Freeway Stories: Speed Reinventions in the Forbidden City - Studio outtline

THE ISSUES The freeway is generally conceived of and used as a solution for an engineering problem:  moving objects from point A to point B. The freeway exists inside the cities but its territory is part of another sphere that does not belong to the cities or their citizens. It does not interact with the public sphere or the urban sphere. The freeway is the Forbidden City. Its territory is erased from cities’ maps. Its signs do not allow humans to enter its domain.

At the same time, as a contradiction, we require more and more of freeways. We as a race of humans spend more and more time in its domain. The freeway has transformed our perception of distance, our perception of proximity; it has allowed cities’ territories to expand exponentially in the last century. While this expansion is taking place, the separation between city and freeway is also becoming more accentuated.

This separation has given special freedom to the realm of the cars to develop their own set of rules.  This autistic behavior that now creates this new context in the one-velocity- and not-now-place is the ruling directive. A space, a place where what is not moving is dangerous. The freeways have facilitated the hyperextension of the boundary of the city and the connections to other cities throughout the country. While this has enabled an unprecedented ease of mobility through and between cities, these same freeways have alienated the interactions and relationships between the cities’ inhabitants.

THE STUDIO explores the aesthetic of the movement of vectors in the space of the freeway and seeks ways to interweave this aesthetic with the intrinsic humanity of the city. Specifically, this project relates the space of the freeway with the activity of the human inhabitants of the city. We will explore the social and spatial conditions of architecture that moves and the objects and ideas that move through architecture. Specifically we will explore ways that mobility dehumanizes architecture and the city. We will challenge this and find new ways that architecture and mobility can interact in a humane way. We will focus on the dichotomy between the need for transportation inside the cities and what transportation systems do to the cities and their inhabitants. The objective of this course is to give a new perspective on the cultural impact of infrastructural projects that moves beyond reducing freeways to engineering solutions to traffic problems to also consider the freeway’s dangerous ability as a tool of social control.

THE FINAL PROJECT will study the future City of Raleigh Freeway Project (I-540) as designed on paper and dissect its physical, political and cultural dimensions and potential consequences. From here, we will propose a new hybrid of roadway that is not only about physical movement but also about integration in a way that does not obliterate but instead engages with the complexities of community lives. We will move through four lines of research simultaneously during the semester.

Our territory: the RDU freeway project to study the implications of the existing territory & explore possibilities of the new topography that will be generated after the freeway is concluded.

Actors: the complexities of public and private, small and big scale, from examples of similar projects in history, including: Haussmann in Paris, the linear city of Arturo Soria y Mata, Pope Sixtus in Rome, La Ronda de Dalt in Barcelona and The lille of Koolhaas.

The car: Fluxus and the poetic of movement

The urban project: the architectural project as a negotiator of scales, programs, speeds, public and private, city and region.

 

Each student will do an exercise that explores each one of these four lines of research, culminating in the Final Project.

 

SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE     

COLLEGE OF DESIGN     

NC STATE UNIVERSITY     

ARC 402    SPRING 2008

Jota Samper

Students work

Reconquering the public space

What kind of cities are we building? Vehicles riding on ever wider streets adding pollutants to our everyday environment making neighborhoods unsafe and turning across-the-street neighbors into strangers… Facilities that used to be provided only in the public realm but now are routinely afforded privately… Every place is the center of its own universe, with no shared focus. Independent from the world around us and disassociation from community offers us short-term freedoms, but adverse long-term consequences –not just for human beings but also for cities… Alex Laburn

http://youtube.com/watch?v=NO0xb1Pqakk

new dialog

What do our cities lack today? What kind of human interaction do we experience each day? What kind of dialog do we have with each other; with our built environment? Can we manipulate the infrastructure of our cities in order to create a new dialog between ourselves and our built environment in order to improve our quality of life?  

