Part 1- The City

Part 1 involved studying one of the city’s systems with a group. Our group focused on the water system, which we found to be increasingly dearchitecturalized over time. Whereas water infrastructure was traditionally heralded as a beacon of civilization (from the Roman aqueducts right up to Toronto’s R.C Harris filtration plant), water facilities are now typically buried- made into parks and littered with automated shacks.

We proposed that by 2030, decentralization of the water system take this trend to its conclusion. With different water reuse and recycling facilities available at every scale of the city (from the tap, through community and right out to the city scale), the infrastructure will disappear into the city fabric, leaving no dedicated “water buildings” anywhere.

Part 2- The Urban Plan

The second part of the project combined people from each group to “zoom in” from the city level and create a 1km x 1km urban plan that addressed each infrastructure studied- our plan proposed a densification of Bloor & Keele around a new transit hub. Paths were carved into the site by solar conditions, creating a pedestrianized, non-orthoganal, medieval-style community with quick access to rapid transit at the core.

Part 3 – The Building

The third part involved working individually to “zoom in” again and flesh out a building that within a 100m x 100m area of the urban plan. The New Well is a building that houses a community-level filtration facility that exposes the water infrastructure to all passers-by (be they travelling by subway, shuttle or foot).

The buliding is made to illlustrate the 3 layers of the city- the substrata into which the water system has disappeared, the natural strata and the superstrata which humans have built up from the. Because the site is located on a slope, the substrata can be exposed by pressing the landscape down. Then, the strata is brought over top of substrata by extending the natural grade, and superstrata is represented with a form that is lifted above the strata and shaped to blend into the rest of the urban plan.

Voronoi cells are used to generate the substrata form, as they mathematically describe the form taken by water when infused with air bubbles and create a cavernous forms that inspire. The main water feature is a pool, as it is a perfect example water reused under the proposed, new water system. A fitness center is added to complement and complete the program. The superstrata is proposed to be residential space, so as to fit with the urban plan’s goal of creating mixed use buildings throughout the area.

We investigated concrete that used polyester fibres as an aggregate. As the fibres used became longer and thicker, the concrete became more brittle and nearly impossible to manipulate- however, it did form a very interesting surface condition.

We digitised the paths of hundreds of these fibres, creating a virtual wire mesh based whose characteristics arose directly from the properties of the fibre-saturated concrete. Using Blender, we then performed a fluid simulation where we poured digital concrete over the wire mesh to see what digital surface would arise from the properties of the practical one.

More information on the project can be found at the Farrow website portfolio page.

I focused my project on the idea of healthcare. Basic research revealed that having points of healthcare along the bay would provide much faster service in the event of an on-water emergency. On the more severe end of the scale, San Francisco’s disaster contingency plans are not terribly developed and would benefit greatly from a site dedicated to disaster relief.

Thus, the project took form as a site that was programmatically designed to “degrade” from a typical terminal to accommodate any scale of emergency. Smaller emergencies could be handled with minimal disruption to regular terminal services, while a large emergency would result in a more complete switchover of programmatic elements to emergency “mode”.

The site’s purpose is reflected in the formfinding that led to its final design. The site design is based around dual-layered element, and when this element is repeated in a network, it creates a richly connected fabric with that achieves the weaving and ramping necessary to accommodate the complex programming. With the network established, is is simply a matter of carving program into the site through the strategic excavation of elements.

Furthermore, the design of the network provides natural “lanes” that address the flow that would occur on a terminal site. These lanes would be used as commuter paths during everyday use, but in the event of an emergency, some could be dedicated to the moving of supplies, others could be dedicated to the evacuation of survivors, others could be shut down to provide space for storage, and so on.

• New Babylon’s population is assumed to be free of concern and defined solely by the creative impulses it pursues and would not become concerned with intrinsic means of division such as nationalism or creed. In the same manner, the network does not contain division or boundaries, nor even the language that could be used to impose or deduct any kind of geography-based order or classification system.
• The nomadic travel of the society’s inhabitants would have no inherent beginning, end or destination. Similarly, the network proposed by Constant had no origin, termination or explicit direction.
• The network was designed as a completely decentralized, distributed and homogeneous system where no area is given explicit meaning apart from that designated by the inhabitants. This mirrors the population’s socialist underpinnings, where responsibility for the society is distributed evenly and no person is given more credence than another.

To create a piece that captured these properties, I made a virtual model (not having the resources for a practical one) of one of Constant’s drawings of New Babylon’s networks that stretched fully around a globe, rather than being confined to a plane. Seeing a representation of the network at its zenith illustrates these properties of the network, and thus the population, that are not apparent in more limited models.

I decided to create a university research facility where food is grown on site, used and tested by researchers and excess maybe then be sold to the public in a small market.

As for a programming model, I took my cue from that of a tree, where food is produced at the extremities and then works its way down a centralized transport system. At the same time, the access to the facility is unrestricted at the bottom and becomes more exclusive as you travel up, to the point that the actual growth level is an automated system that only technicians need visit if there is a problem.

Show here are the initial sketches to which I committed, some snapshots of the subsequent development and the final renderings.