_cyborg_architecture_

[materialization_of_information]
_preliminary

KnowledgeProductiveSystem from Jose Palacios on Vimeo.

_cyborg_architecture_

[precedents]_PompidouCenter_Rogers+Piano

For this project of the Knowledge City, the intention would be to generate a recombination of three different spheres those of technology, society and politics within the architectural context in a procedural weaving process.
In terms of technology, a spatial approach into merging structure with communication will be analyzed. (Micro-scale) compositions of organic tissues translated into an architectural language are of utmost importance in the research. In the same architectural context, a way of creating architecture capable of communicating the socio-political needs of a particular social context will be addressed. This could also be resolved by acquiring knowledge on digital prosthetics that enhance the architectural space in order bridge the interaction capabilities of a certain social context with its surrounding political sphere.

Graz Kunsthaus Precedent study

Precedence Study - CCTV

In 1949, the establish of the new government, released China from its history, and setup a “new order”. Historical buildings were demolished to give way to new industrial workshops and factories and four-hundred-year old city wall was knocked down to construct Beijing’s 2^nd-Ring Road etc. The development of the city is, to some extend, single sided and dominated by strong political power. The CCTV tower is a prefect metaphor for the Beijing’s development in the last 60 years. The mega-structure, the offensive form, and the loudness of the building has ideally represented the strength of a communist government that directs the development of Beijing, leads the growth of its economy and even controlled the broadcasting of media.

The client of this project, China Central Television or Chinese Central Television (中国中央电视台), commonly abbreviated as CCTV, is the major state television broadcaster in mainland China. CCTV has a network of 19 channels broadcasting different programmes and is accessible to more than one billion viewers, most of which, are in Mainland China. This station is one of the official mouthpieces of the Chinese government, and reports directly to high-level officials in the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) Central Propaganda Department. It is commonly believed that the CCTV is the biggest and most powerful media in this country, is both politically and financially enabled Koolhaas to finish this amazing media center. Without this unique historical and contextual background, this project will almost become a mission impossible.

Virtual/Real Storefront

In Robert Venturi’s Lesson from Las Vegas, the renewal of signage and symbol denotes the limitation of architectural abstraction. Largely negated by the Modernist movement, the bold and explicit architectural expression of Las Vegas embodies the spirit of individualism and consumerism. The complex programs and contexts of today require innovative combination of media beyond the purer architectural triad, ‘form’ and ‘light’ at the service of ‘space’. In the realm of contemporary consumerism, iconic structures such as the Chrysler Building and GM RenCen is not much different from Venturi’s “Ducks”, or decorated sheds.

And yet, the architecture around New York’s Times Square or Tokyo’s Shibuya is nothing remotely close to the expressiveness of “Ducks”.  The blandness and their deliberate attempt to dissolve behind the chaos of electronic billboards relegate architecture to mere square footage of horizontal and vertical rental spaces. The fluid evolution of signage and symbol is only projected to accelerate with the innovations in social networking and virtual communication in the past decade. The spread of personal electronic and mobile technology from Google map, Blackberry to Yelp all alters the way Americans consumers interact with their physical environments.

The nascent ascension of e-commerce is fundamentally changing the meaning of branding and commercial advertising. Behavioral targeting and contextual advertising in the virtual world have yet to solicit an architectural response to harness the economic potential of this new form of communication. Web portals such as Amazon and Craigslist were both vilified as a threat to the vitality of urban community, but they invariably provide us with new insights beyond the confine of our neighborhood and enhance the inter-connectivity among various parts of our cities. Most recently, companies like Groupon were set out not to shield us within the virtual bubble of mail ordering but to promote the rediscovery of new outlets within our community. The goal of my research is to speculate and experiment the physical (and architectural) response to this new retail and advertising landscape.

