2012URBAN DESIGN STUDIES

CONTENTS

PREFACE

SEEING

MAPPINGDATA REPRESENTATION

POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE SPACES

PUBLIC AND PRIVATE SPACESANCIENT AND CONTEMPORARY CITIES

OVERALL REFLECTIONS

ASSIGNMENT 4: MY SQUARE AERIAL PHOTOGRAPH TRACING RATIONALISATION MODEL-MAKING ADDITIONAL PHOTOS ‘OUR SQUARES’

ASSIGNMENT 3: MY OBSERVATIONS METHODS OF APPROXIMAION ADDITIONAL PHOTOS SECTION AND PLAN

URBAN INTERVENTION EXERCISE

PATH TRACING EXERCISE

ASSIGNMENT 1 & 2: MY VILLAGE NETWORK OF CONNECTIONS

PREFACE

This journal was produced as a parallel reflection on the content of ABPL20037; Urban Design Studies, at The University of Melbourne. The subject aims to expose students to the major concepts and ideas of urban design theory and practice, and to undertake critique of both contemporary and traditional urban design projects.

The contents of this journal include some brief reflections on general urban design concepts and the documentation of various exercises that analyse various aspects of urban processes, and also some history.

JONATHAN WIRJOPRAWIROWITH TUTOR; ALESSIA PEGOLIAND SUBJECT CO-ORDINATOR: JUSTYNA KARAKIEWICZ

Seeing is not the same as perceiving.While seeing relates to the physical process of observation, perceiving is never objective and is always the result of individual interpretation. Essentially, perception is sight AFTER it has gone through additional mental processes, rather than just raw data like one would see in a photograph.

These subjective interpretations can influences how the world is perceived, and hence affect the development of urban environments.

In comparison with other animals in the world, humans generally tend to see less, but perceive more. For example, an eagle might have amazing sight, but most of the time they do not interpret that data as anything more than whether or not what they see can be eaten.

What we are looking for also affects what we see. This phenomenon known as attentive blindness often completely shrouds major details as we look at a scene, but becomes incredibly useful as a filtering tool for searching and finding things among a myriad of jumbled information in everyday life.

...One way to analyse urban structure is by taking a look at its porosity. Similarly to water travelling through solids, pedestrians travelling organically through a city can give us an indication of density and positive and negative spaces. When we look at these spaces, it is crucial to note the voids as well as the solids of urban fabric. This will be explored further in later exercises.

SEEING

ASSIGNMENT 1 & 2: MY VILLAGE

It is a common approach in urban development to seek to recreate the spirit of a village when designing new developments, new sectors of the city or satellite towns.

We all have in our memories locations and buildings with which we are very familiar within which we describe our lives and our life styles. Your coffee shop, your school, your library, your grocery store, your tram stop, your doctor, your bank, your petrol station or bike shop, each of these describes your own village. These are the places, which you frequent on a regular basis, where you may meet the same people, people you don’t necessary know but with whom you become familiar. If you walk same route every day, or take public transport at the same time every day, you will probably meet the same people with regularity and thus they become a part of your village. Family and friends are part of our village too.

As you develop this network of places and people, you may find that it spreads beyond the local physical boundary and extends out, perhaps across the world. With current forms of communication, we can be in touch with people beyond the horizon and outside our time zone on such a frequent basis that they influence our lives directly. Thus, we can conjecture that our village today is not prescribed by geographical location. Unlike a physical village, our personal village is constantly changing and readapting to who we are, what we do and what new activities we may be engaged with. Our village can spread throughout the city, across the country and to other continents. The first exercise is to diagram your village, while thinking about:1. Your community: your family, your friends, and people you depend on (family, friends, doctor, teachers, grocer, barista, bank manager and so on)2. Places which you frequent on a regular basis3. Activities which form your daily life and where they take place (including your collaborators)4. Other important ways in which places and things which are essential to your village

Think about the ways in which you can describe your village to your colleagues and your tutors. Some things are essential when describing a place of habitation. For example, you will need to diagram distances. The distances may be real but they also may be conceptual. Think about the physical distance to someone you talk to on regular basis; although the physical distance maybe significant, this particular person may still be very close to you and very important part of your life. How do you think of this connection and how do you show it? Does physical distance matter? Think about how accessible your village is to you and to others. What are the barriers and what are the facilitators? Where do you feel safe, and where do you feel threatened, unwelcome and isolated? Is your village fragmented? And if yes, why does this fragmentation happen?

