The School of Architecture, Tsinghua Universit, Beijing, looked at turning New York City into a ‘Soft City’ with some great images of a water logged Manhattan with skyscrapers emerging from canals. The influence of a workshop in Venice, perhaps?
Archive for December, 2006
Learning from Cities 2: Beijing on New York
Monday, December 18th, 2006Learning from Cities 1: Unstable Sameness
Monday, December 18th, 2006An international student workshop took place at the bienanle, focusing on different cities. First report by Pippo Ciorra, Facoltà di Architettura di Ascoli Piceno, Università di Camerino:
We considered the participation to the “Learning form Cities” workshop as an important opportunity to study contemporary urban phenomena on a wider basis than our everyday experience of “sprawl”. Thus we choose New York as the perfect site for this task because it is the city of modern density, a place of relentless change that never changes, where everything is unstable within an immobile and everlasting frame. We went there, developed our readings and discussed them there with local critics, on a review at Columbia University. The students focused on four readings - Art and Real Estate, Urban Instability, Public Space, Architecture – and through those drew their own map of the city. Then they identified four “hot” sites - Manhattanville, Hudson Yards, Lower East Side, Redhook Brooklyn - and sketched their critical diagrams, as an overview on the social-architectural future of the city. The students’ project has a final icona – Streets of Light - a “realistic” proposal to build a temporary infrastructure of lights, a sort of a second grid connecting the sequence of “public floors” recently developed on top of a number of Manhattan skyscrapers.
Squeezed with the other 22 teams in the room at the Padiglione Italia we acknowledged a general aim to investigation ad research and a weakening aim to performative and self-referential architecture. The discussion was exciting, but what we possibly missed was the chance to present our work to experts and thinkers not involved in the seminar. The possibility to publish a catalogue can be a valid step further against the risk of wasting all this work and elaborations.