New Schedule

Schedule –S2011

1 Studio Presentation
Wed Jan 19 Studio Presentation
Fri Jan 21 Studio Introduction –Knowledge City + Precedents + Texts
Sat Jan22 Grasshopper Tutorial-1

2 Precedents + Readings
Mon Jan 24 Desk Crits - Materialization of Information
Wed Jan 26 Pin-up City Presentation Precedents + Texts strategies
Fri Jan 28 Materialization of Information + Scenarios for Knowledge Transfer & Production
Sat Jan29 Grasshopper Tutorial-2

3 Materialization of Information + Knowledge Production Systems
Mon Jan 31 Materialization of Information + Knowledge Production Systems
Wed Feb 2 Knowledge Production Systems
Fri Feb 4 Knowledge Production Systems
Sat Feb5 Grasshopper Tutorial-3

4 Materialization of Information + Knowledge Production Systems
Mon Feb 7 Evaluating the Systems
Wed Feb 9 Desk Crits
Fri Feb 11 Pin up

5 City Strategy
Mon Feb 14 Desk Crits – Shanghai - Beijing
Wed Feb 16 Desk Crits - Shanghai - Beijing
Fri Feb 18 Pin up City Strategies

6 Knowledge City center Project– urban strategy
Mon Feb 21 Desk Crits- Applying the System to the Fabric + Program
Wed Feb 23 Desk Crits
Fri Feb 25 Pin up Knowledge City Center Project - Urban strategy

7 Mid term review
Mon Feb 28 Desk Crits
Wed Mar 02 Mid term Review
Fri Mar 04 Post Mid term Desk Crits

8 Site travel
Mon Mar 07 Beijing
Wed Mar 09 Shanghai
Fri Mar 11 Shanghai

9 Spring Break – extended trip
Mon Mar 14 Spring Break – Honk Kong
Wed Mar 16 Spring Break – Singapore
Fri Mar 18 Spring Break – Tokyo

10 Project definition – urban scale
Mon Mar 21 Desk Crits
Wed Mar 23 Pin Up
Fri Mar 25 Desk Crits

11 Project definition – Building Scale
Mon Mar 28 Desk Crits
Wed Mar 30 Pin Up
Fri Apr 01 Desk Crits

12 Project definition – Building Scale II
Mon Apr 04 Desk Crits
Wed Apr 06 Desk Crits
Fri Apr 08 Desk Crits

13 Interior spaces
Mon Apr 11 Desk Crits
Wed Apr 13 Pin Up
Fri Apr 15 Desk Crits

14 Project development
Mon Apr 18 Desk Crits
Wed Apr 20 Desk Crits
Fri Apr 22 Desk Crits

15 Final review Week
Mon Apr 25
Wed Apr 27 Final review

Probably the best way to start this blog is with the studio syllabus. I know it is a bit formal, but at least it is the starting point of the research.

Knowledge City Shanghai - Beijing

Professor: Frederic Levrat

Teaching Assistant: Mazdak Jafarian

Collaborative Studio Tony Sun, Tonji University Shanghai

Takashi Yamaguchi, Osaka Sangyo University

Theory - Knowledge City

It is projected for the beginning of the XXI century that over 50% of the world population will be living in urban centers. But what is the actual purpose of a high density City at the beginning of the XXI Century? With the advent of new technologies the storage, transmission and management of information has become quasi spaceless. So, with a brutal contraction of time and space, not to say a complete disappearance of the notion of distance for data transmission in the Information Age we have arrived again to the notion of Delocalization. So why are we paying so much rent to live in the center of cities like Paris, New York, Tokyo, Mumbai or Kyoto?

What is the city of the XXI century offering to us that we believe is so valuable?

And in that regard, what is the model of the new city of the XXI century?

My fascination for this semester subject comes from two consolidating poles:

1. What is the relationship between the stored Knowledge of the Virtual and the constructed Physical environment?

2. How do we strategize the development of fast growing cities?

If the future of the city is the “Knowledge city” what form and shape does such a city takes? Is it a human oriented Network, or an information oriented network? It brings us back to the initial question, regarding the relationship between the Virtual and the Physical in architecture. If the main “raison d’être” for a city is its production of immaterial information, how does the physical constitution of the city encourage and enhance this non physical production? There is a paradoxical relationship between the build environment and its attempted finality. On the other hand we all accept this condition, as our current experience of the city is a condition of "interface” where the build environment allows us to understand better abstract “information”. Personal experiences and shared experiences in the city becomes a decoder of the artificially produced information and Architecture finds a new role as an Interface between the Virtual/ Immaterial and the human body.