NETWORK OF CONNECTIONS AND VARIABLES

To demonstrate my village in a graphical way, I first looked at this task as a series of variables; either qualitative or quantitative. I then proceeded to find precedents on the multiple ways I could portray this in an infographic manner, and found that the network of connections system would work best in this situations, as it deals directly with my relationships to other people and places. Then, it was all a matter of putting as many variables as possible into a clear, cohesive, and structured diagram. I found that using a 2D cartesian plane is most effective because the axes themselves can take care of two variables, while the rest can be represented either by icons, size of connection lines, and colour of components.

In the end. to take it further, I incorporated yet another variable, which was the temporal aspect of my relationships with the people and places around me. I found the measure of time to be extremely difficult to represent, and so I had to simplify it into segments of time such as “interacted less than 1 year ago” or “less than one month ago”. That method made the concept more manageable to display on paper.

What is interesting about my project in particular that I did not see in others was the emergence of corellations in my data. Rather than just presenting themselves as a set of values, they tell a story - such as “it turns out that the people who are closer to me geographically tend to be closest to me emotionally as well” or “it turns out the people who hang around the university a lot are also really good friends with each other as a consequence of it”. I found that the implications of these, among other correlations, are quite profound.

CITY

WOR

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Jonathan Wirjoprawiro’s ‘Village’

ME GEOGRAPHICAL DISTANCE

EMOT

IONA

L DIS

TANC

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Variables:Amount of Interaction: Size of connection lineEmotional Distance: Y-axisGeographic Distance: X-axisCategories of People: Colour legendCategories of Places: Symbols/Icons

NETWORK OF CONNECTIONS AND VARIABLES

DATA REPRESENTATION

“Maps are graphic representations that facilitate spatial characteristics”

18th centuy: UK started standardising their maps19th century: the US, with geological surveys

The idea for maps sometimes is not about the precision, but more about the emerging patterns that occur, which may be able to help us predict the future or the past, by means of extrapolation.

Maps have developed over time and take different shapes and forms, they do NOT need to be drawings on paper - as the broader definition suggests.

The eskimos have been using totems made out of wood that they have carved into particular shapes to map out the outline of the coasts. In this sense, their intent is to map out geographical and natural features by touch, rather than by sight. This can be a very useful way to convey the same information when having delicate paper is impractical to carry around and is rendered useless in the dark of night.

In the same way, Polynesian’s have developed interesting “stick charts” that also map out geography. These stick charts are an interesting case study because it demonstrates a form of encryption of information, because only specific navigators are able to read/interpret these charts. However, these days most maps have tried to standardise styles and conventions to make it easier for an international audience to read common features of a map.

MAPPING

DATA

INFORMATION

COMPREHENSION

This area here is why diagrams are sometimes very useful. The process between compiling the information, and actually getting people to comprehend it, is quite a treacherous path and often gets lost in translation. Certain types of information are best represented in specific ways - for example most people are now accustomed to seeing the physical characteristics of the world, as well as other information such as demographics or network of associations, in 2-dimensional maps.

A lot of urban design studies rely on the tranformation of sets of data into a comprehensive representation, such as maps, graphs, and diagrams. However, it can often be difficult to selectively pick all of the data to compile into relevant information.

