A Warm up: Procedural Cities & Building Blinders

Procedurally Generated Cities

A Warm Up: Procedural Cities...

We began testing procedurally generated cities in blender. Here the question was largely quantitative, can we work out density, and generate a procedurally generated form that follows the prescribed rules. While this blender output does take on the appearance of the city, a street logic is not clearly visible.

This is a quick and dirty exploration into the mechanics of the procedurally generated content, but in it's simplicity it is a reminder of just how simple the underlying logic of a complex urbanism might be. Judging by superficial appearance is not a reliable method for approaching urbanism.

In this way we found ourselves reliving the mid-century Modernists looking at the city as a serious of broad formal abstractions , rather than an outworking of the complex needs and interests of millions of individuals operating only occasionally as a collective.

Demonstration of procedural workflow on a different plane.61

...and Building Blinders

Similarly we took a pass at a deconstruction of the many functions of the street fleshing out the idea of installing new urban infrastructural element. We loosely termed these building blinders, because they extended our from buildings border walls into the street and above their rooftops. Occasionally, these could also shrink to the size of park benches or grow and coalesce across blocks. The idea that the degree of building blinder would be based on the existing data in the area that would suggest the inhabitants ability or need for extra space.

The blinders would serve to divide streets and rooftops into a series of implied rooms, enfilade, rather than a hallway or path to which a pedestrian might be tempted to fully traverse without stopping or inhabiting these places. In this way the line between interior space and exterior would be blurred, as well as the public street from the private porch. This approach seemed to be fertile ground , until we begin to think about the practicalities of structure and instantiation on old buldings. Additionally, the planarity of the project, felt it might beg the question as to whether it was infact an architectural intervention. Ultimately, this set up a framework for how we would think of our final thesis intervention. Instead of building a canon of uniquely shaped, and largely arbitrary, forms to blind and curate the locus of inhabitants and pedestrians, we felt a three-dimensional conception of space and roof could enter and protrude in and above the existing urbanism.

One advancement that a critique of this iteration led to is the question of subtraction. Could our intervention offer a lense through which we could begin dissolving old or excessive existing buildings to convert them to new programs that might accommodate less demand.