The emphasis is on the extensive reworking of the surface of the earth as a smooth, continuous matrix that effectively binds the increasingly disparate elements of our environment together.
Wall, Alex. Programming the Urban Surface, p246.The Cartesian skyscraper was thus redesigned to respond to its own mechanical naturalism–its structural parti was now a tripod, or “crow’s foot”–allowing the building to be exposed to the sun on all sides.
Ábalos, Iñaki and Herreros, Juan. Tower and Office: From Modernist Theory to Contemporary Practice, p22.The home is the wellspring of personhood. It is where our identity takes root and blossoms, where as children, we imagine, play, and question, and as adolescents, we retreat and try. As we grow older, we hope to settle into a place to raise a family or pursue work. When we try to understand ourselves, we often begin by considering the kind of home in which we were raised.
Desmond, Matthew. Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, p293.The home is the center of life. It is a refuge from the grind of work, the pressure of school, and the menace of the streets. We say that at home, we can “be ourselves.” Everywhere else, we are someone else. At home, we remove our masks.
Desmond, Matthew. Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, p293.It is only after we begin to see a street as our street, a public park as our park, a school as our school, that we can become engaged citizens
Desmond, Matthew. Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, p294.What else is a nation but a patchwork of cities and towns; cities and towns a patchwork of neighborhoods; and neighborhoods a patchwork of homes?
Desmond, Matthew. Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, p294.America is supposed to be a place where you can better yourself, your family, and your community. But this is only possible if you have a stable home.
Desmond, Matthew. Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, p294.When people have a place to live, they become better parents, workers, and citizens.
Desmond, Matthew. Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, p295.Residential stability begets a kind of psychological stability, which allows people to invest in their home and social relationships. It begets school stability, which increases the chances that children will excel and graduate. And it begets community stability, which encourages neighbors to form strong bonds and take care of their block…Instability is not inherent to poverty. Poor families move so much because they are forced to.
Desmond, Matthew. Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, p296.Regional biodiversity is affected not only by patch size and connectivity, but also by patch shape.
Hill, Kristina. Urban Ecologies: Biodiversity and Urban Design, p94.…spatial patterns offer the most direct opportunity for urban designers and landscape architects to alter ecological relationships.
Hill, Kristina. Urban Ecologies: Biodiversity and Urban Design, p94.…certain ecological issues are beginning to occupy a more central position in urban design.
Hill, Kristina. Urban Ecologies: Biodiversity and Urban Design, p95.I believe that explicitly creating an infrastructure that supports regional biodiversity on a site-by-site basis while recognizing cumulative effects would be a new goal for urban design.
Hill, Kristina. Urban Ecologies: Biodiversity and Urban Design, p98.First, “good” ecological design must enable a biological function important to the ecological health of its regional and local setting. “Better” ecological design would address the functions that are strategically critical to this health in a given bioregion—such as improving water quality, conserving plant or animal species at risk of local or global extinction, increasing soil fertility, or improving air quality. “Best” ecological design would be able to show these benefits in measurable ways and would stay in touch with the latest thinking in the sciences and engineering (and social and environmental ethics) to make sure it makes sense to keep pursuing those benefits. Second, “good” ecological design has to be more cost-effective than our existing methods of addressing (or ignoring) urban ecological health.
Hill, Kristina. Green Good, Better, and Best: Effective Ecological Design in Cities, p37.Replicability ties ecological design to the concept of infrastructure as used by planners, economists, engineers, and even the new theorists of landscape urbanism.
Hill, Kristina. Green Good, Better, and Best: Effective Ecological Design in Cities, p38.Third, “good” ecological design has to be elegantly parsimonious…the same physical forms (structures, plantings and topography) must fulfill both ecological and social needs. Forms have to be associated with cultural meaning that is engaged and valued.
Hill, Kristina. Green Good, Better, and Best: Effective Ecological Design in Cities, p38.Eduard Bru and Adriaan Geuze are two designers who are especially interested in making things and places that are indeterminate in their functions and thereby allow their users to invent and claim space for themselves.
Wall, Alex. Programming the Urban Surface, p245.The voids exercise a greater effect on the subsequent built environment than does the design of particular building layouts.