DATA REPRESENTATION

PATH TRACING

One of our exercises involved tracing the paths that people take around a part of campus. We did this by using chalk and simply drawing lines on the ground, following the movement of people through a certain area. Again, I think this exercise has a lot to do with gathering data, which can then translate to correlations and findings that we may not expect from the beginning.

We found that during different times of the day, the number of people walking towards different buildings shift dramatically. For example, a lot of people visited the pizza place when it was lunch time, and a lot less in the evening. That seems fairly intuitive, but then we explored a few more things.

One observation that emerged from this exercise was that some landscape elements such as trees and pot plants or a bench can attract a lot of people, and yet some others repel the movement lines quite dramatically. I am still quite unsure of why this happens, but arguably it is because of the seemingly convenient locations of one or the other.

As another side note, it seems that bicycles and other vehicles tend to travel in a more linear and straightforward pattern, whereas pedestrians generally linger and stray a lot more.

PATH TRACING

POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE SPACE

What do we mean by positive and negative space?

When looking at positive and negative space, it is extremely useful to look at Giambattista Nolli. He was an Italian architect in the early 18th century who re-drew the plan of Rome in an iconic style.

“The significance of the Nolli map for historians, scholars, students and practicing architects is that it gives a unique view of Rome’s “innate character.” It vividly reveals the topographic and spatial structure of the city, countering a tendency in contemporary architectural history and criticism to examine objects as isolated monuments outside the very context that give them life and meaning.”

Nolli maps show the solids and voids of an urban space and gives an understanding of the density of the city, as well as the porosity of the streets in terms of movement and traffic. It also shows the plans of major buildings with particular attention to the ‘poche’ hatching - similar to what can be seen in the works from the Beaux-Arts.

This type of mapping is extremely useful to form a network of associations between features at the scale of the building to the scale of the district and to the scale of the city. In the end, it can provide an analytical spatial understanding of the city, and also to provide the necessary information for the model-making exercise shown later in this journal.

POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE SPACE ASSIGNMENT 3: MY OBSERVATION

The brief:

Each student will be allocated a specific location along one of Melbourne majorstreets. Each tutorial group will be given a specific street.You are required to provide four drawings for your allocated street location:a sketch plan, a sketch section; and a scaled plan and section (at 1:100 scale).In all drawings include the following: buildings (height, setbacks, articulatefloors), footpaths, kerbs, medians, traffic and parking lanes, tramways, tramstops, bus stops/shelters, trees, street furniture (seats, poles, lights, bins,signage) and other elements that are significant in the area you have beenassigned such as public art, bikes, cars or anything else. Be sure to include atleast one person in the scaled section drawing.

Part 1 – Sketch drawings:The challenge for the sketch plans is that you can't use a tape measure or anymeasuring device. You have to learn to 'read' the size of objects through othertechniques ‐ eg. counting bricks/pavers. More techniques for ‘guestimating’distances will be outline in the lecture this week.On your drawings show is all information you have ‘measured’ by observing yourstreet section, and that you will use to produce accurate scaled drawings. (Notethat these sketches are ‘rough’ drawings and don’t need to be at scale.)

Part 2 – Scale drawings:Using your sketch plan and section, you will create scaled plan and sectiondrawings (at 1:100 scale).. Hand‐draw or computer generated drawings areequally acceptable.[Note on orientation of drawings.]

MY OBSERVATIONS

For this exercise, I was assigned a segment of Bourke Street to draw a plan and section of. The idea of this exercise was to again emphasise the usefulness of 2D representations of positive and negative spaces. The assignment also allowed me to become more familiar with the urban characteristics of Melbourne, and Bourke street is a great example of it.

The most outstanding feature of this street is it’s pedestrian mall, which is one of the primary tourist attractions for Melbourne. Other than that, this street is typical of the Hoddle Grid, with wide streets accommodating a two-way tram system, car lanes, and wide pedestrian foot paths in front of a series of commercial buildings.