This is where we need the city; as a physical interface contextualizing Virtual information into a Physical space, negotiating between dimensions, and in return producing information and knowledge. The future of the city in the information age is not the dissolution of the physical space into the ether of digital bits, but rather an essential tool to understand and interface information: It is what I call the “knowledge city”. The City should be considered as an interface between stored knowledge and active users, as well as between active users themselves, and between active users and the surrounding space. It is the place for the possibility to exchange knowledge, to learn from each others. It is the place for chance encounter, the un-programmed, the unexpected.

So how do we design it? Can we enhance a city to improve its knowledge capital? Is Paris, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Doha, Mumbai, Shanghai, Beijing, New York or Tokyo better suited to become the next leading “Knowledge city”?

Project Site: Shanghai - Beijing

These two major urban centers of China have been investing heavily into becoming the not only some large modern cities, but potentially the future leading city in the world.

We will have a specific site in each city and the studio will compare the different strategies each city has developed and intervene on the different sites. In the hypothesis the studio has 12 students, we will have 6 students per city, proposing a new “Knowledge City Center” for Shanghai and Beijing.

Shanghai is the industrial and financial power house of China. With a population approaching 20 million habitants it is the research and production center of the fastest growing economy in the world. It has some huge university campus near the center of the city as well as some new research and development campus on its periphery.

Beijing is the capital of the most populous country in the world. It is an essential center of power and culture, as well as economic and research center. Beijing has tried to position itself as the leading urban center in the XXI century by investing in highly recognizable building such as Rem Koolhaas CCTV or Herzog&DeMeuron Olympic Stadium.

The projects will address a multiplicity of scales, from the Urban Network strategy to the specific “interface scale”. In this regard, does culture exist only in designated areas or is it a network culture? Can major influx of money create knowledge and culture?

Ultimately, the studio is a research in contemporary culture and the future of the urban city center. In this regard, does culture exist only in designated areas? Does the residential and commercial city/neighborhoods to be excluded from the ambition to generate a cultural “product”? Isn’t culture and creativity rather a resistance process, encouraged more by reaction toward a better world?

Program - Knowledge City Center - Architecture as an interface.

The program for the “knowledge city center” is an interface, between stored knowledge – such as written information, digital information – and the human body. It is a mix between an interactive library, a public space and a museum. Some sort of a cultural Times Square grafted on the Seattle Library and the Pompidou center; basically, an urban condenser.

The first part of the semester will be oriented toward the different types of urban interfaces, from public libraries to campuses and public squares. The question of the different forms of densities – digital, multimodal, pedestrian and vehicular – will raise the notion of the current formula for a culture of congestion, so well developed and embraced by OMA.

The second part of the semester will involve designing the specific building or Network – médiatheque, cultural center, café, city square - as well as its relation with the outside space surrounding it. A special emphasis on the membrane of the envelop, separating/connecting the inside and the outside of different environment and its potential “hypersurface” quality, as a vehicle to transmit and potentially generate information/ knowledge.

The project could be a building or a complex network of elements spread out through the city.

Collaboration

The studio will be working in collaboration with a number of actors in Beijing and Shanghai. The Graduate program of the University of Tonji in Shanghai will conduct a parallel studio and provide us with some information, constituting a rich dialogue between academic research and the fast evolving reality on the ground.

In addition, the last Knowledge City Studios generated an important Symposium in Osaka, Japan, with the participation of Mark Wigley, Beatriz Colomina, Preston Scott Cohen, Fumihiko Maki, Xu Weigo, Takashi Yamaguchi and I. We will be able to analyze their point of view and their lectures.

Trip

The studio will be traveling to Shanghai and Beijing, visiting both cities and their respective type of Knowledge City development.

The trip will occur on the first week before Spring break and can be continued in the region during the Spring Break.

Technical Support

The first part of the semester will be oriented toward building an “information based” architecture. We will be using Grasshopper to generate formal strategies to interpret information. The TA will be assisting you to understand better the software capabilities, during the week as well as offering additional technical classes on Saturday, for the first three weeks.

Test

Welcome to Knowledge City 2011.