Wall, Alex. Programming the Urban Surface, p238.Unlike the treelike, hierarchical structures of traditional cities, the contemporary metropolis functions more like a spreading rhizome, dispersed and diffuse, but at the same time infinitely enabling.
Wall, Alex. Programming the Urban Surface, p234.…ambiguous areas…peripheral sites, middle landscapes that are neither here nor there, and yet are so pervasive as to now characterize the dominant environment in which most people live.
Wall, Alex. Programming the Urban Surface, p234.…if the goal of designing the urban surface is to increase its capacity to support and diversify activities in time—even activities that cannot be determined in advance—then a primary design strategy is to extend its continuity while diversifying its range of services.
Wall, Alex. Programming the Urban Surface, p233.…the urban surface…its smooth and uninterrupted continuity…
Wall, Alex. Programming the Urban Surface, p233.…landscape…I refer to the extensive and inclusive ground-plane of the city, the “field” that accommodates buildings, roads, utilities, open spaces, neighborhoods, and natural habitats.
Wall, Alex. Programming the Urban Surface, p233.Here, the term landscape no longer refers to prospects of pastoral innocence but rather invokes the functioning matrix of connective tissues that organize not only objects and spaces but also the dynamic processes and events that move through them. This is a landscape as active surface, structuring the conditions for new relationships and interactions among the things it supports.
Wall, Alex. Programming the Urban Surface, p233.Early modern methodologies of collage and montage acquired force through the collision of distinct orders and the generation of tension across seams of difference. Difference was encoded in forceful juxtaposition.
Allen, Stan. Contextual Tactics, p12.Surrealism erodes modernism from within, registering an emergent awareness that the whole hygienic-panoptic project of modernism–its desire to remake the world on the basis for new technologies–contains within it the potential to go disastrously wrong.
Allen, Stan. Contextual Tactics, p13.Through the very means of representation itself, Mies makes explicit the seams, gaps, and distractions of modern metropolitan life…disjunction exists not internal to the architecture itself, but between the architecture and its context. Mies has established complex and discontinuous relationships between a series of objects that are themselves fundamentally regular–even geometrically pure–and a city fabric characterized by impure mixtures of old and new.
Allen, Stan. Contextual Tactics, p13.They [maps] are also troubling. Their apparent stability and their aesthetics of closure and finality dissolve with but a little reflection into recognition of their partiality and provisionality, their embodiment of intention, their imaginative and creative capacities, their mythical qualities, their appeal to reverie, their ability to record and stimulate anxiety, their silences and their powers of deception. At the same time their spaces of representation can appear liberating, their dimensionality freeing the reader from both the controlling linearity of narrative description and the confining perspective of photographic or painted images.
Cosgrove, Denis. Introduction: Mapping Meaning, p2.Christian Jacob describes the changing paradigm of cartographic criticism as a shift from the ‘transparent’ view of the map as a neutral, informative transfer of external information into the simplified classificatory frame of the map space, conducted with the intention of achieving ‘an ideal correspondence of the world and its image’, to an ‘opaque’ view of the map which takes account of the selections, omissions, additions and inescapable contextual influences which shape the outcome of such transfers. Mapping is a process which involves both a ‘complex architecture of signs’ (graphic elements with internal forms and logics capable of theoretical disconnection from any geographical reference) and ‘visual architecture’ through which the worlds they construct are selected, translated, organized, and shaped.
Cosgrove, Denis. Introduction: Mapping Meaning, p3.A widely acknowledged ‘spatial turn’ across arts and sciences corresponds to post-structuralist agnosticism about both naturalistic and universal explanation and about single voiced historical narratives, and to the concomitant recognition that position and context are centrally and inescapably implicated in all constructions of knowledge. ‘Cognitive mapping’ means much more today than was conceived by its 1960s investigators, who took for granted the existence of an objectively mappable and mapped space against which the ‘mental maps’ could be compared.
Cosgrove, Denis. Introduction: Mapping Meaning, p7.In the opinion of many observers, it is the spatialities of connectivity, networked linkage, marginality and liminality, and the transgression of linear boundaries and hermetic categories–spatial ‘flow’–which mark experience in the late twentieth-century world. Such spatialities render obsolete conventional geographic and topographic mapping practices while stimulating new forms of cartographic representation, not only to express the liberating qualities of new spatial structures but also the altered divisions and hierarchies they generate. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s reference to rhizome as a metaphor for half-submerged, non-hierarchical, open and unplanned spatial connection is a signal example.