Bourke street also has a wide variety of buildings, showcasing Melbourne’s urban history and the layering of different styles over a long period of time. Furthermore, these different buildings also show Melbourne’s multicultural personality.

METHODS OF APPROXIMATION

There are three major ways that I approximated the lengths and heights of different urban features/elements.

1. Human scale This included using my hand to measure individual bricks, using my strides to measure the width of foot paths, and using my height to measure the height of buildings. It’s the most intuitive measuring tool!

2. The heights of building floors Either by extrapolating my own height or using the standard commercial-building level heights, I ascertained an approximation of the building floors. I then used this to measure the rest of the other urban features, such as lamp posts, tram lines, other buildings, etc.

3. Modular building elements Once I knew the height of each building block, I could also count how many of modular pieces constituted a floor, or the whole building.

OVERALL VIEW

For this exercise, I was assigned a segment of Bourke Street to draw a plan and section of. This overall view of Bourke street represents the view of the section that I tried to draw. From this view, we can already approximate some of the scales of the elements, such as the tram in comparison to the cars, or the buildings in comparison to the lamp posts.

The most challenging part of producing the plan and section was not only the approximation of dimensions, but also the representation of them in black and white. Particularly with the section, I paid a lot of attention to the depth of the drawing, and tried different shades of grey to communicate the different distances and hierarchies of certain elements. I believe this filtering of information is really crucial in this exercise, and it helped me figure out which elements of the road were really important.

ADDITIONAL PHOTOS

SECTION AND PLAN

URBAN INTERVENTION

For this exercise, we tried multiple ways of causing some sort of disturbance in a public place. I believe that breaking convention is essential in re-thinking the function of urban spaces, and also stimulates the community involvement.

As a somewhat obstructive intervention, we tried having a picnic inside Melbourne Central, both in the way of pedestrian traffic and off to the side. I think the consequences were that people had to walk around the picnic area . However, unlike a still sculpture or simple benches, using people to disrupt pedestrian traffic allow for higher levels of interactivity with the community. Furthermore, it was also effective in attracting people’s gazes towards it.

Why should we merely use public spaces in the way that we normally do? and what does this mean in terms of urban design?

I think these kinds of interventions can help us analyse the way people move, and in conjunction with the path tracing exercise, it can give us an idea of how a space works. Personally, I find this task/experiment is very useful and relevant to my major in architecture.

If done well, urban interventions have also proven to create awareness of social issues, and this is usually done by large-scale public art works such as paintings. I think the urban environment has a lot of potential as a medium of communication and public art, not only to be expressive, but also to inspire and liven the human experience, which is something quite difficult to do in the modern city. This concept is what I have tried to explore before, as shown in the images below.

Left: Urban artwork by French photographer JR, winner of 2011 TED Prize.Right (inspired by left): ‘Conceptualisation of Mass Expressionism’, my own work, in collaboration with Qing Ping and Nathan Su - an entry for the design competition Sona Superstudio 2011

RE-APPROPRIATION OF PUBLIC SPACES

When discussing the matter of public and private spaces, one key concept comes to mind; the appropriation of existing spaces to accommodate new needs. This is especially important because a lot of buildings built in the city are built for permanence, and yet the current rate of change in technology and culture demand fast-paced and often more temporary solutions.

The New York high-line is a great example of a re-appropriation of an obsolete urban space. After the demolition of the rest of the railway, the High Line became a space void of any activity. However, it was noted that resilient plants started naturally growing from the railways. Urban designers then saw it as an opportunity to repurpose the space into a public park and walkway. Since it is surrounded by high-rises, it also became a centrepiece of sorts, and due to the re-designing, the property valuation of the adjacent and nearby real-estate (especially those with desirable vantage points) has also skyrocketed.

Furthermore, unlike Central Park, the walkway also has quite a lot of traffic even at night, making it one of the safest public open spaces with very minimal security authorities.

In the end, perhaps all urban design should strive to have this adaptive capacity - to be able to transform itself when the changes of the society demands it. Finding out a method to design something like that is another question altogether.

