altaworkshop: August 2011

MattL

I know I am getting a bit ahead of myself here... there is no need to determine a logo this early in the piece. But I just wanted to share something with you guys that I saw today. The logo of a TV station here in China.... As you can see, they've incorporated the characters from their name into a kind of mosaic logo. I quite like it. Sorry it is not very clear - its captured off the TV.

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Matt C (03-09-11)

It looks like we have a bit of consensus between the chinese speakers amongst our group to name our studio as "易作坊“ after today's meeting.

the character 易 (yi) has a multitude of meaning:

alteration
change
Easy

it is also the name of one of the most significant classic text in Chinese history 易經"Classic of Changes, Book of Changes " it is believe that the idea from this significant text is the origin of the "ring yang" "five elements" "taoism" "eight trigrams" "fang shui" etc... Matt + Jaime, any thoughts on this?

I have put together a little matrix of calligraphic of the character yi, each row is a different calligraphic/ text style from different era (second row and last row are the most ancient pictographic depiction) we could play with the idea Matt mentioned above with any of the the below characters? Any favourites?

This is another example of a logo i like, aesthetically. 创意铺子 "Creative shop"

the same idea can be applied to the english counter part of the logo

2011.08.30 by Fred

I've always been facinated about the social & political part of city planning & design...i guess my question is through what kind of process, do these ideas in the diagram translate into urban built form? Or how does the urban built form manifest those ideas?

For example, for centuries and spanning across cultures, axial designs, grand bourlevards, symetry, platonic forms, monumental scale & so on, speaks for the political power/strength/stability, the legitimacy of government, and projects a timeless image...

Is this the path we are taking? Or are we trying to set ourselves away from those old ideas and perimiters? They are old, but by no means ineffective when it comes to capital designs. Can we actually avoid doing the same thing, or is there really an “alta” design?

It’s interesting that both democratic & authoritarian both use the same strategies to demonstrate their ideologies. I guess forms themselves are neutral.

Beijing

Brasilia

Canberra

Paris

Rome/Vatican

Washington

Welthauptstadt Germania (1937 - 1943) partially built #MattC

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MattL (Tue 30th of August)

Hi guys, I agree with the proposition that it is going to be about creativity and critical thinking, and communicating this clearly. I agree the competition will be judged less on implementation and detail.
I am thinking if we don't have time/energy (and some of the skills) to do a lot of the implementation/detail - I can find some University students/graduates here in China that are highly skilled in detail, visualisation etc. if we want to achieve a level of detail and good look - especially considering this will be a key part of our design portfolio I guess. It will be a minimal cost (Graduate architects get 4000 Yuan per month here for working 60 hour weeks).... anyway something to consider....
There is, for this project, a deep link between various theories and themes of political science and sociology and design outcomes - much more than usual. I think this is something we have to explore given the nature of the project - if we look at the provocations such theories and themes would appear central to the project.
I have brainstormed some initial ideas about how various political and sociological concepts relate to capital planning, and how they might apply to a new capital in Australia. Please see attached image.

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Following on from your thoughts Matt I believe you are right, it will, in the end come down to how good our creative and critical thinking is as it is not about implementation. I believe that three elements is what will make the difference when evaluating the submissions:

Creative-innovative thinking, what Matt defined very well as thinking outside of the box.
Rigorous and critical thinking of ones own project and of future city planning and masterplanning in general.
Legibility, impact and precision of the presentation of the project.

Of the three I think that the one where we can distinguish ourselves best is the second as we can think this over properly.

That is why maybe we should aim to do a project that generates rules for better cities and show some outcomes of such rules/process applied to our hypothetical city. These ideas are related to some trends in landscape urbanism such as relational urbanism, but we don't need to be slavishly addicted to the same aesthetics or outcomes.

Source: http://relationalurbanism.blogspot.com/

This is just a very pre-eliminary idea but I would like your feedback, please leave your comments bellow.

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Matt C 02-09-11

Out sourcing some of the work might be an option once we are certain on exactly what to produce.

relational urbanism blog seems very interesting, would love to read the rationale behind it.

A little thought regarding this relational/parametric urbanism approach, the illustrations might look quite simple, but the mechanics behind it could be quite complicated. I am genuinely interested in developing our proposition using this approach but i am also little wary that since not all/ most of the team have the expertise in this field, it might be quite risky to depend the development of such systems on the minority of the group (and i suspect this is something that we can't outsource) I am more than happy to have a go though : )

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Matt C 02-09-11

Dug out some lecture notes from UDT which might be helpful for our brain storming exercise

Dimension of Authority in urban form

Scale (Vert & horiz, Space & form, domination, intimidation)
Stability (Order, timelessness, permanence)
Orientation (Axes, Vistas, Visibility, twisting, constellations)
Dynamism/Vitality (twists of orientation, diagonals, dialectic imagery)
History (Egypt>Greece>Rome…Inevitability, memory)
Natural (Landscape, nation, place, territory, authenticity)
Style (distinction, identity, symbolic capital)
Ritual (parade, choreography, controlled behaviour)

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Matt C 02-09-11

Something i have been experimenting with city engine a while ago:

These are images of hypothetical cities generated from a generic script (a rule based form generator) Same terrain, same density profile, same number of street segments, same topographic constrain(development avoid the lake and mountain) etc

The only variable is the grid system

The initial idea was to set up a workflow to benchmark the performance of different grid systems against a series of analysis to see if there's something to be learnt from it.

Space matrix connectivity analysis (GIS Analysis)

insolation analysis (ecotect analysis)

Fluid dynamic analysis (Simulated the movement of wind through a built area )

PedShed Analysis (GIS analysis)

ViewShed analysis (ecotect analysis)

wasn't so much of a design exercise, just as a way to understand the impact of different grid systems over different parameters

Very preliminary work, didn't really get to push it along. But i think we have a good tool to help generate hypethetical cities of different typologies relatively quickly to test our hypothesis.