Cosgrove, Denis. Introduction: Mapping Meaning, p4.a priori features of mapping are scale, framing, selection, and coding.
Cosgrove, Denis. Introduction: Mapping Meaning, p9.Enlarging or reducing the space generated and occupied by phenomena alters their form, their significance, their relations of meaning with other phenomena. Scale selection and manipulation is thus a powerfully imaginative and generative act which at once records and sets in train chains of meaning and association in an active process of knowing.
Cosgrove, Denis. Introduction: Mapping Meaning, p9.Framing is a territorializing, even imperializing, process, the map inescapably a classificatory device.
Cosgrove, Denis. Introduction: Mapping Meaning, p10.Failure to frame a land mass, or a mapped territory fully to occupy the map’s bounding lines, as in seventeenth-century maps of Van Dieman’s Land, speak of failures of vision and knowledge, of the uncertainty implied by the peripeteia–the meandering, linear progress whose trace may disappear into the trackless space.
Cosgrove, Denis. Introduction: Mapping Meaning, p10.‘Blank’ spaces within the frame also generate and reflect aesthetic and epistemological anxiety; they are thus the favoured space of cartouches, scales, keys and other technical, textual or decorative devices which thereby become active elements within the mapping process.
Cosgrove, Denis. Introduction: Mapping Meaning, p10.Scale and framing of course come together in projection, the necessity within geographic and topographic mapping to translate the globe’s three-dimensional, curving surface onto a two-dimensional plane through the agency of graticule. The abstract lines of graticule and grid, whether left visible on the map or erased in its final appearance, act both to secure a consistent semiotic connection between sign and signified (map and territory), and to contain, distribute and coordinate the internal signs and spaces of representation.
Cosgrove, Denis. Introduction: Mapping Meaning, p10.Selection in mapping generated its own anxieties, many of them circulating around questions of status of the knowledge presented on the map.
Cosgrove, Denis. Introduction: Mapping Meaning, p11.Mapping experienced, as opposed to imagined, space requires a semiotics which connects represented space to an idea of the real.
Cosgrove, Denis. Introduction: Mapping Meaning, p12.The possibilities for coding survey information through various sings and symbols placed within the representational spaces of the map, are theoretically unlimited, constrained only by the imagination of the map-maker and the practicalities of legibility and comprehension.
Cosgrove, Denis. Introduction: Mapping Meaning, p12.Another form of mapping is the creative probing, the tactical reworking, the imaginative projection of a surface. Here, the mapping becomes the two-dimensional ‘staging’ of actuality or desire, and it has a long genealogy, ‘Perspective’ has a temporal as well as spatial meaning–looking forward, the sense of prospect. Thus the map excites imagination and graphs desire, its projection is the foundation for and stimulus to projects.
Cosgrove, Denis. Introduction: Mapping Meaning, p15.Ptolemy’s distinction between geographical mapping–fundamentally a mathematical exercise which privileged theoretical knowledge over sensory experience–and choreographic mapping which places emphasis on the recognizable qualities of visual image, including colours, symbols and codes.
Cosgrove, Denis. Introduction: Mapping Meaning, p20.…creative, even playful, process of discovering and engendering though mapping new connections and relationships among disparate elements. Where network enthusiasts and regional surveyors mapped to disclose and impose order, Corner maps to create fields for projects…’drift’, where mapping acknowledges open-ended even goal-less, movement across space; ‘layering’, which superimposes spatial elements and experiences, less exposing than intervening imaginatively in their interconnections; ‘gameboard’, which recognizes and enables the actions of contesting agents across a design space; and ‘rhizome’, realizing graphically the metaphor of non-centric, organic spatiality.
Cosgrove, Denis. Introduction: Mapping Meaning, p22.“Home improvement” for the urban poor, like “home improvement” for the middle class itself, was considered the direct route to virtue; bad home environments were the inevitable road to despair.
Wright, Gwendolyn. Building the Dream: A Social History of Housing in America, p117.A staunch refusal to accept the necessity of urban life for most workers led reformers to believe that the suburbs and countryside offered solutions.
