Data Driven Urbanism

Examining data, we realized a key issue is the timeframe on which conventional design operates. If you design a large urban project conventionally, you are designing a solution that operates on the best data gatherable to hit a target ten years in the future when the project will finally be finished. This is a moving target, that unlike weather, our reaction to predictions renders the data void.

But we were also intrigued by the size and scale of existing datasets today, and this led us to explore Jenifer Gabry's in an effort to gather realtime data from a population going about their life. The challenge is to brainstorm the process by which this live data can lead to live evolutions and morphologies in the urban intervention itself. We landed on a modular system that would sculpt itself on an evolving series of recurring data emplying Jenifer Gabry's "citizen sensors" in a way that allows people to vote on local urban adpation by living as opposed to their voice being lost in the aggregate of dissemenated institutional propoganda.

As we organized the data, there also arose a question of scale. Data of a larger metropolitan area looked the the most promising and seems inherently comprehensive. However, such a large scale presupposes an interconnection that might apply to freight and visitors, shouldn't tell you much about environmentally conscious inhabitants. Rather, we must clean up work, and contain living in a way that allows these two primary trip endpoints can increase in proximity and decrease commuter miles traveled.

"American design culture has been split since the mid-1990s between the continued development of the collage-based approaches that Rowe and Banham's generation pioneered, and the rise of the strictly digital methods, driven by three-dimensional modeling and animation software. Recombinant designers crop and reassemble parts, fragments, or overlays to generate design solutions, whether at the scale of the drawing, the building, or the urban plan. Recursive designers build up complexity through the modulation of "primitive," self-similar parts through techniques of cyclical iteration. At its extremes, this opposition pits compositional artistry against computational rigor in contemporary vanguard architecture."

-Joe Day in his new foreward titled After Ecologies for the 2009 reprinting of Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies by reyner Banham58

This quote by Day spurred to think of our project in terms of this curious cocktail of "recombinant" and "recursive." Months later as I found myself collaging datasets to compose our architectural intervention's data cloud on which we would base our aggregation I realized this is fertile ground for such a connection to be made. This was reinforced by the cyclical reiteration of self similar parts.

But does this consumate Day's observation or suggest that in the last decade and a half the zeitgeist has already begun remolding how we position ourselves in the discourse of Architecture? I would venture to suggest that the world of modularity, overarching logic of a formalism, and residual need for pieces of meaning all point to a radical upending our perception of what architecture can aspire to do. I think we have spent this summer exploring the tools that will be implemented here. Lastly, and I think most uncomfortably, we have to ask about the extent to which architects need control of every last detail of the projects they design. Is it enough to design or form? Is it enough to spec a type of parametric facade? Can we relinquish any of this control to the individual?

It seems one of the primary features of denser housing is also to impose as a byproduct a collective and unyielding aesthetic to any individual person or family. While this is a perfectly understandable expectations among large corporations and developments, we believe the discipline of architecture is creating a whole portion of single family housed holdouts, and that we can only serve a whole human population by finding ways to reintroduce design and programmatic autonomy within a new urban field. Our project is a speculation into the future decades of design methodology. Will pedagogy follow?

42 Erica Fischer, “Travels within the East Bay from Twitter Routed along Most Densely Geotagged Corridors,” Flickr (Yahoo!, January 23, 2012), https://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/6745718821/in/album-72157628993413851/. 43 Gopnik, Adam, Nicholas Lemann, and Antonya Nelson. “Jane Jacobs's Street Smarts.” The New Yorker. The New Yorker, September 19, 2016. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/09/26/jane-jacobsstreet-smarts. 44 Koolhaas, Rem. Delirious New York : a Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan. New York :Monacelli Press, 1994. 45 Koolhaas, Rem D.. 1992. Two Libraries for Jussieu University. https://library-artstor-org.sciarc.idm.oclc. org/asset/ AWSS35953_35953_29396295. 46 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. 47 Debord, Guy. 1957. The Naked City. https://library-artstor-org.sciarc.idm.oclc.org/asset/ AWSS35953_35953_34644341. 48 Stelios Arcadiou, “STELARC: ‘THE INVOLUNTARY, THE AUTOMATED AND THE UNCANNY: ZOMBIES, CYBORGS AND CHIMERAS,’” Rensselaer Architecture RSS, 2016, https://www.arch.rpi.edu/2016/04/upcoming-lecture-stelarc/. 49 Bernard Tschumi, “Parc De La Villette,” Bernard Tschumi architects, 1983, http://www.tschumi.com/projects/3/#. 50 unknown, “The Situationist International and the Theory of the Derive,” The Situationist International and the theory of the derive, accessed August 20, 2022, https://fog.ccsf.edu/~dcox/EMU/S.I.html. 51 Di Janub, “New Babylon: Constant Nieuwenhuys,” cropped-miarramico.jpg, February 10, 2011, https:// janub.wordpress.com/2011/02/09/new-babylon-constant-nieuwenhuys/. 52 The Landscape of the Mind: A Conversation with Bernard Tschumi - Scientific Figure on ResearchGate. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Bernard-Tschumi-I-learn-about-the-world-throughthe-tools-that-I-have-as-an-architect_fig2_307621459 [accessed 21 Aug, 2022] 53 Wikimedia Commons contributors, "File:Streets in Kowloon Walled City.jpg," Wikimedia Commons, the free media repository, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Streets_in_Kowloon_Walled_ City.jpg&oldid=503685569 (accessed August 21, 2022). 54 James Crawford, “The Strange Saga of Kowloon Walled City,” Atlas Obscura (Atlas Obscura, July 7, 2021), https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/kowloon-walled-city. 55 Allen, Charlie. Thesis Research instructor Devyn Weiser 56 “Large-Scale Webgl-Powered Geospatial Data Visualization Tool,” kepler.gl, accessed August 23, 2022, https://kepler.gl/demo/ukcommute. 57 Chan, Siu Lun Chan. Thesis Research instructor William Virgil 58 Reyner Banham, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2009). 59 Chan, Siu Lun Chan. Thesis Research instructor William Virgil 60 Chan, Siu Lun Chan. Thesis Research instructor William Virgil 61 Chan, Siu Lun Chan. Thesis Research instructor William Virgil 62 Chan, Siu Lun Chan. Thesis Research. Instructor: William Virgil 63 Allen, Charlie. Thesis Research. Instructor: Devyn Weiser