Despite all of that, re-appropriation of spaces is not limited to large-scale urban developments. Most of the re-appropriation that happens in urban spaces is simply people using a space in a different way than it was designed to be used. For example, as Justyna pointed out in one of her lectures, it is amazing to see how many find comfortable places to sleep in public spaces, whether it is a park bench, lawns, leaning on light poles, etc.

ANCIENT AND CONTEMPORARY CITIES

WIth ancient and contemporary cities, I compared the environments of ancient Greece/Rome with the current Brazillian favelas. As far as urban environments are concerned, I believe these two are interesting phenomena in their own contexts.

I think the main difference between these two environments the size of the population, the resources available to them, and how they emerged. While the ancient cities were symbols of progression, favelas are associated with degeneration. UN HABITAT suggests that “slums in the traditional sense are housing areas that were once respectable – even desirable – but which deteriorated after the original dwellers moved on to new and better parts of the city. The condition of the old homes declined as they were progressively subdivided and rented out to lower income people”. Favelas and many other slums of the world lack infrastructure, mainly due to the general state of urban decay and social problems (crime, unemployment, etc).

One thing that interested me was that favelas resembled a megastructure, perhaps due to its relation with the topography, or its somewhat modular appearance. The ‘megastructure’ was a popular architecture and urban design thinking in the 1960s, as a solution to the unpredictable growth and change in a city. “In a way megastructures were the first examples of time-based urbanism. Megastructures were buildings at the scale of a city... a large frame in which all the functions of a city or part f a city are housed”. This concept is a stark contrast from the urban form of the Athens agora or the Roman forum, for example, which consist of discrete buildings.

What we remember from the ancient cities are their monuments. In previous subjects - as with this one - I have come to know Athens and Rome as cities of monuments, landmarks, and great public spaces such as the stoa and marketplaces. In rome especially, the introduction of roads and aqueducts served as vital infrastructure for urban growth.

However, one thing they have in common is the organic formation of the environments over time. If we compare other cities again, we see that Beijing’s centric city planning in the Qing Dynasty, or Melbourne’s Hoddle Grid, are both planned and built almost instantaneously, relative to favelas and the ancient Greece/Rome, which were instead a result of many changes over long periods of time.

TOP: the Stoa of Attalos in AthensBOTTOM LEFT: example of megastructure in architectureBOTTOM RIGHT: Photo of a Brazilian favela

MY SQUARE

ASSSIGNMENT 4: SQUARESThe purpose of this assignment is to introduce you to scale and proportion of open spaces (squares) within urban structure as well as components, framing and surfaces that define these squares.

We were asked to produce a model of a well-known public square anywhere in the world at the scale of 1:1000. It is important to show the three-dimensional features of your square, such as the topography and accurate building elevations.

PIAZZA FARNESE

The following Information is directly taken from Ultimate Italy,(http://www.ultimateitaly.com/piazzas-italy/piazza-farnese.html)

This is an elegant square of immense proportions and welcomes the visitor with its grandeur. It has two beautiful fountains and the majesty of the Farnese Palace.

In 1626 G. Rainaldi constructed the fountains as per the wish of cardinal Farnese. These 17th century marble fountains were made from Egyptian granite taken from the Baths of Caracalla. Initially one of the basins was sent to the Piazza del Duca, which is the modern day Piazza Farnese on the orders of Pope Paul Farnese III. During that period there was insufficient water to supply the fountain and it stayed an ornamental showpiece for many years. When the Aqua Vergine’s water flow increased cardinal Farnese asked for and obtained from Pope Gregory XIII the other basin, which was located in Piazza Venezia.

Thus the twin fountains with their large granite basins adorned the center of Piazza Farnese. They are decorated with lilies. The flower de Lys is the emblem of both the aristocratic Roman Farnese family and the French royal family.

