System City: Infrastructure and the Space of Flows AD

140 Pages·2013·19.83 MB·English

by  Michael Weinstock

ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN
SYSTEM CITY
GUEST-EDITED BY
MICHAEL WEINSTOCK
INFRASTRUCTURE
AND THE SPACE
OF FLOWS
04 2013
|
ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN
JULY/AUGUST 2013
ISSN 0003-8504
PROFILE NO 224
ISBN 978-1118-361429
1
IN THIS ISSUE
ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN
GUEST-EDITED BY SYSTEM CITY: INFRASTRUCTURE
MICHAEL WEINSTOCK
AND THE SPACE OF FLOWS
5 EDITORIAL 4
Helen Castle
6 ABOUT THE GUEST-EDITOR
Michael Weinstock
8 SPOTLIGHT
Visual highlights of the issue
14 INTRODUCTION
System City: Infrastructure
and the Space of Flows
Michael Weinstock
EDITORIAL BOARD 24 Variation and Distribution:
Will Alsop Forest Patterns as a Model for Urban Morphologies
Denise Bratton Evan Greenberg and George Jeronimidis
Paul Brislin
Mark Burry
André Chaszar 32 A History of Territories, Movements and Borders:
Nigel Coates Politics of Inhabitation
Peter Cook Marina Lathouri
Teddy Cruz
Max Fordham
Massimiliano Fuksas 38 A Distributed Ground: The Unknown Fields Division
Edwin Heathcote Liam Young and Kate Davies
Michael Hensel
Anthony Hunt
Charles Jencks 46 Third Natures: Incubators of Public Space
Bob Maxwell Cristina Díaz Moreno and Efrén García Grinda
Jayne Merkel
Peter Murray 56 Intelligent Cities and the Taxonomy of Cognitive Scales
Mark Robbins
Deborah Saunt Michael Weinstock with Mehran Gharleghi
Patrik Schumacher
Neil Spiller
Leon van Schaik
Michael Weinstock
Ken Yeang
Alejandro Zaera-Polo
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86
66 Darwin Among the Machines 100 Local Climates of the City
Jack Self Iain D Stewart
72 Cities and Grids: 106 Ex Silico Ad Vivo:
In Search of New Paradigms Computational Simulation and
Joan Busquets Urban Design at Foster + Partners
Francis Aish, Adam Davis
78 The Grounds of a Renewed Practice: and Martha Tsigkari
Groundlab’s Approach Towards Landscape
and Infrastructure 112 Networks and the City
Eva Castro, José Alfredo Ramírez Sergi Valverde and Ricard V Solé
and Eduardo Rico
120 Data City:
86 Scales of Metabolic Flows: Urban Metabolic Decision Processes
Regional, Urban and Building Daniel Segraves
Systems Design at SOM
Keith Besserud, Mark Sarkisian, 124 COUNTERPOINT
Phil Enquist and Craig Hartman The City Beyond Analogy
Colin Fournier
94 Metasystems of Urban Flow:
Buro Happold’s Collaborations in the 132 CONTRIBUTORS
Generation of New Urban Ecologies
Wolf Mangelsdorf
The city is critical to the capacity of society to
adapt to a future of uncertainty and change.
— Michael Weinstock
106
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ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN
1
JULY/AUGUST 2013
PROFILE NO 224
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Front, back and inside front cover: Mehran
Gharleghi, Model of the City, AA Emergent
Technologies and Design (EmTech), Architectural
Association, 2013–14. © Michael Weinstock
04 2013
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44
EDITORIAL
Helen Castle
The ‘system city’ represents a whole-scale rethink of the urban. In recent years, the
reach and influence of large-scale cities has tended to be traced on socioeconomic
grounds as reflected by Saskia Sassen’s coining of the ‘global city’,1 or in terms
of demographics with the ‘megacity’ label being applied to cities with over 10
million inhabitants.2 In this issue of 3, Guest-Editor Michael Weinstock places
the urban on a much wider canvas – whether at the evolutionary, cultural or
global scale. He pushes at the envelope of the current notion of the city, where
the city’s relationship to the global is largely regarded in terms of ‘connectivity’ to
the Internet or worldwide trade. Weinstock’s concept advances to an entirely new
holistic level: ‘Considering the city as a dynamic complex system places emphasis
on the interactions and connectivity of the flows through its infrastructures, and of
the feedbacks and critical thresholds that drive the emergence of new spaces and
urban morphologies that are animated by new modalities of culture’ (see p 17). He
brings a scientific lens informed by his work on ‘emergence’ at the Architectural
Association (AA) School of Architecture in London, where he is a co-founder
and co-director of the Emergent Technologies and Design (EmTech) Masters
programme. As part of this project he co-guest-edited, with Michael Hensel and
Achim Menges, the seminal 3 issues Emergence: Morphogenetic Design Strategies
(May/June 2004) and Techniques and Technologies in Morphogenetic Design (March/
April 2006). This work was consolidated in his classic book The Architecture of
Emergence, which in many ways provides a foundation and a preface to this current
issue of 3, with two chapters at the end of the book dedicated to the formation
and emergence of cities in the ancient world.3
The greatest synergies in this issue come through this focus on the material
and physical sciences: whether it is SOM providing a pertinent analogy with the
routine blood test and the diagnosis and intervention of the medical practitioner
(see pp 86–93); Evan Greenberg and George Jeronimidis analysing the rainforest’s
morphology and its potential as an urban model (pp 24–31); or Groundlab on the
significance of the terrain and an approach that uses ecological infrastructure as the
