REVOLUTIONARY urbanism in the 20th century spurred a radical change in architects’ relation to the city. From Le Corbusier’s Ville radieuse, which sought to eliminate class-based stratification, to Rem Koolhaas’s Delirious New York, a comprehensive exposé of Manhattan, its fantasy-inducing metropolitan culture, and rise of the skyscraper paradigm. Constant Nieuwenhuys’s New Babylon rejected the capitalist order of the modern city, and proposed a city liberated of its hierarchal constraints. No longer is homo sapiens fixed to his abode, tied to his land, or defined by one set locale. Homo sapiens becomes homo faber, man the creator, in which his surroundings (endless sectors) are defined by his imagination, his play, and his social connections. Our project, Layering Urban Topographies: the Evolution of Endless, seeks to redefine New Babylon in relation to contemporary, endlessly shifting desert environment in the United Arab Emirates. We pose several questions: how do past urban precedents influence revolutionary urbanism? How do we reconcile idealized proposals like New Babylon with that of the vernacular reality? How does the hyper-capitalist environment of the emirate cities negatively influence design? How has the digital revolution inspired our inner homo faber, and created an endless outlet for our creative play?
Homo faber, continuously playing and interacting with his surroundings, still needs to see the reflection of his past identity, follies and cultural influence. The super-imposed grids of other cities and urban proposals are constantly shifting and flexible in the spaces they define: movable partitions are extruded from these historical examples, of which homo faber modifies to his liking. The disc sectors shift in proportion as they approach areas of extreme creative density: the ellipses become more circular, as a circle symbolically represents equity among other humans. These circle sectors are areas of constant mutability and imaginative play: no one space is the same after one homo faber has walked through it. The ultimate goal of these spaces is to create geometries as fluctuating as the dunes surrounding them, and to provide an outlet of creative expression for its inhabitants.
Our models were inspired by the layering technique Constant used to depict his symbolic representations of New Babylon. In his diagrams, constant would take historic site plans of cities: Paris, London, Amsterdam, etc, and layer on top locations where his endless sectors would be located. Similarly, we employed a technique of layering historical examples and revolutionary urbanism on permeable sector discs. The bottom most discs represent the vernacular environment: the site plan of Mexico City, Dubai, London and other real world precedents. Subsequent discs are proposals or theoretical commentary for the modern or contemporary city. Thus, the sectors are chronological experiences through the evolution of urbanity in contemporary architecture. The sectors, distinct in proportions, are bound to “circulation columns.” These columns, providing the only connection to the earth, serve as ports for creative activity: fiber optics, electrical lines, elevators, transportation links, et al, all converge to meet the desert floor at these points. From them, different layers of the sectors can be accessed. Each disc, although representing a certain timeline of urbanism, are constantly shifting: movable interior partitions imitate the site plans of different cities or urban proposals, while homo faber enters to move and shift the partitions to his liking. The discs act as “play lands,” categorized as different colors for their usage (yellow: residential, green: commercial, red: civic), and they expand in proportion as they reach dense urban centers at these circulation columns.
preliminary project for architectural association intermediate studio 10: dimitar dobrev, sean mcguire
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