Built in a Week: Guadalajara - Part I

After realizing the competition entry date was earlier than expected, compounded with the knowledge that the 4' long board has to be completed, printed, and in Guadalajara in 10 days, I've been a little busy cranking on images. So I'll post some here, with an update to follow once all is sent out.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Invisible City

What happens when a city returns to nature? Where do the people go? What if the 1.5 million inhabitants of Guadalajara decided today that they wanted to go elsewhere? Maybe they go home, pack up their books, wrap their glassware in newspaper, place everything in boxes and ship it all off to some other place. Then, they begin unscrewing lightbulbs, taking doors off their hinges, removing windows from their sashes. They tear down the brick walls and stack the materials in crates. Then they pull up their driveways, waiting momentarily while a truck rolls  the street up like a giant rug. Someone plucks the streetlights from their bases, and another collects manholes (and not just the covers). Entire buildings are dismantled, parking lots removed, soil replaced, and all signs of civilization are secreted away. Maybe overnight.

And then the sun rises and nature has made her comeback. The grasses spring up for the first time in decades underneath a foundation that no longer exists. Rabbits make homes in abandoned storm sewers. The people, meanwhile, have all gone to holiday in Puerto Vallarta, bringing their lamps and their grocery stores and gas stations with them. They bring the office, because we may be here a while.

Then, while they are gone, what once was Guadalajara begins to be remade. Smaller, fresher, more compact. Instead of sprawling suburbs, mid-rise buildings sprawl to the heavens. Tall towers mark the locations of highly dense neighborhoods and business districts. Everything seems to cling fast to a serpentine pathway- a spline of cars, trains, and pedestrians. The inhabitants of New Puerto Vallarta begin the exodus back to their ancestral homes, only now the scene is much different; the city is very narrow, and everything is walkable from one of these new transit hubs. Buildings are organized much the same way, as elevators and escalators and stairs take people first to sky gardens, then to their destination. Over time the new city of Guadalajara will fill in with all its previous inhabitants, and will add another 300,000 in babies and curious onlookers. But the city they return to now offers stunning views of natural forests and riparian streams infilled with serene agriculture (enough to feed the entire city).

Possible Cities

ArpaFIL is hosting a design competition to re-imagine the city in a more harmonius balance with the environment and with its inhabitants. The competition essentially wipes the city of Guadalajara, Mexico off the face of the earth and the challenge is to create a city from scratch given only the natural topography of the land. The competition is quite daunting, if not for its size alone. But it also serves as the perfect venue for exploring many of the concepts and theories about urban development, architecture, infrastructure, and the spaces between that I have been developing for years. The project is becoming a proving ground for a new type of urbanism. I hope that the competition will also serve as the centerpiece of a few blog entries.

In essence, the project can be seen as a study of hierarchy in scale; The project is organized around a central transit spine which includes international high-speed rail, regional rail, and local train service, highways and local lanes, even pedestrian routes. Development forms along the spine, increasing in size and density as transit nodes grow nearer. Layered upon this built form is one controlled by the natural topography: Low/zero density forests and wildlife refuges, interconnected riparian zones along streams and lakes, and low mountains framing and containing the natural limits of the city. In the geographic center of the city, where most cities are at their densest, agrarian farmland and Solar Stirling power generation.

The most unfortunate aspect of the competition is that all information must be submitted on one 30" x 40" presentation board. With a few years of concepts finally being overlayed and analyzed, there's sure to be more information than can be submitted. Rejoice, for that is what will be covered here!

The Edifice Complex

Much of my research has focused on the threshold between the individual building and its larger built environment. When I was studying in Paris, I spent a lot of time studying contemporary architecture in a city which gets most of its character from ideas and standards that were implemented 130 years ago. I would study buildings by Christian de Portzamparc, or Massimiliano Fuksas, or Jean Nouvel. My bias in interpreting the works was that everything was in some way responding to its context, either by holding the street edge, or following window lines or cornice heights. Everything was, in my mind, sort of shoe-horned into place in the city. I'm beginning to wonder now if that is necessarily true, or if it was by own desire to see that happening. My senses tell me that some are responding more than others. A fair assessment.

Lucia Phinney told me that what I was really studying in Paris were "screens", these veiled elements that were really about separating disparate conditions, be they public versus private, or deeper; in my assessment of the city itself, there was a dichotomy between the public and more touristy areas which were rather pristine, and working-class neighborhoods in the 9th and 10th arrondissements that epitomized the real Paris: a large city with its problems of homelessness, crime, vandalism, etc. According to Phinney, much of my research was an attempt to identify that threshold. Now that I'm back in the States, back in Chicago, I am again finding myself interested in identifying these screens and thresholds.

When it comes to defining thresholds, I have a better idea of what they are not than what they are. I know that I am not just interested in the facades of buildings. The facade is an important aspect of defining the threshold in that it informs and is informed by its context and regulates the privacy gradient. But I have found that by exploring the alleys one can find a truer assessment of what is happening in a building. It's as if the experiential limits of the building are held tight against the facade of the building, but in an alley the limits are extended, perhaps halfway down the block. When you get tot the scale of the city, tings begin to change. Up close is when you feel the weight of the city bearing down on you. Cognitive maps provide barriers with small openings instead of fluid space. However one can be 20 miles out of town and still feel they are connected- this weekend I was traveling through Indiana and could still see the skyline in the distance.

Thresholds are very nebulous. Depending on the scale of the artifact and the level of engagement it can hold tight against a building or be miles away. A screen can be paper-thin or a thick space of transition, and can change with the changing elements of a building, even changing with the diurnal and seasonal periods. I hope I can continue to explore these phenomena in the streets and neighborhoods of Chicago.