basis for design (pp 78–85). It is also very much apparent how new technologies
such as computational simulation and multi-scale analytic modelling are facilitating
this approach, revealing a new sense of the city as one that is integrated into a
complex network of flows and processes, and as much about physical as cultural
properties.
Running counter to the main theme of the issue is Colin Fournier’s energetic
Counterpoint that seeks us to question any assumptions about complexity and
its relationship to urban social behaviour and the system city analogy. Just how
system-oriented do we want our developing perceptions of the city to be? 1
Notes
1. Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 1991.
2. Grahame Shane explains that Peter Hall credited Janice Perlman with the invention of the term ‘megacity’ in
her PhD studies of Rio favelas in the early 1970s (published 1976). See David Grahame Shane, Urban Design
Since 1945: A Global Perspective, John Wiley & Sons (Chichester), 2011, p 29.
3. Michael Weinstock, The Architecture of Emergence: The Evolution of Form in Nature and Civilisation, John
Wiley & Sons (Chichester), 2010; see Chapter 7 ‘City Forms’ and Chapter 8 ‘The Forms of Information, Energy
and Ecology’, pp 176–243.
Text © 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Image
© Illustration by Frances Castle
55
Michael Hensel, Achim Menges and Michael Weinstock, The Architecture of
Michael Weinstock, 1 Emergence: Emergence: The Evolution of Form in
Michael Weinstock, ‘Metabolism Morphogenetic Design Strategies, May/ Nature and Civilisation, 2010
and Morphology’, 1 Versatility and June 2004 top right: In his book (published by John
Vicissitude, March/April 2008 top left: Guest-edited by Michael Weinstock Wiley & Sons Ltd), Weinstock places the
above: In this article, Weinstock sets out with Michael Hensel and Achim Menges, evolution of human form, culture and cities
an account of the dynamics of natural the issue explored evolutionary design in the context of the processes and forms
metabolic systems that are amenable to processes for the composition of materials of the natural world, and shows how humans
analysis and digital simulation, suggesting and building systems within the context have extensively modified the surface of
an agenda for the development of metabolic of biomimetics, digital technology and the the earth, the ecological systems that exist
morphologies of buildings and cities. complexity of natural systems. upon it, and the climate.
66
ABOUT THE GUEST-EDITOR
MICHAEL WEINSTOCK
Michael Weinstock is an architect, and currently Director of Research
and Development, and Director of the Emergent Technologies
and Design (EmTech) programme in the Graduate School of the
Architectural Association (AA) School of Architecture in London.
Born in Germany, he lived as a child in the Far East and then West
Africa, and attended an English public school. He ran away to
sea at the age of 17 after reading Conrad. After many years at sea,
in traditional wooden sailing ships where he gained shipyard and
shipbuilding experience, he studied architecture at the AA and has
taught at its School of Architecture since 1989 in a range of positions
from workshop tutor to Intermediate and then Diploma Unit Master,
Master of Technical Studies and Academic Head.
Over the last decade his published work has arisen from research
into the dynamics, forms and energy transactions of natural systems,
and the application of the mathematics and processes of emergence
to cities, groups of buildings within cities, and individual buildings.
While his principal research and teaching has been conducted at
the AA, he has published and lectured widely, and taught seminar
courses, studios and workshops on these topics at many other schools
of architecture in Europe and the US. He has made a significant
contribution to the theoretical discourses of architecture, to the
pedagogies of the discipline, and on practice. He has been a leader
in bringing awareness and understanding of natural systems and the
historical and current impacts of complexity, climatic and ecological
changes on human architectures at all scales, and of the natural and
human dynamics that are currently driving changes in all the systems
of nature and civilisation.
He is the author of the book The Architecture of Emergence: The
Evolution of Form in Nature and Civilisation (John Wiley & Sons,
3
2010), and over the years has contributed many articles to . He also
guest-edited (with Michael Hensel and Achim Menges) two previous
3
issues of : Emergence: Morphogenetic Design Strategies (May/June
2004) and Techniques and Technologies in Morphogenetic Design (March/
April 2006). 1
Text © 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images:
p 6 © John Wiley & Sons Ltd; p 7 © Michael
Weinstock, photograph by Lauren John
77
SPOTLIGHT
AMID.cero9 The Magic Mountain, Ames, Iowa, 2002
A former power station is wrapped in an
ecosystem mask that converts energy
infrastructures and architecture into a living
system to be inserted within the city. The
membrane attracts the most important butterfl y
and bird species in the northern US like a real
mountain, and the building is converted into the
laboratory of a genetic engineer, where different
species and varieties of roses can be researched
and developed, challenging the common tools
and concepts of architecture, gardening, species
breeding and the ecology of living.
8