Workshop: Suburban Exchange
Tutor: Ivan Kucina
This workshop will explore potentials for creating public spaces along the highway Tirana-Durres, linear suburban conglomeration whose rapid grow during the last decade has been determined by infrastructure development and exclusive privatization. Design interventions that will be produced during the workshop will elaborate strategies of converting disintegrated private spaces into places for positive social exchange. Suburban disintegration could be considered a result of the imperatives of the speculative urban development which is orientated toward maximizing individual profit abandoning common interest. As a consequence, suburban space becomes collection of fragmentized, non related, self determined constructions that appear everywhere along the infrastructure corridors, at any levels, shapes and scales, encompassing the major territories of contemporary city.
Taking heterotopias of suburban space along the highway Tirana Durres as starting point, this workshop will propose a provisional design for establishing public space in front of and on the back of the building of Polis University. Having in mind the importance of social, cultural and educational role of Polis University that established itself on the awareness of responsibility toward community, this proposal would serve as an activating model for inspiring others to do the same with their properties. Though the time this would result with creating continual public space along the highway.
In the beginning of the workshop, the selected case will be scanned and mapped in order to expose the relations between social actors, their behaviors and their close environment. Using a series of diagrams from programmatic to spatial, participants will then conceptualize an intervention that can act to convert private property into public alternatives. Participants will create a comprehensive variety of outcomes at a diverse scale of strategic intent. From portable devices and installations to public building and the formation of new types of public space, this workshop will provide an intense bubble for experimentation and debate. At the end, selected proposals will overlap and layout as 1:1 scale drawing around the building.
Workshop Guidelines
Atlas
Collect data on the site
Research physical and mental elements at the site and observe activities of the spatial actors.
Make your story
Compare collected data to identify the social, economic, technical factors that influence human activities.
Discover the uncharted attractors, inarticulate drivers of human activities, non-enlightened forms of
communication, unexpressed wishes and needs, or otherwise, the secrets of the chosen site.
Classify
Determined on the basis of taxonomy, sort and order data collected.
Spatial phenomena are divided into: places, routes, territory, attractors...
Activities of people divided according to: events, habits, relationships, meanings...
Map
Apply different mapping techniques that correspond to certain classes of data.
Prepare photographs, drawings, plans, texts, diagrams, tables, movies
Scenario
Brainstorm on the topic of social exchange
Give attributes to the fragments of space.
Locate sources of energy.
Separate key terms that indicate the spatial phenomena.
Place the possible interventions.
Formulate trends of attraction
Free transformation of data of the human activities
Create group profile of the people at the site.
Imagine different situations that would match the behavior of group profile.
Create prototype
Connect the site, activities, group profile and trends in the unique concept.
Develop the concept through a series of reactions between site and group profile.
Test behavior of visitors in the established concept.
Intervention
Program diagram
Define your program elements within the site.
Each element is awarded by an abstract form.
Make the first working model that translates your program elements in 3D program diagram
Spatial Diagram
Make the second working model to distinguish spatial relations obtained from previous models.
Architecture diagram
Make the third working model to translate spatial makings and links into the language of architecture.
Presentation
Select and organize your project material and make:
Power Point slide show including 20x20sec slides in A3 landscape format ready for printing.
Upload compressed Power Point slide show with 300 words attached to the Convertible City BlogSpot.
Draw overlapped layout 1:1 scale around the Polis University.
Prepare 400 sec oral presentation.
Evaluation
The appearance of the new design should surprise you.
You should ask yourself why is your product is different from existing ones?
Why anybody would love it?
What kind of emotional reaction is expected?
Which value is bringing to society?
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