Urban Composition by Mark C. Childs

Author:Mark C. Childs
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press
Published: 2013-01-09T05:00:00+00:00

Burning Man, Black Rock City, Nevada. This annual event in the Nevada desert is a prime example of a recurring form.

Midsummer Snowballs by Andy Goldsworthy, London, 2000. This temporary artwork played on its own disappearance.

Although a limited design life can reduce unnecessary monetary and environmental costs, this approach can also engender a set of problems. Due to the higher cost of construction loans and price competition in some markets, builders may be tempted to design “products” with low initial costs and poor life-cycle costs, which, in short order, they sell to users. This can create a false economy in which users and neighbors suffer. For example, slight increases in initial costs, such as improved insulation in mobile homes, can reduce both operating and environmental costs. If presented with the option, the user, the regional electric utility, or a housing advocacy group might be willing to pay the higher initial cost.

Moreover, this mortgage-life approach dismisses the possibility that built forms may gain value over time by adding to a larger milieu. Historic preservation efforts, adaptive reuse projects, and central metropolitan real estate prices argue that built forms can gain value from time and context.

Durable built forms require the means to adapt to changing contexts and programs. Designers should consider likely changes to program and context and test their designs against these scenarios.10 If a restaurant fails, can it easily be sold for other retail uses? If the theater across the street reopens, can we attract their foot traffic? If a tree dies along a street, how will it be replaced and how will that affect the composition? If bicycle use increases, can neighborhood streets be easily connected to a trail along the power line corridor? The architect and professor John Habraken and open building advocates have explored various means to provide for adaptability at different design levels.11

We tend to change different domains of building systems at different rates (see “Design Domains” in “Contexts”). Functionally separating these layers aids adaptability so that, for example, playground equipment can be changed without rebuilding the park in which the equipment sits.

Providing spatial slack, a bit of extra space at critical junctures and edges, can ease repairs, renovations, or other uses. Freeway shoulders, for example, allow accident removal and lane repairs. A stream’s riparian zone allows for floods, repositioning of the stream bed, and wildlife movement.

Finally, programming from context suggests thinking of potential uses of a built form from the point of view of the larger context and the lifespan of the structure. Thus a café on a plaza should be conceived of as an edge room of the plaza whose vitality is dependent on its connection to the life of the plaza and whose role is to support the plaza. It may do so as a café, a bookstore, or a flower market if well designed. These transformations should be easily imagined, as they share fundamental spatial characteristics of retail spaces.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.