Emily Axtman

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86HWr0lMviU

Mobile Architecture

The project is about mobile architecture that creates mobile communities. The architecture interacts with our forbidden highways by using the highways to travel from one location to another. Our society is mobile, so why shouldn’t we have architecture that responds to our conditions. People change jobs finding themselves commuting up to two hours or having an employer relocate the to a new location. The concept of mobile architecture would allow us to move our residence close to our work locations or create mobile work locations altogether. Locations would be set up providing services to allow these mobile units to come together to form communities. The mobile units are designed to collapse to a size that can travel on our highways and provide better aerodynamics. When the unit is at a fixed location, it expands into a more dynamic and formal space. The mobile units can be configured as single or multiple units that come together to form a single form. The mobile units are equipped with an array of solar panels providing energy for the unit and charging the electric vehicles which would be more feasible with the shorter commutes. The electric vehicles themselves are a smaller piece of mobile architecture that plugs into a work place and provides office space.
The benefits of this concept are placing our built environment were and when it is needed, not creating a built environment only to abandon it for another location. Reducing commuter time, traffic congestion, and energy consumption and making it feasible to use renewable energy sources. Creating an as needed environment that can shrink and expand with a ever changing society. This concept embraces a gradual shift in technology utilizing existing infrastructures while placing resources, services, and people where they are needed. James Handy

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPZnkwFuIk0

The Organism

This project is an intense intervention into the boundaries that the
freeway has traditionally created and how the freeway of the future can
overcome this boundary condition through the use of new Materials and the
Spatial Patterns that these materials make possible. Through the use of a
new form of living material that can be programmed to replicate and
perform to the architect’s desire, we can see an integration of
architecture, biology, and the higher agricultural sciences within the
realm of the freeway. The role of the architect can morph into a hybrid
of architectural design, biologist, horticulturalist, and collaborator
with many other scientific communities. In this future, architecture and
agriculture will collide to form an:
Agri-tectural Archi-culture

Jason Dail

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptDNwy_b25Y

Time Shared Freeway

Maria Hill

What if we could take the freeway and make it a destination instead of a passage? The area that a highway takes up is massive and has enormous impacts on the surrounding community; it acts as a divider between neighbors, communities and cultural groups. But what if it could be a shared space instead? The freeway becomes a park, a playground, a concert venue at different times of day, depending on the needs of the community and the space is shared between all demographics. A sense of ownership is created. The freeway becomes something specific and familiar - a truly beautiful environment.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KT5jtw6NBk

 

between the highway

The highway as we know it today is a large area of unusable land that
while connecting areas on a large scale, it actually acts as a barrier on
a more local scale. This current setup not only wastes valuable land,
but also divides communities and creates a dependence on vehicles,
lessening the role of the pedestrian. Using this information and looking
at current trends in community planning, where the size of the house is
approaching the size of the lot in which it is placed, I have created a
system that works with this trend, while solving some of the problems
posed by our current highway system. Through taking variables and
creating rules for how they interact, I have devised as system that
encourages interaction between the highway, the pedestrian, and the
architecture itself. By introducing a ribbon-like green space that
weaves in and out of the highway and using the topography of the site,
the grid of the area surrounding city is formed. This grid becomes
disrupted by the green space that acts as a pedestrian highway that
allows the pedestrain to connect to different to various public spaces.
On the other hand, the highway not longer divides anything. The grid of
the city is allowed to overtake the highway, allowing access across it,
and also providing space for architecture to interact with it. Rob Franklin

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkOZmmyEL_Q

city within

The concept for this project is to contain all the movement and functions of an entire city within one vertical form and to integrate the freeway into the architecture. I am creating this new urban environment where the volumes are made of different materials that create a collaged texture for the city. Instead of hallways and corridors connecting these volumes, there will be streets, parks and plazas, for vehicular and pedestrian movement throughout the city. As the population and need grows, the city can be built up in sections. The building will be at the intersection of I-540 and US-1. Here the freeways and railroad will be able to service the new city and provide a connection for the surrounding territories outside the 440 and 540 rings to the old city of Raleigh. The connection ramps at this intersection will enter the building and connect travelers to various spaces and volumes, and anchor the building to the site. Stephanie Greene

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8Kj6XN78fQ