Wright, Gwendolyn. Building the Dream: A Social History of Housing in America, p118.The breakdown of social organization and family ties was considered an inevitable result of crowding. The stable, elaborate social networks of ethnic ghettos escaped most of these observers, many of whom still blamed the poor for their misery.
Wright, Gwendolyn. Building the Dream: A Social History of Housing in America, p121.This ritual procession began to crystallize with the appearance of large openings corresponding to the overall scale of the building, which focused and dominated its composition.
Ábalos, Iñaki and Herreros, Juan. Tower and Office: From Modernist Theory to Contemporary Practice, p22.Superimposing geometric proportions, which were only ever an approximation, on the exposed grid of the curtain wall was not easily reconcilable with mathematical repitition.
Ábalos, Iñaki and Herreros, Juan. Tower and Office: From Modernist Theory to Contemporary Practice, p25.The technical floor, the suspended ceiling, and the structural system were thus incoporated within an integrated entity that determined the flexibility of the overall space. The section of this building volume, its spatial rationality and economy, the degree of freedom it offered in the design of energy systems, and its exterior appearence or presence became themes explicitly examined in contemporary architectural practice.
Ábalos, Iñaki and Herreros, Juan. Tower and Office: From Modernist Theory to Contemporary Practice, p40.In a building of standard proportions, high-rise principles of construction began to apply at around twenty stories. At this height, the lateral forces on the building, traditionally absorbed by the massiveness and equilibrium of masonry walls, emerge as principal factors affecting the structural system.
Ábalos, Iñaki and Herreros, Juan. Tower and Office: From Modernist Theory to Contemporary Practice, p41.The structural system can be divided up into elements determined statically and resolved through simple statics.
Ábalos, Iñaki and Herreros, Juan. Tower and Office: From Modernist Theory to Contemporary Practice, p43.The first large-scale vertical structures reproduced the strengthening function of the traditional wall by introducing rigid portal frames in the exterior bays to resist wind load. Soon, however, the need for unobstructed usable space caused this strengthening function to be repositioned to the interior circulation core, superimposing a rigid shear wall onto a conventional isostatic frame. These transitional solutions extended the stable structural system to around forty stories.
Ábalos, Iñaki and Herreros, Juan. Tower and Office: From Modernist Theory to Contemporary Practice, p43.“We have arrived at an apparently paradoxical conclusion,” he stated; “the art of a structure depends on knowing how and where to locate the voids.” Structural materials resisting similar forces must adopt similar systems of spatial organization for maximum efficiency.
Ábalos, Iñaki and Herreros, Juan. Tower and Office: From Modernist Theory to Contemporary Practice, p48.If wind is the principle stress acting on the high-rise building, then the structural response is characterized by flexicon: the building deflects. Nature, however, offers models for counteracting this problem: inflexible, hollow spatial organizations that transform wind loads into simple compression and tension through tetrahedral geometry.
Ábalos, Iñaki and Herreros, Juan. Tower and Office: From Modernist Theory to Contemporary Practice, p49.there was an implicit contradiction between the vertical circulation systems and the structure’s movement.
Ábalos, Iñaki and Herreros, Juan. Tower and Office: From Modernist Theory to Contemporary Practice, p49.the distinction between the structural coherence of spatial triangulation and the conventional rectangular geometry of usable space produced a specific typological dialectic that circumscribes the later development of the high-rise.
Ábalos, Iñaki and Herreros, Juan. Tower and Office: From Modernist Theory to Contemporary Practice, p49.acknowledged flexicon in the tie bars and joints and retained the correspondence between spatial structure and function.
Ábalos, Iñaki and Herreros, Juan. Tower and Office: From Modernist Theory to Contemporary Practice, p49.On Growth and Form…This text applies Galileo’s mechanical analyses to the relationships between form and growth in nature, concluding that unlimited growth in forms that come “from art or nature” was impossible without changes in the load-bearing capacity or proportion of the structure.
Ábalos, Iñaki and Herreros, Juan. Tower and Office: From Modernist Theory to Contemporary Practice, p51.every increase in size is accompanied by a decrease in efficiency. This is not always true, and there are many structures whose increasing efficiency due to increasing volume with proportionately decreasing surface continues up to the limits of the strength of the materials.