The Palazzo Farnese dominates Piazza Farnese with its sheer size and beauty. Many people consider this the ultimate renaissance palace, as it is big, beautiful and full of art.

In 1514 Alexander Farnese who was then a cardinal ordered Antonio de Sangallo a young and talented architect to build the Farnese Palace. In 1524 he became Pope Paul III and enlarged the palace. He got the famous renaissance sculptor and painter Michelangelo to design and implement these additions.

Michelangelo now became the key architect of the Farnese Palace. He was responsible for building the overhanging Florentine roof and the wide cornice below it. He directed this gigantic project for two decades. He created the top floor with taller looking windows and ceilings higher that his predecessor Sangallo had used in the lower two floors. Thus the inventor of Mannerism inverted the usual ratio, where upper floors are given less importance than lower floors, to relieve monotony and add some tension to the building. He broke the classical rules of architecture like Raphael did and created a masterpiece of a palace in the process.

In 1564 Michelangelo died and Giacomo della Porta added the rear facade over the garden and the view of St. Peter’s.

There is a monumental inner courtyard. The state dining room has frescoes by Annabel Carraci. Unfortunately you cannot see the beautiful inner areas of the Farnese Palace as it is the working and living space of the French ambassador and its embassy and is leased to them from the 1630’s till 2035.

On the northern side of the Piazza Farnese is the Palazzo Pichini. It is also known as Palazzo Roccagiovine. In 1705 Alexander Specchi redesigned it. The faced has recently been repainted but some more work is required to maintain its beautiful interiors.

A visit to Piazza Farnese is on the agenda of most tourists to Rome. However if you can obtain an invitation from the French ambassador or embassy to visit the inner rooms of the palace it would indeed be a more interesting and fulfilling visit.

WHY I CHOSE THE AREA (HIGHLIGHTED IN RED):

As I had chosen to analyse Piazza Farnese in Rome, I thought it would be useful to grab some key ideas of what makes the place the way it is. As discussed before, the most prominent building is Palazzo Farnese, so I decided to put that in the centre of my model. Other key aspects were its proximity to the river, and also the surrounding layout of the residential blocks. I found that the highlighted area encapsuates all of these features while still fitting on an A4 sheet.

TRACING

The way I went about creating the model was to first trace the location of the streets, the square, and the river, according to what I found in both Google Maps and Google Earth. This way, I could clearly start to see the formation of positive and negative spaces; and which areas are used for movement/traffic, and which are used for buildings.

At this stage, my findings lead me to believe that the piazza was located in quite a remote space. From previous knowledge, I learnt that the urban fabric of Rome was built organically over the years, because of its long history as far back as the ancient times. As such, some features of the city, such as Piazza Farnese, was not located to create an axial visual termination, nor as a really ‘public’ space. This refers back to the idea of public and private spaces as discussed earlier in this journal, and in this case, although the square is ‘public’, I would imagine that in the Renaissance era it would be fairly privatised by the Farnese family.

This organic planning is the opposite to what we’d see in places like Melbourne or Beijing, where they had a ‘master planner’ to design the bulk of the city, which generally shows a more rigid and organised grid-like structure such as the Hoddle Grid. Overall, from this diagram we can also clearly tell that Piazza Farnese was built in the Renaissance era because the roads are inherently appropriated for pedestrian use, rather than for modern transportation.

RATIONALISATION

The next step, was to add the buildings. In this step, I decided to really simplify the essence of the area because directly translating geometry from Google Earth would have resulted in an incoherent clutter which would not have been useful for this exercise. So, rather than a direct translation, I traced over the most important buildings and elevations that could just as effectively convey the idea surrounding this public place.

There are a few main features that emerged from this step;1. The clearly overbearing size of Palazzo Farnese, showcasing the dominance of the family at its prime.2. The gratuitous number of buildings that are built according to the palazzo typology, which was very

popular particularly in the 15th-17th centuries. In terms of positive and negative spaces, this can be seen in the various ‘cortile’ (central courtyards in the palazzi) around the area.

