charles Paul Conn, Disguised (Milton Keynes, Bucks: Word (UK), 1986). Mixing the colloquial quote of Marie Anttoinette “Let them eat cake” with Patricia Moore’s habit of method acting as here stakeholders to design better architecture. 10 Arrested Development (Fox, 2003). This play on words is a reference to the title of an early 00s comedy titled Arrested Development which seems to have foreshadowed the 08 Housing Crisis. However, this satire also demonstrates the quandary of a development suspended in mid-construction and completely disconnected with its would be producer and consumer. 11 Camillo Sitte, The Art of Building Cities City Building According to Its Artistic Fundamentals, trans. Charles T. Stewart (New York, NY: Reinhold Publishing Corporation, 2013). 12 Koolhaas, Rem D.. 1992. Two Libraries for Jussieu University. https://library-artstor-org.sciarc.idm.oclc. org/asset/AWSS35953_35953_29396295. 13 Jacobs, Jane, and Jason Epstein. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York, NY: Modern Libray, 2011. 14 Meredith, Michael, Hilary Sample, Katy Barkan, and Et. al. “Housing, No. 1, Thoughts on a Walking City.” MOS, 2011. https://www.mos.nyc/project/thoughts-walking-city. 15 “Downtown Is for People (Fortune Classic, 1958),” ed. Nin-Hai Tseng, Fortune (Fortune, September 18, 2011), https://fortune.com/2011/09/18/downtown-is-for-people-fortune-classic-1958/.Here the notion of desire paths, and even Kowloon Walled City loops back to Jane Jacobs, when she says in an article titled: Downtown is for the People,” There is no logic that can be superimposed on the city; people make it, and it is to them, not buildings, that we must fit our plans.” 16 Debord, Guy. 1957. The Naked City. https://library-artstor-org.sciarc.idm.oclc.org/asset/ AWSS35953_35953_34644341.Here the question of how much control do you relinquish as an artist emerges. In the spirit of drifting, one must ask whether there is residual momentum of a previous course and whether that bore any intentionality. If no intention existed prior, can a proposed set of start and endpoints influence the course of a drift? 17 Bernard Tschumi, Architecture and Disjunction (Cambridge, Mass: M.I.T. Press, 1996). While this inversion sounds far fetched, it seems to be something Bernard Tschumi is conversing with. 18 Wollen, Peter. “Peter Wollen, Situationists and Architecture, NLR 8, March–April 2001.” New Left Review, 2001. https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii8/articles/peter-wollen-situationists-and-architecture. 19 Wollen, Peter. “Peter Wollen, Situationists and Architecture, NLR 8, March–April 2001.” New Left Review,