Ábalos, Iñaki and Herreros, Juan. Tower and Office: From Modernist Theory to Contemporary Practice, p51.since every increase in size is accompanied by a disproportionately higher increase in volume than in area, these structures become more stable as they increase in size.
Ábalos, Iñaki and Herreros, Juan. Tower and Office: From Modernist Theory to Contemporary Practice, p52.This transformation was characterized by the decomposition of the structural system in response to specific forces and functional demands, components placed on the periphery of the building in response to wind load, appropriate adjustments to scale, and increasing specialization of load-bearing and structural materials.
Ábalos, Iñaki and Herreros, Juan. Tower and Office: From Modernist Theory to Contemporary Practice, p52.In a simplified description one could say that, subject to variable wind pressure, a skyscraper sustains a vibration that causes it to oscillate, or sway, continuously around an intermediate position, the deflection from which is determined by the mean wind pressure.
Ábalos, Iñaki and Herreros, Juan. Tower and Office: From Modernist Theory to Contemporary Practice, p55.all of the elements of the building’s skin might function together as a complete three-dimensional tensile model.
Ábalos, Iñaki and Herreros, Juan. Tower and Office: From Modernist Theory to Contemporary Practice, p56.Replacing the grid with this diagonal superstructure also led to more rational skyscraper construction. Vertical loads are redistributed by the diagonals among the columns in such a way that, in spite of their specific tributary areas, all the columns on the same floor have equal dimensions.
Ábalos, Iñaki and Herreros, Juan. Tower and Office: From Modernist Theory to Contemporary Practice, p65.In a hypothetical, square-plan building, the ideal layout would concentrate this mass at the corners, thereby achieving maximum inertia.
Ábalos, Iñaki and Herreros, Juan. Tower and Office: From Modernist Theory to Contemporary Practice, p72.Using concrete for bending moment and steel for shear was an abstract and ideal solution that opened the way to a hybrid concept of structural systems.
Ábalos, Iñaki and Herreros, Juan. Tower and Office: From Modernist Theory to Contemporary Practice, p74.Aeroelastic tests suggested different ways to optimize a building’s performance under wind load. Altering the building’s general form to improve aerodynamic penetration, altering the section to affect the vibration period, altering the surface texture of the building envelope to absorb lateral forces, and using exterior systems for diverting or breaking up the wind
Ábalos, Iñaki and Herreros, Juan. Tower and Office: From Modernist Theory to Contemporary Practice, p89.One can use irregular shapes or highly textured surfaces on the building skin to create areas of turbulence, producing a cushion of air surrounding the building that transforms the wind’s kinetic energy into thermal energy though the effect of friction.
Ábalos, Iñaki and Herreros, Juan. Tower and Office: From Modernist Theory to Contemporary Practice, p90.Contemporary high-rise construction bears in particular the imprint of several key transformations that took place following World War II. Among these were the advent of the ideal of continuous, unobstructed open space; the three-dimensional configuration of the structure; the recognition of the pure, repetitive prism as no longer being the most structurally valid form; and the concept of the building envelope as an active element in the structure’s mechanical performance.
Ábalos, Iñaki and Herreros, Juan. Tower and Office: From Modernist Theory to Contemporary Practice, p93.The home remains the primary basis of life.
Desmond, Matthew. Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, p293.The relatively recent shift in ecological theory that has led to a more prominent consideration of dynamic, non-deterministic processes offers new opportunities for dialogue with designers who are interested in complexity. This shift challenges designers to propose patterns that influence complex processes over time, sometimes in unpredictable ways, by altering flows of organisms, materials, and energy.
Hill, Kristina. Urban Ecologies: Biodiversity and Urban Design, p94.Two relatively recent observations that offer significant insights to physical planners and designers are that: (1) “patches” of native vegetation that exist in many landscapes developed for human use are too small to offer habitat to some of the species that thrived in those landscapes before humans caused widespread changes in vegetation patterns; and (2) these small patches of vegetation that remain are often distributed in isolated fragments that are no longer connected to each other in ways that could facilitate the movement of nonhuman species from one fragment to another.
Hill, Kristina. Urban Ecologies: Biodiversity and Urban Design, p94.