3. The lack of modern buildings - this area is dominated by renaissance buildings that are three or four storeys tall - and it really impacts the visual aspect of the city skyline.

This rationalisation step not only helped in selectively choosing what was important and discarding all the unnecessary information, it also helped to simplify the model-making process. This adds the extra layer of interpretation, rather than just replicating the existing context.

MODEL-MAKING

Generally, the model-making process was extremely tedious. I found myself further simplifying some of the buildings due to time constraints, but overall I feel it still retains the piazza’s urban characteristics.

After I printed the templates shown in the previous page, I labeled each building according to their elevation heights, which I ascertained from Google Earth. I also labeled other features such as voids and open spaces accordingly, to map out where my model buildings would be glued on to.

Then, it was just a matter of drawing up and nesting the building shapes into pieces of card, cutting them, and gluing them together in a long and arduous process...

At the start, I did think about modelling the facade details of the buildings, and also the roof structures, but I felt that for this particular square it would not have added anything to my analysis (not to mention taking a lot more time!), so instead I tried to accentuate the ‘cortile’ and the elevational heights of the buildings.

ADDITIONAL PHOTOS

ADDITIONAL PHOTOS

‘OUR SQUARES’

Having finished our individual squares, we put them all together as part of a collaborative exhibition, and seeing the conglomerate of public squares lined up in this manner is a different experience altogether.

One of the most interesting observations is the difference in scales (many of them totally unexpected) for various squares as they were built in different parts of the world, and also in different times. This arrangement shows clearly how the urban planning of the medieval era in France differs to the renaissance era in Italy, and how those differ again to the modern era in the US.

Many aspects of urban planning came together in this exhibition, and it was really nice to see some squares which were planned axially or some which had a monument as a centrepiece, or other squares which were mainly designed to suit the natural slope of the landscape.

ADDITIONAL PHOTOS

ADDITIONAL PHOTOS

‘PINTEREST’ING

For this subject, we were introduced a platform of sharing our ideas and images; the internet social media “Pinterest”.

Pinterest allows its users to “pin” images or videos onto category-based “pinboards”. Pinboards collect photos based on themes such as fashion or technology or humour. In this case, we were concerned with photos that were fascinating in an urban sense. We combined photos that we took ourselves out in the streets and also pins from other websites, forming a conglomerate of wildly unique images that show the intrigue of different cities and experiences.

Below are a few interesting images that I have pinned onto my boards relating to this subject, and Pinterest was the medium on which I had undertaken the exploration of building facades that were designed to be viewed at different speeds, whether by pedestrians or cars.

REFLECTION

The subject reveals many characteristics of urban spaces, and it teaches a lot about the scales of the city, the positive and negative spaces, and also how they are used on a daily basis.

The lectures and overall course content seems very disconnected and often irrelevant, and it is very difficult to filter or grasp from it what was really important. At the start of the semester, I intended this journal to be an attempt to do that - to try and make my learning more of a linear process.

However, towards the end I found out that the way it was taught is very different. Rather than a top-down approach, Justyna and Alessia emphasised the rhizomic structure of learning in this course. This meant that the content was a culmination of different topics with variable relevance and seemingly no hierarchical importance. Instead of documenting all of the content, this drove me to do a little bit of my own research into what I found were most interesting in the lecture contents. This journal aims to reflect that.

What I found quite profound though, is that many of the concepts, ideas, and knowledge are directly applicable to my other subjects, whether it is my architecture design studio or history subjects. For example, the studies on the 5km/h and 100km/h facades has helped me approach the project for the Wyndham Gateway Installation. This leads me to treat this subject as a complementary subject for every other subject, rather than a stand-alone.

In collaboration with Guang Xu and Qian Chen: Design for the Wyndham gateway installation for Architecture Design Studio: Air,

With this design, the different speeds at which the installation is viewed was critical.