Brown Sheep (Rajat Sodhi | Brian Houghton | Abhishek Bij)
AADRLv11 | Parametric Urbanism III
The Research Agenda for this Thesis focuses on the inherent intelligence in the dynamics of flow to mediate natural, pedestrian and vehicular movements to reach stasis and to define a boundary condition for distributing built mass, mixed use program and a public park. The pattern of distribution highlights theconsistency of an evolutionary system, wherein local variations of networkingpaths and nodal points, influenced by parametric contextual field conditions, can have multiple emergent effects from the scale of an architectural logic to global urban organization.
The techniques developed to control flow are deployed on a site of Parque DomPedro in Sao Paulo, which has witnessed consistent urban decline due to conflicting infrastructural systems. The proposal aims at restructuring the site and introducing a new building type that integrates the ground with the builtto create occupiable spaces and emerging circulatory routes that help the user to negotiate different transport infrastructures and rejuvenate the site.
Urban Condition
The city of Sao Paulo was built for the automobile and the dense infrastructure of roads, highways, underpasses and traffic interchange loops define the urban fabric and sustain the city’s ability to sustain its high density. The site of Parque Dom Pedro is located at the edge of city center and is defined by a set of traffic interchange loops that allows both for the absorption of incoming traffic from the suburbs into the center and allowing vehicular movement to bypass the city. The site is also bifurcated into east and western banks of the River Tiete. The western part of the site consists of Dom Pedro II Bus Terminal which links the city center to the suburbs, while the easternsidecontains the Palace of Industries, the former site of the Mayor’s office, now a restoration project and the Dom Pedro Park. In recent years, the site has witnessed the layering of new infrastructural systems such as a metro station and a tram terminal. The only physical link to the site is now reduced to a pedestrian bridge that connects the city with the infrastructural systems on site. Paradoxically, these new layers have turned the site into a traffic churning infrastructural archipelago sustaining the city with both vehicular and pedestrian traffic, yet leading to its rampant degradation due to its limiting and segregated connectivity.
Sao Paulo is the largest city in Brazil and in Latin America and ranks among the top five cities with the largest metropolitan area in the world. The city consists of a historical city center and the metropolitan area. With 11 Million people inhabiting a little over 1.5 square kilometer, the center is the most populousregion in South America and the southern hemisphere.
The positioning of the site within a high density and fast moving vehicular traffic interchange ring has resulted in its degradation. The bifurcation of the site by the river adds another degree of inaccessibility to Dom Pedro Park which makes it an ideal place for anti-social behavior.
The Plugin - The emergent distributed cluster work routes allow localized access points and circulatory routes the buses. The distributed system connects the site geographically with bus circulations in corresponding directions. In addition to the vehicular circulatory logic, thediagram suggests possible massing and redistribution of greens in an elevated and thickened ground conditionwhich may serve to connect with the context both at a planning and human level.
Materialization
The Fins of the urban diagram enable to suggest not only an urban massing for the site, but a set of relationships and differences that each set of fins exhibits within a nodal point set in comparison to the fins of other sets. The different cluster formulations of the fins were segregated and each cluster was used to define a set of surfaces. The translation of a group of fins into a surface thus provides an opportunity to collect and regroup geometry to create architectural effects.
Spatialization
The translation of the urban diagram into surfaces provided an opportunity to instrumentalize the surface as structure to create spatial configurations. This was achieved through a process of thickening, splitting, bifurcating and blistering of the ground surface, both horizontally and vertically. Our research focused on developing a new form of urbanism that is derived from the generation of integrated and diverse ground conditions that negotiate a complex networking of pedestrian flows, and set forth new opportunities for the organization and differentiation of public and private spaces.
The challenge in thickening of the ground surface involved its successful translation from a horizontal plane, vertically up to form the skyscraper.
The deflections of the surface results in creation of blister like formations that can be parametrically controlled for each set of fins independently, allowing for a control over the dispersion of program in the thickened ground. In the process of thickening of the ground, multiple layers of circulation were introduced therefore leading to recursive thickening and splitting of the surface allowing for occupiable zones to be created not only on the top and underneath the surface but also in the interstitial regions of the surface.
This technique results in the formation of a new architectural prototype thatintegrates the flows of pedestrian and vehicular traffic while simultaneously allowing for pockets of spaces being created due to the resulting structure. These pockets of spaces are connected by a complex network of pathways which allows for differentiating the program and the parametric reconfiguration of the building based on its relative position with the larger global system of nodalpoints.
The Urban Plan shows the reconfigured park structure and its connectivity to the context. The thickening of the ground enables the park to exist at different levels, allowing for a non-linear flow of pedestrian in and out of the site. The proposed architectural prototypes cross the periphery and connect with the context at local points where the pedestrian is allowed in order to maintain a discreet disconnection with vehicular movement in the site.
The prototypical model demonstrates the architectural prototype that enables the negotiation of pedestrian and vehicular flows, connectivity to context and continuation of the park space as a thick ground.
Conclusion
The exploration of flow dynamics through material experimentation, its translation and research into off the shelf software and custom written code, and its application to create a new form of urbanism that is predicated on creating and negotiating infrastructural connectivities has allowed the thesis to produce a new architectural prototype which integrates the ground and the built.
Such an urbanism challenges the relationship between the figure and the ground and allows us to ask new questions about urbanism as a system defined by inter-relationships and relative relationships between points in a field condition.
The architectural prototype pushes the dilution of the relationship between figure and ground to another level where the gradient of formation of spatial pockets and circulatory networks allows the dissolution of the public and the private by establishing varying degrees of publicness as a primary mode of distributing program within a built structure. Thus, by modulating and controlling types of flow, one is able to create gradients of occupiable zones, pedestrian and vehicular movement and gradients of structure and green spaces.
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