Studio Developments

I've been looking a lot at the planning work by Yona Freidman and Peter Cook this past week. Cook has imagined such a broad range of urban projects that I found several with similar concepts: all of those listed under the City of Gardens chapter in his colorful "Ideal Cities" book.
They are, however (and completely unsurprisingly if you know anything about Peter Cook or Archigram), completely unrealistic, and visualized through abstract collage and a lot of writing.


Friedman, on the other hand, still suggests a purely fictional planning tool, but one that is far more believable. As Monia says "in collage it work."




Friedman proposes a light space-frame infrastructure that temporary, mobile habitation "pods" would be inserted. Because people in this society are constantly moving, and the Machine Age was supposed to increase the individual's play time, the "pods" (housing, gardens, terraces, shops, etc) are mobile and made from cheap materials.
He has done a few installations of these spaces at museums... erecting huge cardboard shapes that you can walk around in.

The conclusion is that my proposal should be more like Friedman than Cook, in the sense that the vegetation infrastructure that I am proposing is fanciful, but still believable. Just like my project has "a foot in reality" with the Mayor's biodiversity statement and GrantScape funding, the final product should have a breath of reality.
SO!
My newest drawing looks like this:


Where the vegetation infrastructure winds itself through the city, defining setbacks for buildings and setting the initial boundary for plants to take over.
The most important thing to keep in mind is that I am NOT suggesting destroy half of London in a crazy mass-veg take over: this is simply a planning tool that is only London specific (and only South of the Thames specific) because this is where I first saw the fox.


The vegetation infrastructure creates plots or blocks, similar to streets, that define how large the buildings may be. The smaller the plot, the smaller the setback and building allowed. If the plot is too small, no building is allowed. If the plot is too big, it is an area designated for future division and building, but currently remains unbuilt.

To help represent this urban scale, I am making a model. The base will be CNCed and looks like this (apologies for the quality):



The little bits of greenish-clear stuff are where etched plexi glass will fit in to show all of the lines from the line drawing.
I've been struggling with deciding exactly what the massive triangles mean, but after tutorial with Monia yesterday, we settled on something like a Nolli Plan.
The massive triangles (the extruded pattern) represent the overall mass given to the vegetation. The spaces in between are where buildings will go. This corresponds perfectly to the plan from above. When the model is complete, I will have added a bit of lasercut pieces and (hopefully!) some light STL trellis.

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Pictures from our last crit soon. Monia has submitted them to the AA-photo people, so hopefully they will either be online or on my harddrive by Monday.