'wild urbanism' at zaryadye park

congrats to the all those at DS+R and their winning proposal for zaryadye park in Russia!

This super cool concept, of 'wild urbanism' plays well within the city.  Bringing various landscape typologies together and allowing users to wanders is quite perfectly positioned, especially within the urban city center - where our paths are quite often, dictated for us.

beautiful images (as always) and a clever film clip help sell the idea.  architecture holding hands with 'nature' - well played.

VOTE4CENTRIPETAL

vote here!

Centripetal_ zoomscapes

 2A_eM collaborates with Situ Studio.

today's technology (the camera) allows one to experience architecture through a new medium (film) at new speeds beyond the human experience. we can replay, distort and adjust reality along new trajectories at various elevations and perspectives creating new opportunities for experiencing space, the city and the architecture surrounding us.

this is the result of an exercise in design fabrication. a prototype was constructed using CNC technology combined with reclaimed bicycle parts to produce a mechanism to rotate a camera about a Y-axis. the revolutions combined with a forward vector produces a loopty-loop or corkscrew condition.

occupying a subway, we shot these clips looking across and down the tracks out the side and front windows (respectively) of the J train. the result is a disorienting experience of the city.

here is a link to the vimeo album.  

a short edit is up for voting in the videotect architectural film competition,NOW!

"dualities in repose"

We're off an running for a crazy summer of competitions/collaborations. Here's the first in a 'quadfecta' of work that will [hopefully] get pushed out this summer - with some stellar results. First on the docket, I have joined Corey Gaffer of Gaffer Photography [and amateur landscape design] in a collaborative effort to create an imaginative design for SLANT.eu, an international competition on Landscape Architecture. This is our submission to the competition:

"Sitting on the bend of a river, a plot of land

lies vacant. Overgrown and derelict, the possibility for

regeneration is palpable as an engine for change and

growth. As the river cuts, a park will connect. Industry

and culture coalesce, through creativity, innovation and

active participation sprouting a green economy and

joining communities with healthy local food and access

to art while improving the ecological health of the river.

The park softens hard edges created by urban residences to the west, large cultural complexes to the east and the river embracing the site perimeter. The resultant softening creates a multitude of new relationships and accessibility with the waterfront. Physical access to the river, access to education and information regarding river ecology and access to jobs through community gardening reengage residents with water as a resource in a full range of social and recreational activities.

Strategic planting restores and refreshes the soil on site and filters runoff before entering the river maintaining and improving the health of the river as an amenity. Embedded within the comprehensive bioremediation strategy, implied program hugs the water’s edge. Soft delineations are marked through unique relationships to the riverfront; community garden, beachhead, and art island. The passive characteristic of the river reemerges in an active dialogue with the park user.

Conceptually, the park draws from the diverse strengths and unique potentials in the surrounding context to activate new public space: a confluence of culture, economic innovation and individual repose. Strategic design emphasizes the relationships between greater natural, social, civic, and economic ecologies: where dualities exist they are reinterpreted as strengths and harnessed to emphasize the unique characteristics of the site’s surrounding context.

The north end of the park extends the museum’s impact through the introduction of an outdoor sculpture park. Set among waving grass a prairie is peppered with sculptures to be discovered, viewed, engaged, and reflected upon. To further heightening views, an island creates a new platform for viewing one’s surroundings from a vantage point encircled by a wetland marsh. The sculptures occupy an ecotone from prairie to marshland: an extended threshold. Here birds, frogs, lizards and snakes call home.

The south end contrasts the individual intellectual experience with a community based garden and market. The transition is dappled with trees opening to terraced modules creating a tapestry of gardens and ponds aiding the cultivation of local food sources. Physically engaging with earth reconnects residents to natural processes and cycles of growth strengthening community and improving health for residents across the river. Through this haptic engagement, the community gardens create a new micro-economy for residents by growing and selling healthy, local foods.

Linking both ends,a primary path wends through the site amplifying the gesture of the linear park. A thick forest hugs the path offering a visual and acoustic buffer from the urban fabric. The path creates new connections and opportunities to experience the neighborhood along and down to the waterfront as one navigates the dualities of culture and industry. The result is a park where dualities converge in an area of tranquility to experience, appreciate, reconsider, enjoy and grow.

UPDATE: holocaust memorial design competition

the results are in. we didn't place - unfortunately, but you can't expect too much for pulling together a submission in a few days... unless you're h.van_oudenallen. congrats and good luck!

luckily we had some interest from our fellow students that lightened the load a bit.

we held off posting our actual submission, until now. our process work can be found here. now, with the passing of time, we post our submission:

In such a small space, line, forms, and gestures are limited… What do we have then, but light, time, movement, and material? With this premise in mind, we ask ourselves not only, “what does a memorial mean, but also what does it do.”

We are not survivors of the Shoah. We don’t pretend to know the intensely personal feelings associated with the experience; we can only speculate. In a short time, little direct experiences will be left. Therefore we sought to distill the fundamental essence of a collective conscious.

We propose a place of peace, perhaps a place of discomfort, a place of reflection, a place where senses stir memories. These qualities will always be remembered, be shared, be alive, broadcasting the memory and the universal message “never again” long after the last survivor has left.

