micro-urbanism
stephanie white
Our material future appears in many of these pages as responsive urban networks that are mapped, extended, made significant, for surely most of them right now are near-invisible. Micro-urbanism: the micro- details of living in the city. If the twentieth century was dominated by macro-urbanism, large plans, sweeping zoning and transport systems, perhaps the twenty-first, seeing where all that got us, will concentrate on a smaller scale. Burnham’s ‘Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood’ may be changed, legitimately, to ‘make no large plans; they will surely go wrong, and in spectacularly destructive ways’. We’ve done with magic and men (singular, heroic, blood up); more to the point might be standing with feet on the ground, in a specific climate, in a particular place, in a crowd, trying to survive. The starting point. In this issue we have Murmur Wall by FORMWORKS, an LED skeleton into which one whispers wishes, hopes, desires, confessions which travel through an invisible infrastructure. 1 Maya Prybylski maps this infrastructure as the networks that define a spatial community. Dom Cheng’s sheltering umbrellas hook together like colonies of algae the size of a city. Joseph Heathcott writes about Mexico City’s street markets, another linked-unit structure, that spread like mycelia across a diversity of urban patterns. Joanne Lam’s Hong Kong streets, resonant with memory, now resonate to water cannon and tear gas. Off the streets, protesters can be kettled, in buildings, in tunnels, the streets persist as public concourses. Maria Portnov looks more closely at streets, and finds them shambling and often unloved, certainly underdesigned. These case studies look for both the facilitators of, and the obstructions to, community, communication and the communal subsets of the city. This is micro-thinking at its finest grain, rather than macro-zoning according to broad demographics, market facilitation or traffic access. It is something finer, more particular, more intimate. 1 Murmur Wall is an artificially intelligent, anticipatory architecture that reveals what the city is whispering, thinking and feeling. By proactively harvesting local online activity—via search engines and social media — Murmur Wall anticipates what will soon matter most to the city. www.murmurwall. net. 2 On www.metis-architecture.org one can find a number of projects that explore the cultural layers of a city, its topography, its geology and its material presence.
Micro-urbanism 1: Metis, a research unit founded by Mark Dorrian and Adrian Hawker at the University of Edinburgh in 1997, focusses on the city and the complexity of its representation. In a lecture given by Dorrian at the University of Bristol, he describes the methods of Metis, and explains at some length his working processes. One of the early projects on the Metis website is Micro-Urbanism , a 2001 competition for a corner of Parliament Hill in Ottawa. The Bristol lecture is gripping; I am waiting to hear about the Ottawa project, which comes last, and he literally brushes the slides away and doesn’t say a word about it. However, the Ottawa project is the ground plane of the enormous carpet laid for Metis’ On The Surface exhibition in Aarhus and Edinburgh, so must be foundational.
courtesy of Metis
Clearly too complex to describe in a website caption, the project description nonethless outlines this project’s intentions: ‘Seen from the air, Ottawa is a city marked by the co-existence of two urban/landscape phenomena: the abstract city grid that replicates equivalent spatial units, and the river whose edge produces a series of specific spatial conditions. The relationship between the three city blocks of the competition site and the highly figurative parliamentary buildings is grounded in this broader duality. Before the latter, the weave of the city grid spreads out like a textile. This project, a hybrid programmatic proposal that incorporates cultural and governmental facilities, concerns the development of the large urban site forming the southern edge of Parliament Hill. The architectural strategy is developed from the notion that the city (and, by extension, the land beyond) might in some way be gathered up or folded onto the site, with all the density and compression that the metaphor implies. Through the topology of the folds, a new urban continuum would be established, one that draws together and rearticulates the space of the parliament and the space of the city. In the project, the existing buildings on the site are edited in order to break down the cellular nature of the existing morphology and produce a notional texture of minor architectural elements, which are then re-inscribed within the new structure. The grain of the lot lines that extend beyond the site, striating the city fabric, is retained.’ 2 Calvino is used to structure meta-texts which narrate certain channels through the city. With the maps and photographs that come in the competition package, Metis uses a set of mathematic operations based on the happenstance of geography and topography, so the starting point of a project is rooted in the materiality of place, which is then extrapolated into a series of registration lines that spin and fold into three-dimensional networks, out of which Metis recognises potential envelopes that could become potential volumes that might be read as potential architecture. Thisa project sets out a methodology that one can discern in subsequent projects: the projection, rotation and folding of planes, lines and dots that eventually return to the in situ ground plane. Points of intersection become charged, the starting point for design in a volumetric universe. And, subsequentially it is driven by narration as an obligation and an ordering factor.
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on site review 36: our material future
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