IaaC Blog

Find the complete presentation here final-ppt_uday.pdf

Can hybrid ecological models of habitats be formulated within urban environments?

First attempt models

After my first analysis I go to four different bus stops in Barcelona and from there i make some diagrams of the existing situations. Also i am starting to deal with simple geometries to solve the issues adressed from my analysis.

Here is my first explorations about the bus stops some examples and  some diagrams showing the functions conected to the bus stops and the changes as the centrality increases.

Gara de Nord is the gateway to the city of Bucharest for a lot of European tourists. It currently represents the old idea of Communism imposed by Ceacescu with its solid, monumental facade closed completely to the outside….With Communism over, how to give the lost identity back to Rumanians? What is their identity?

The proposal is based on revitalizing station and park to create an explanade/landscape space where visitors and locals create the essence of place in the city…a space where dreams and aspirations of the community get registered in time.  The railway station will be restored with a permeable/glass facade that breaks with old communism and gives the idea of openess to the outside. New access points for a new metro station underground linking Gara de Nord with Basarab will be strategically located in the park. Vehicle circulation will be moved underground to create a pedestrian plaza/explanade on grade level……

There will be three or four architectural devices that deal with the different boundary conditions in the explanade….The program will have openspace auditoriums for artists, dance, music where they can meet/mingle and exchange ideas….The park expands and grows outwards “populating” the station and filtering it

My intension for the Thesis Project was to combine the knowledge I have gained on the definition and realization of a parametric design project with a broader initial research on the urban fabric and social aspects of it which would serve as the source of my parameters. I tried, as you can see in my first Thesis Proposal below, to think on a network of small scale spaces that would reactivate the link of the citizens to the public space. One of the problems of this -too vast still- proposal was that since the public space of Barcelona where I intended to work on is beyond doubt very well used, the function proposal I would make should be a very strongly justified one. I had therefore to think more on the specifics of my proposal, keeping the general scale and design direction framework.

Live®city Habitat
Facing the disconnection of users with the public space in the context of an ever-growing time based urbanity, it would be interesting to reconsider the appropriation of public space by the citizens. One way to do that could be through the creation of a system of urban prototypes that discuss upon the whole range of uses between the borders of public and private. A means of infrastructure interfering with the urban fabric that starts from particular points and spreads out following its own growth rules but always mutated by the city and infecting the city itself.
As an initial intention of location the design could focus on transition parts of the urban fabric or even observe simultaneously the reaction caused by the placement of those “prototypes” in totally different points of the city. Are they working or not? How do people use the interior and the space around them? Is there any significant change in the fabric around them caused because of their existence?
In terms of methodology, a first step should be a research on performances and their associations, in order to develop the vocabulary of qualities that will then evolve into spatial parameters. Some examples of such associations and parameters could be: Open-air/ Sheltered, Enclosed/Communicative, Permeable/ Solid, Big/ small, Horizontal/ Vertical, Border/ Union, Space/ Element.
In this research parametric associative design can be the appropriate tool to translate social, spatial, location and time contexts into form and structure. This would certainly give the opportunity to deal in a more precise and efficient way with the complexity of notions forming today’s urban cityscape. As far as the scale of the design project proposed is concerned, since the design tools that will be used give the opportunity to move from an urban scale to fabrication methodology and detail, one focus scale will be decided according to the direction of research that will be taken up.