This research studio will revisit—and
hopefully reinvent—the tradition of imagining a city from scratch. The world’s
population is projected to increase by 1.5 Billion in the next 15 years. Already more than 50% of that population
lives in urbanized areas and the percentage is projected to reach 75% in coming
decades. In developing countries (where the bulk of the population growth is
occurring), the existing urban infrastructure is simply incapable of supporting
that level of growth. Rather than
accommodate that population growth in already stressed urban centers, we
propose that a more viable strategy would be a series of “Start-up Cities;”
small yet diverse cities characterized by innovative design at both the
architectural and urban scale.
In order to develop new strategies, we will
collectively analyze past examples, and produce designs valid in the present.
We will review contemporary urban thought and proposals: New Urbanism,
Landscape Urbanism, Infrastructural Urbanism. We will explore new conceptual
frameworks opened up by complexity theory and ecological thinking. We will
investigate the environmental implications of city design, and pay attention to
the ecological impact of these new cities.
Finally, the iterative and serial nature of urban form is well-suited to
computational design and we will make full use of new design methods.
“Roma 20-25: New
Life Cycles for the Metropolis” is an
international design workshop and exhibition organized by the MAXXI Foundation
and the Urban Planning Department of the City of Rome. Drawing from the 1978
“Roma Interrotta” exhibition, the project calls schools of architecture to
envision Rome’s urban future by superimposing a virtual grid to a new map of
Rome’s metropolitan area. Rather than dividing the city based on the Nolli
plan’s twelve sections, Roma 20-25 generated a new map of Rome by identifying
the territory where most of the social and economic activities currently take
place. Twenty-five different areas were defined and assigned to participating
universities, who were asked to both analyze and re-design their given
territories.
“Giro di Roma: The Agency of
Architecture at the Urban Scale”
Our approach is governed by three working
principles. First, to engage the
question of Rome’s immediate periphery in both its local, historical context as
well as the wider context of dispersed urbanisms in the 21st Century. This suggests a careful attention to
infrastructure and mobility: both the movement of goods and people, as well as
social mobility. Second, to understand the city today as something not separate
from nature but embedded in a larger ecological context; today, the city is in
nature and nature is in the city. This
implies a close attention to territory, topography and landscape. Finally, we want to engage the memory of the
1978 Roma Interrotta exhibition. Despite
the vast scale of the site, we are convinced that the problem of the city
belongs to architecture, and that architectural interventions have a real
potential for positive agency at the urban scale.
The PUIC team was assigned the central
square in the large territorial array, sharpening the exhibition’s focus on
questions of center and periphery. Our
focus, however was not on the historic center, but rather on the edges of the
given square: the porous mix of landscape and building fabric surrounding
Rome’s compact center.
Credits:
Research and Exhibition proposal produced
by Princeton’s Center for Architecture, Urbanism and Infrastructure
Stan Allen, Director and project leader
Research and Design Team:
Julian Harake; Miles Gertler; Alfredo
Thiemann; Hans Tursack; Okki Berendschot; Liam Turkle; Princeton University PUIC
Our Approach
Our approach is governed by three working
principles:
First, to engage the question of Rome’s
immediate periphery in both its local historical context and the wider context
of dispersed urbanisms in the 21st Century. This suggests a careful attention
to infrastructure and mobility. In order to underscore the idea that the
remnants of the historical past are not limited to the center, we propose to
mark the concentric order of the city with a new ring, which will be a
structured landscape system first while simultaneously operating at the
city-wide scale as a device to unify the periphery.
Our second approach is to understand the
city today as something not separate from nature but embedded in a larger
ecological context. This implies a close
attention to territory, topography and landscape. Working with existing natural
pathways (rivers, green corridors and topographical features) we will repair
the connectivity of the large-scale natural systems through defined local
interventions.
Finally, we want to engage the memory of
the 1978 Roma Interrotta exhibition (and its deep Princeton roots).
Specifically, departing from Kenneth Frampton’s idea of the “Megaform” – large
scale interventions that are characterized by intricate sectional topology and
careful relationship to site and landscape – we
believe that it is possible to create local density and social
aggregation that is well integrated into this new urban field condition.
Despite the vast scale of the site, we are convinced that the problem of the
city belongs to architecture, and that local architectural interventions have a
real potential for positive agency at the urban scale.
Team members: Julian Harake, Miles Gertler,
Alfredo Thiemann
