Archive for the ‘Urbanism’ Category
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Radical Railbanking
Fall 2009-Summer 2012
I. Geodemography
Over the past several decades, the use of geodemographic data has grown ubiquitous in the regulation of urban land use and development. City planning commissions use geodemography to aid in the implementation of policy, and private corporations reference geodemographic data when purchasing, selling or developing real-estate. Demand for geodemographics has created a surging industry of providers, such as Claritas and Axciom, that collate and retail data for commercial use. These corporations collect census data, consumer …
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Territory Twister
Summer 2011
Territory Twister is a theoretical project sited within the zoned conditions described in Radical Railbanking. The project is located in the southwest side of Detroit, next to Mexican Town and directly adjacent to the popular Mexican Town Flea Market. Territory Twister attempts to gerrymander a material environment for social interaction within an otherwise lifeless neighborhood. The form of the project is determined through an iterative “relaxed” redrawing of the site boundary. The result is a layered boundary …
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Onondaga Creek
Spring, 2010
This transdisciplinary project proposes that Geographic Information Systems can be converted into a productive tool for architecture and urban design by developing innovative urban modeling techniques using commonly available census and municipal data. Now ubiquitous in urban planning and real-estate development, GIS most commonly uses spatio-demographic data to validate or reify conventional planning practices. This project exploits the ubiquity of GIS by converting data-sets with discrete categories and boundaries into pliable and fluid relational topologies. These manipulations of …
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Detroit Shape Scape
Summer 2011
The Detroit Shape-Scape is a theoretical project sited within the zoned conditions described in Radical Railbanking, and aspires to concretize the latent publics implicates in that project. The project is conceived as mini city within the city, housing a programmatic diversity characteristic of a vital metropolis. The program includes interior and exterior public spaces, an expansion of the adjacent Wayne State University, student residences, rentable space for craftsmen and artists, stops for existing and proposed mass transit …
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Cleveland: MEDIPLEX CITY
In-Progress
Once the fourth largest city in the United States and a major industrial center, Cleveland has lapsed into decades of sustained decline. The loss of its middle class population and economic base in manufacturing has left the city financially and physically in shambles. Amidst this perfect storm of bad news, one sector of Cleveland’s economy has been growing prodigiously: healthcare. The Cleveland Clinic, the city’s medical namesake, is now its largest employer and a cornerstone of Cleveland’s economy. Throughout …
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Seaport
Fall, 2008
With Thom Moran.
This project was an entry to the 2008 ENYA Competition: South Street Seaport Re-Envisioning the Urban Edge. The competition brief called for the design of a new pier on the East River containing a mixture of community facilities. The authors of the competition hoped that such a structure would help to reconnect the community to their waterfront.
This entry contends that the best way to reconnect the South Street Seaport neighborhood to its waterfront …
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SimCity ShapeScape
2008
This speculative project locates a new high-speed railroad station on the current site of Chicago’s Union Station. The goal of the project is to make the use of high-speed rail a casual part of urban culture. Union Station was precisely the wrong type of building for these goals: it is out of scale to the street-level development in its context, its elevations are blank at the pedestrian level, and its beaux-arts monumentality is prohibitive instead of casual and inviting. …