Please note Diploma Unit 12 is on sabbatical in 2010/11 and will not be running
Nip and Tuck
Holger Kehne, Jeffrey Turko
Since 2003 Diploma 12 has pursued an agenda to develop and construct new spatial and social constellations from an engagement with infrastructure. This year we will develop a visionary network of public bridging systems for the Los Angeles Metropolitan region.
Before modernism and the development of regional planning practices such as those notoriously enacted by Robert Moses in New York, infrastructure was integrated within the experience and performance of cities and buildings. By contrast – in accordance with the modernist paradigm which conceives urban space as a series of rationalised and functionally distinct operations – infrastructural projects built to network transport at a regional or national scale tend to sever connections at a local scale. The resulting disjunctions and social fragmentations have produced what Stephan Graham and Simon Marvin term a condition of ‘splintering urbanism’, where the local public realm is ill-served by privately funded and monoprogrammatic largescale projects.
In response to this condition, and in the context of the multi-billion dollar investment in infrastructural renewal currently underway in the US, we will explore alternative futures for infrastructure, using Los Angeles – one of the most radical, innovative and yet fragile of urban ecologies – as our location. Here the unit will address the potential of architecture to mediate across the different scales of networked infrastructures, while also exploring their capacity to respond to an array of local and public interests as well as the demands for more global forms of connectivity. To this end, the typically linear trajectory and narrow functionality of the bridge typology will be reoriented towards a field condition in which multiple programmes are articulated.
The unit will travel to LA to study the complex conditions surrounding infrastructural settings, visiting a wide range of modernist and contemporary buildings as well as some of the most exciting architectural practices currently working in this region. Each student will select and study a condition that runs along, over, under and/or across an existing freeway in terms of structure, topography, geometry, programme and potential. Accordingly, we will again employ the diagram and the index as methodological tools for reading and reconfiguring these conditions. Exploiting architecture’s capacities to fuse the functional, the projective and the spiritual, we will propose visionary material structures that will transpose the term ‘freeway’ into a sustainable and inclusive future.
Bios
Holger Kehne is a founding partner of Plasma Studio (plasmastudio.com) and GroundLab (groundlab.org) and winner of the Next Generation Architects Award, The Young Architect of the Year Award, The HotDip Galvanising Award, the ContractWorld Award and Europe 40 under 40. Plasma Studio is lead designer for the International Horticultural Fair in Xi’an, China with a wide range of buildings due to open in 2011.
Jeffrey Turko founded JEFF TURKO – NEKTON (nekton.org) and is a member of the Ocean group (ocean-designresearch.net). He has also taught at the University of East London School of Architecture and Visual Arts since 2001.