It is our hope that through simple actions we can influence profound reactions.

thanks again to all those that helped!

holocaust memorial design competition

we've recently completed another competition for the atlantic city boardwalk holocaust memorial.
here are some process images that we can share now.
the final images will follow shortly after the judging. [when it's legal]

conceptual sketches

plan sketch + notes

rendering sketches + notes

thanks to everyone for all their help:

dave tesch_ m.arch 2010 - creative contribution

adriana artega_ m.arch 2011 - models
sam brannon_ bsas 2011
luke cvikota_ bsas 2011
ashleigh fischer_ bsas 2011
richie hands_ bsas 2011
therese hassett_ m.arch 2011
jodi masanz_ m.arch 2010
ben mather_ bsas 2011
michelle sletten_ m.arch 2011
paul steidl_ bsas 2011
blake villwock_ m.arch 2011

Gathering Place

Our go at the International Glass competition (this year's challenge to reinvent the "community gathering space") had to go off in a well-organized fashion because of the time constraint. Well we took our sweet time on Detroit, we were left with less than a week to represent, finish, print and send the physical thing to Tokyo. But this limitation, I believe, rendered some solid results. Our main objectives had to be simplified, ordered and presented quickly, clearly and diagrammatically.

The project we saw was the re-thinking of how people gathering in contemporary times. There is no "central place" but many unique places; as well, people do not "GO" to a "Place," but more easily and with excitement "bump into" one another along a way. We thought these ideas were the basis of what a new gathering place should be. We did not want to build a place, but reconsider how people live, in order to put in place a framework which would 1) make the "going" more experiential, so as to encourage a more human-paced way of "going," 2) introduce to this "community" what community can be through the encouragement of easy "bump-into" interaction and 3) keep in place several gradients of individual or "owned" places without getting rid of the symbolic American "home."

Strategies:
We took an ex-urb / sub-urb on the edge of Milwaukee as example.
We designed for the better part of a century, showing stages of work that would be done to change the physical environment.
1) bringing in the wide- no-man's-like streets over a period of years
2)planting more and more trees that will add a canopy to the empty suburban pathways and encourage the branching out of people to their front yards
3) collecting half of each owner's backyard and creating a "fortress-like" block-owned area for a variety of activities, and lowering fences to half the human height
4)placing parches and gradients on front of home to encourage the use of "see-and-be-seen " space
5) infilling in-between and re-using garages as the larger corridors (like Capitol Drive) get turned into rail corridors in the future
6) envisioning both economic, agricultural and neighborhood-spurred recreation that line the inner suburban forest, creating no need to go to great lengths for such necessities as food, entertainment, park-systems, or casual community interaction amongst people.

There will be no need for a "center" of gathering, when every place encourages interaction along the normal path of living and moving. Gathering will make its own place amongst a framework designed for interaction.

life cycle ps1

BIG has done it, their entry into the ps1 design competition is 1 of 7295.














the entry, by invitation - [denmark?!] + [well-established?1], considers the full life cycle of the materials used. the soapy bubble forms will be fully down_cycled into 7,295 plastic bags. oh, the bubbles started as truck bed covers...



the entire installation is 99% air. 1% material... to relax in, play in, reflect in, and on - light, shade, texture. great stuff.



here's a nice link to archdaily's coverage of the last ten years of ps1

steven holl wins Glasgow school of art comission

Same old Steven.


article in BD

wpa 2.0 [working public architecture]

"Federal attention to America’s infrastructure is a critical part of our nation’s economic recovery plan, but we must also consider how that investment in the next generation of bridges, roads, and waterways will create more sustainable, more engaging, more livable cities. This symposium gathers some of the country’s most talented young designers –finalists in the WPA 2.0 competition, together with design talent recognized internationally, to address a new future with policy makers. Innovative ideas drive the work that will be presented; technical and practical sensibilities demonstrate that those ideas could be the basis for a Working Public Architecture."

check these great works of digital animation and film from the finalists at the wpa 2.0 finalists.

carbon tap:



hyper local networks:

WPA2 : Local Code / Real Estates from Nicholas de Monchaux on Vimeo.

rouse[d]

1st Place: Jason Pierce, Illinois
2nd Place: David Wolthers, Denmark
3rd Place: Scott Long, New York
Honorable Mention: 2A_eM design Cooperative, Wisconsin (Jessica Wilcox, Nicholas Reiter, Peter Nguyen)

[D]escription:

rouse[D] is a two part competition and exhibition. rouse[D] will focus on re-inventing the city of Detroit through the use of digital computation methodologies!

Experimental and innovative design ideas through exhibition.

This is an international open ideas competition challenging people to come up with designs that will rouse the city of Detroit and encourage an evolution of our understanding of its unique urban environment. We have studied, examined, photographed, and proposed our ideas many times over, but how can we begin to take action to improve the overall condition of what so many believe to be a modern day ruins? Every city has its history and Detroit is no different, but now it’s our turn to “bounce back” and maybe not in the traditional or conventional way, but in a new, unprecedented way that is specific to the one-of-a-kind condition Detroit presents to us. So the solution too, will be one-of-a-kind specific to our Detroit… let’s see what you’ve got…

here's what we got...