URBAN BEACH Instructor / Section / Anne Save de Beaurecueil and Franklin Lee with Ezio Blasetti

SOUS LES PAVES, LA PLAGE

The studio will continue an on-going investigation into multi-scalar flow remediation strategies that attempt to merge the cultural with the environmental, moving beyond pure optimization strategies, to cultivate exotic architectural forms that channel new flows of energy in the urban environment. For this, the unit will work on developing formal performance organizations that negotiate between the exuberant and the ecological, to embed a type of flamboyant environmentalism within ornamental structural systems. The studio will introduce a social and aesthetic agenda to the design of normally banal civil infrastructure projects.

Previous studios entitled Liquid Urbanism focused on developing both macro and micro mediation systems to channel the environmental forces of sun, wind, and water, responding to and ultimately transforming the urban pressures caused by the economic disparity and social inaccessibility found São Paulo, Brazil. This semester, we are extending this agenda to intervene within another ‘fluid city’ condition: the redevelopment of the post-industrial banks of the river Thames in London, England in the designing of a new urban beach, cultural center and water treatment plant. Unlike Paris and Berlin, the city of London had for many centuries turned its back on the River, and never cultivated the romantic bank-side promenades and architecture found in other capitals. For the last ten years, the city has been trying to transform the image of the river, and yet its pollution and decaying river-edge urban morphology in many areas is in strong need of transformation.

In 1968, student protestors coined the phrase “En dessous les paves, la Plage”, (Underneath the cobblestones, lies the beach) a phrase that then and today conjures multiple connotations. In the literal sense, it was a call to attack, to pull out the cobble stones from the street to throw at authorities, which revealed the sand-beds, (and thus ‘the beach’) below the cobblestones within which they had originally been laid. Figuratively, the call was for a transformation of the antiquated bourgeois bureaucracies that controlled urban institutions to allow for modern social liberties and benefits. Ironically, in the height of capitalist reforms nearly 30 years later, Paris has organized every summer since 1992, the “Paris Plage” (paris beach), a manmade beach along the Seine. The idea has been copied in Berlin, Budapest and Milan, and now London is starting to follow suit. The situation is rife with social and political dichotomies, besides its literary origins discussed above: city life has always been defined by protocols of a certain formality in dress-codes, and a type of industriousness required in behavior and demeanor. The beach defies these modes of operating-creating a liberating space that approaches a certain social equality: from Rio to Los Angles, the beach is a public space which can break down the divisions between social classes and cultures through one’s lack of clothing and possessions.

The studio will broaden last year’s deployment of variable computational methodologies by using new parametric modeling techniques to subject a series of iterative mediation devices to a multiplicity of different forces, to both study resultant formal transformations, as well as to calibrate these physical organizations to produce controlled transfers of energy and novel atmospheric effects. Extending last year’s research of the environmental mediation inherent in plants and flowers, this year we will investigate the human body’s own environmental mediation system of sweat glands, skin and hair. These initially will inform subdivision mesh organizational modeling by releasing the constraints on these curve networks with new dynamic hair animation modeling, dynamic skin and bubble simulations, and scripted component device proliferations. The fabrication of multiple physical behavior models will serve as fitness tests for a feed-back mechanism in creating performance based architectural interventions.

The goal is to create a fusion of structure, form, and flow, so to promote a more symbiotic relationship between culture, environmental engineering, and the natural landscape. To this extent, we propose to both challenge and intervene within the discrete and uniform policies of ‘dry grid’ organizations, which are systems characterized by a separation between structure and movement. Instead, certain fluvial alliances will be formed so to create ‘wet grids’, in which movement can be structurally absorbed by a system, similar to those developed within Frei Otto’s hybrid structural-drainage roof membranes, for example, yet applied to a multiplicity of different types of organizations.

As has been shown by both the flooding and depleting water supply caused by certain water management systems of the colonial and modernist eras, a sustainable water management system is created not by a rapid linear transmission of water, but a combined strategy of slowing down the movement of water through a system of containment and release: a system of diversion and diffusion through multiple branching networks. The same techniques can be used for the numerous flows of movement at both the urban and architectural scales, in the design of building flow management for program, wind, solar and drainage networks, so to create a system of fused ecologies and give functional engineering processes civic and cultural importance.

The studio will work on technically creating this cultural and environmental inter-modality by using the computational techniques of variable subdivision tessellation and recursive primitive proliferation. Subdivision is an algorithmic computational modeling tool that responds to variable topological and structural forces by generating a system of successively refined polyhedral organizations. Like blood capillaries, the efficacy in its proliferation is obtained through a miniaturization and multiplication of channels to create an intricate network of branching vectors. The mesh systems are used to mediate between different types of forces, from the movement of people or structural loads, to the transmittal of water and light. Conditional expression scripting allow the mesh tessellation to register different agent driver forces by linking transformational attributes of input sources with various driven topological effects and differentiating aggregations in these meshes, along with the repercussive mediations they cause within the curve network. Abstracted components shall be proliferated within the hair mesh systems to create three-dimensional architectural branching volumes and environmental mediating devices. The studio will use advance modeling techniques to start a definition of structure and skin panelization, by unrolling, flattening and expanding members to prepare for a model fabrication process using the laser cutter.

At this more refined architectural level, the studio shall work on fusing different flows of wind, water and light within an integration of the skin, structure, and spatial layouts. In opposition to heavy orthogonal rigid frame organizations, like those used in post and beam construction or in the Cartesian arrangement of modernist roadway networks, the studio will developed light-weight structures of interlocking surface using the micro-network structural principles of geodetic and funicular formations. These structural systems are able to efficiently transmit and balance multi-directional shear and lateral loads in both cell aggregates and in building frames, through a series of multiple and miniaturized polyhedral configurations at varying degrees of resolution and scale.