Week 2 - Tutorial Reflections

blog entry

Week 2 -

This week's charette called for us to explore future scenarios for all the four theme groups - urban, suburban, regional, virtual. This gave a better chance to explore our potential choices for studio. The following is a breakdown of what we came up with for each topic.

Urban - This was the area I had the most ideas to begin with. The congestion tax would free up a lot of the roads and provide the opportunity for recreational spaces to take place on these spaces. I had seen this done in Copenhagen to great success. We decided it could also create the necessity for pedestrian "desire paths" through laneways and buildings to cut down walking time between destinations. This would create a porous building typology which could yield some interesting results.

Suburban - Creating a retail experience that gives the consumer a feel for the product without actually being a point of sale was a challenging scenario for certain shop types. How was it possible to bring this down to small local retailers and produce vendors? Several solutions were conceived for this which suggested a open type market and a series of temporary "pop up" stalls. This made rent affordable while giving vendors the chance to visit with new stock every fortnight or month. Restaurants and produce vendors could collaborate in this scenario to provide meal ideas - a recipe would be given to the consumer along with the correct proportions of produce needed to make the dish for "x" amount of people. This would certainly limit the waste in produce we face when bulk buying. 

Regional - With this area our group struggled to provide a good reason why a self sustaining community should exist in this day and age. It seemed counter productive and energy intensive given the efficient systems established by the government and businesses for providing energy, water, food and a variety of experiences. None the less, we decided rather than being totally self sufficient, we would suggest a system which promotes local produce and services. We devised a tax scheme that would would increase as the distance away from the source was increased, thus providing financial incentives to the consumer to source thier good and services locally,

Virtual - I found this area to be the most interesting in terms of unexplored ideas. Given the scope and the impact our virtual lives are having on us this was indeed topical for future forecasting. we found one of the main problems we would face which has been somewhat under publicised is the growing need for server specific buildings and to control the heat and energy they produce. This posed very intersting solutions of using vacant carparks in the cbd from the proposed urban scenario. We envisioned they could be coupled with parks which would use the heat created for growth. Another aspect of virtual we explored was the nature of data mining and our digital footprint. While there were obvious negatives in terms of privacy and security, we looked for a way of usefully using all the amassed data. We found it linked back in with our tax idea from the regional, where user purchases online would be evaluated in a carbon credit type scheme and taxed accordingly to energy use (both in manufacture and transport). We saw this as a better way of implementing a global carbon tax which would target consumer mentality. Much the same way nutritional information has to be applied to all packaged foods. 

Ultimately I think from this charette I had the most ideas for the urban project, however I'm more interested in the challenge of virtual and thinking about architecture in a new way. For this reason I will preference the virtual theme group for this semester.... Fingers crossed!