Tag Archives: urban design

the sniper’s log_

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IMG_9975-2

(street dialogues, barcelona.)

1803_

certain x (un)certainty

- ‘planned’ environment appears to have eschewed the lively air of its inhabitants.

- the very act of entering a space violates the balance of geometry. when we intersect such places, do we affect one another? i believe so.

- textures, shadows & even acoustics, carve all sort of new and unexpected spaces. if there were limits to the production of clandestine spaces, what are the limits they hold, and how do we dilate them?

- to question the tangibility of highly sanitized urban design. are we, at best, problem solving or at worst creating generic solutions globally?

- does design co-exist with the urban tissue or does it subtext it; fuck context and (un)context design? will this rhetoric exaggeration set us questioning deeper on its immanence?

- maybe we can enter an urban space and think of its distant memory, with all its strange ambiguity and assertiveness. 

the urban fabric is a stage, we need more emotions and drama. it should not only be seen an instrument for economic commerce, it represents the expression of pride for its inhabitants.

any comments are welcomed.

a.

unlearning_

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‘ yet he is aware that everything is in a state of flux. a strong wind can change the shape of a cloud, a tumbling river the shape of a river bank, the process of changes in the earth’s crust, the shape of mountains. ‘ – the power of Ch’i

 

dear diary,

(10 Oct 2012)

do we want to win this battle or not?

sometimes it is important to find out what the city is, not so much of what it was, or what it should be, but perhaps the essence of what the city actually stands for. this thought drove me to explore the notion of the city.

 

project N_ ‘ now this is not the end. it is not even the beginning of the end. but it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning. ‘ – Sir Winston Churchill

 

i have spent 4 years learning from the institution, it provoked an intuition of what the term ‘vibrancy’, and it’s quasi-endless potential , stood for. it’s role, often too quick to be generalized , can play a crucial key towards what characterizes the ‘real city’ in the 21st century. in such contemporary times, the stark indifference of what ‘vibrancy’  mean to the spectators of cities can somehow evoke an extraordinary artificial form of memory, which helps to facilitate the process and function of the city.
this city has changed at an unbelievable speed, and there is almost no illustration of its gradual shift from center to periphery (and possibly beyond) it presents herself in a rather idiosyncratic way, where my initial landing model succeeded in showing some properties of the evolution of complex systems, and in particular, the difficulty of governing a design determined by multiple interacting elements. however though, what is evidently clear is that the complexity of systems does not allow us to keep thinking in linear causality or in simple systems (any longer).

for this investigation, i propose a radical model that challenges the conventional notion of problem fixing, as well as redefining the notion of concept, context, and content. the history of architecture is not so different from the history of science. it is a history of the forms of conceptualization, and elaborating it further would mean the beginning of a question that builds upon earlier concepts, but that does not presuppose the existence of a specific answer or solution.

the rest, is still (unwritten)

 
best,

a.

 

 

proto-metabolist_

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architectural;

Singapore’s proto-metabolist movement, the south-east’s non-western avant-garde movement for urban renewal.

the architectural song-lines of our reverse alchemy synthesizes a new norm for modernization in the south-east of asia. the country’s apotheosis of urban renewal is unique and avoids the contamination of ingredients in the melting pot, keeping them separate, but allowing the manipulation of identities for a more ‘modern’ culture.

characterized by:

- coexistence & conflict of amazingly heterogeneous institutions & individuals

- unprecedented rapid & extensive transformation n the physical structure of the society

- rapid communications methods

- technological progress & its impact upon regional cultures

we are modernization in its purest form, lobotomized, adopting the mechanics & rationalistic program. a semiotic state, conscious of, inspired by, demographic pressure. if there is chaos, it is authored, if it is absurd, it is willed absurdity. our urban society is a dynamic field of interrelated forces; a set of mutually independent variables in a rapidly expanding infinite series. this equilibrium will change in character as time passes and not remain rediscovered at small scale.

western civilization must recognize the thinkers at the periphery if we’re heading towards the same goal of ultimate globalization.

‘ our cities are fluid & mobile. it is difficult to conceive of some of them as places, in the real sense of that word. how can an entity with no discernible beginning or end be a place? it is certainly more apt to think of a particular part of a city as a place. if it were possible to articulate each of the parts of the city more adequately, to give qualities of edge and node to now formless agglomerates, we would have begun to make our large urban complexes at least understandable, if not ‘image-able’. ‘ - fumihiko maki

(entitled: the only moment we were alone. photo credits: usaid umar/@ieatthefish)