Project Two

Project Two
Urbia
Social Space in the Sectional City

Plug-in City: Maximum Pressure Area by Peter Cook, 1964

OVERVIEW

Collectively, you will investigate and represent the urban condition through the creation of a continuous section. Each individual portion of the section will differ in representational strategy, but they will be carefully co-ordinated with neighboring portions so as to maintain sectional continuity.


PART ONE: DUE OCTOBER 23, 2008, 8:30AM

A 1000m stretch of downtown, from the centre of Toronto City Hall to the centre of Union Station, has been divided into 20 equal portions, each approximately 50m in length. Each of you has been assigned one of these portions, as shown below (click on the image to enlarge it, and right-click on the image to save it to disk).

Through actual and virtual exploration, determine the spatial qualities and quantities that exist within your assigned portion. Pay special attention to the interconnected spaces between your portion and adjacent portions; to adjacencies between private and public, solid and void; and to the variety of experiential conditions that exist within your portion. You will not be expected to produce an accurate measured drawing of your site - careful approximate methods are sufficient. Document your exploration through a combination of media: writing, sketching, photography, audio recording, video recording or any other technique you may be comfortable with.

Do not limit your explorations to the cutting plane of your section, as its exact position remains undetermined, though it will lie between York Street and Bay Street. Your section is "looking east," so be sure to account for objects and environments visible beyond your site in this direction. You are expected to account for environments occurring up to 125m above grade, and down to 25m below grade.

Next, develop strategies for representing the character of the spaces in question. Suggested strategies include pencil, pen, ink, watercolour, acrylic, collage and montage. Each of you has one or more media with which you are already familiar and facile - it is suggested that you play to your strengths for this Project. You will be operating at a relatively small scale, and the density of information is high, so precise, hard-edged techniques are especially suitable, but your final product will not be a technical drawing: it will be a highly personal representational response to your experience of the space. You may rightfully choose your representation so as to celebrate the positive aspects of the interconnected dynamism of downtown space. But remember, there are insidious forces at play here as well:

Where once streets and and sidewalks intervened between the islands of glass and spandrel panel, the new bridges and tunnels continue the same architectural order, and with them, the same socio-economic order, between blocks. Heretofore streets functioned as periodic reminders and enforcers of the civic domain; the new patterns of city building remove even this remaining vestige of public life, replacing them with an analogue, a surrogate.

from Overhead and Underground by Trevor Boddy, 1992

For Thursday, October 23 at 8:30AM, prepare the following:

• A minimum of five samples of your site documentation: passages, sketches, photographs or otherwise.
• A minimum of three samples of possible representational strategies. These should take the form of 1:100 sketches of selected portions of your section, using the actual media you intend to employ in your final drawing.

Post all items to the blog, and bring as many of them as possible in hard-copy form to class on Thursday. Please also read Overhead and Underground: Building the Analogous City by Trevor Boddy, which we will be discussing.


PART TWO: DUE OCTOBER 30, 2008, 8:30AM

You have quantitatively and qualitatively documented your assigned portion of the collective section, and have developed suite of representational strategies with which to represent it. You will now prepare a presentation quality drawing, which will conform to the following parameters.

• Each drawing will be 50 cm wide and 150 cm high
• The drawing scale will be 1:100
• The ground plane on each drawing will at a height of 25cm (although there is a slight elevation loss from north to south along the section, this will be ignored for the purposes of this Project)

These parameters are visually summarized below.

You must co-ordinate the continuity of the section with your neighbors. All spaces that continue from one portion to the next should be carefully aligned with adjacent portions. It is strongly suggested that the heights of all continuous lines relative to the ground-plane datum be firmly established on Thursday, October 23 (I will facilitate this process).

For Thursday, October 30 at 8:30AM, prepare the following:

• One presentation-quality drawing of your assigned portion of the continuous section

I will document the results for the class and post them to the blog.


EVALUATION

Five Samples of Site Documentation: /5
Three Samples of Representational Strategies: /3
Quality of Information Collected: /3
Representation Style, Craft and Care: /5
Group Co-ordination: /2
Insights Derived: /2