DSP - RESEARCH STATEMENT

Adaptive toolkit for urban growth. Tactile urbanism.

Our interest in Urban Design lies in meeting the urgent need for urban growth, understanding and finding ways to influence the variety of forces shaping the built environment. Our ultimate aim is to develop a toolkit for adaptation options of urban areas with different current urban conditions. Influencing the forces shaping the built environment is ideological and requires a vision of a better built environment constructed from concepts of equality, efficiency, productivity, beauty. We are not interested in proposing a general and idealized model of urban conditions, but finding a way to deal with them in design terms. Our focus will be to develop an evidence-based design approach that will reveal the authentic quality of the design itself to influence forces that shape the built environment. We will focus on tactile design that is appealing to senses as an approach to the incorporation of heterogeneity into patterns of growth.

Successful design arises from a thorough and caring understanding of place and context. We will develop a theoretic background on how the built environment came to be confronted with current urban conditions, and try to define three of them in the context of UK. Therefore, the toolkit will be developed in the context of three conditions: already established character such as a dense mixed use area, an area with completely undefined character that deals with sprawl such as a residential area, and a character that deals with collapse, relocation or isolation, such as an industrial site. We see our basis in putting the toolkit into the current urban context in order to demonstrate the potentials of this approach.

Then we will apply context to the tools we will be using for our tactile design method and define them by developing a theoretic background. We will use them to influence the growth of the built environment in each urban condition and evaluate the result. We will also examine case studies that successfully dealt with those urban conditions especially from the Netherlands experience, but also studies and approaches that we feel are opposed to our approach in design such as Parametrisism. We believe that no matter how attractive and skilful the design output of today is, it is growing irrelevant as it doesn’t address issues of urban reality. It is evident that despite the apparent diversity of styles, attitudes and aesthetics we see today, most urban design approaches fail to propose the solution for urban problems. Our design method develops to confront the growing irrelevance of current design solutions.

The output will be a flexible toolkit that can be applied to any site and can influence the forces that shape the built environment achieving “elegance” at the scale of human visual and physical perception and experience.

References:

Vesely, Dalibor.: Architecture in the age of divided representation : the question of creativity in the shadow of production / Dalibor Vesely,Cambridge, Mass. ; London : MIT Press, c2004
Hungry Box (2002-2004 : Netherlands Architecture Institute, etc.): Reading MVRDV, Rotterdam : NAi, c2003
Strategies in architectural thinking / edited by John Whiteman, Jeffrey Kipnis & Richard Burdett. Chicago, Ill : Chicago Institute for Architecture and Urbanism ; Cambridge, Mass : MIT Press , 1991.
Rykwert, Joseph, 1926-: The seduction of place : the history and future of the city / Joseph Rykwert. New York : Vintage Books, c2002..
Mutations : Rem Koolhaas, Harvard Project on the City, Stefano Boeri, Multiplicity, Sanford Kwinter, Nadia Tazi, Hans Ulrich Obrist.Barcelona : ACTAR ; Bordeaux, France : Arc en rêve centre d'architecture, [2000].
Urban design futures / edited by Malcolm Moor and Jon Rowland. London : Routledge, 2006.