day 71_Buenos Aires_first impressions

Back on the road… This is my first day in Buenos Aires and my first day of the Winchester travels overall. So far, I really like the city. It feels very European, which I’m not surprised, but it’s much more heterogeneous. Today I mostly walked through Palermo and Recoleta, which are considered one of the nicest areas in the city (and of course the most visited by tourists). As I mentioned, the city fabric is more heterogeneous than a typical European city. Eight-twelve story apartment buildings are intermixed with one-two story buildings with a more colonial flare, which results in a great visual variability and brings a lot of energy to the streetscape. Streets are lined with trees and parked cars, retail space typically occupies the first floor of the buildings, and graffiti is covering almost all surfaces within human reach.

However, despite the heterogeneity in street section and elevation, the city could not be more homogeneous in plan. Everything is laid out on a shifted grid (which of course makes the navigation through the city very easy). But I was struck by the uniformity of urban fabric when arriving on the plane late at night. Buenos Aires looked like a glowing checkered table cloth, nicely laid out, covering an incredibly flat and expansive area at the edge of Rio de la Plata basin - one of the largest river basins in the world.

ABOUT

The travels have been done in two stages. The first part was supported by the Gertraud A. Wood Traveling Fund and concluded with a book and an exhibition at the Yale School of Architecture (see Metropolis Now for more details). The journey took me to the East and was completed during the summer of 2012. During the second part, supported by the William Wirt Winchester Traveling Fellowship, I will be traveling to the West, not as a dialectical opposite to my Eastern travels, but rather as a continuation of the same journey.

Last summer I visited some of the most populous and rapidly growing cities in the world, where the impact of global capital was visible on every corner. Despite the globalization, rapid urbanization, and one could also argue rapid westernization of the world, cities are not generic, as I already had a chance to see in the first part of my travels, and local variations still prevail and are much greater than some would want us believe. The goal of these two trips is to learn about the individual differences and uniqueness of each metropolis, and find architectural and urban examples that stand against and in contrast to, using Koolhaas’s term, junkspace.

The proposed research is in three stages:  1. Subjective observation (travel period), 2. Objective analysis (post-travel), 3. Projective conclusion (post-analysis).

The purpose of this travelog is to record what I have seen and experienced during my trips, more or less narrowed down to architecture and urbanism. Most of the time the accompanying text is a quick observation of a particular building or area I visited that day, purposefully avoiding conclusions, with the hope that after the end of the trip I will be able to digest all the information, distill it, analyze it, and come up with a critical stance on the contemporary metropolis, or at least a critical comparison between the visited metropolises and architecture operating within them.

After the completion of my travels, the hope is to expose and illustrate the findings through rigorous comparative analysis in three distinctive but related scales: 1. Metropolitan scale: form and structure of each metropolis, 2. City scale: formal organization of urban fabric in each metropolis (planned vs. unplanned), 3. Building scale:  open spaces (parks, squares, boulevards, etc.) and iconic buildings.

METROPOLIS NOW Journey to the East _ BOOK

Photo-journal with accompanying notes, plus some analysis of the largest metropolises I visited during my recent travels to Asia. The book is part of an exhibit at the Yale School of Architecture (see below).

Here are some sample pages:

METROPOLIS NOW Journey to the East

An exhibition at the Yale School of Architecture on display now until June!

Finally pulling together some of the travel research and photos from the Wood Travel Fellowship. So here it is:

The goal of the trip was to visit some of the most populous cities in the world, in countries very different from what I had been used to, with the hope of exploring and better understanding the notion of a metropolis. A very ambitious agenda, indeed, and that became clear once I started travelling and realized that to analyze, categorize, research, or simply ‘understand’ what a metropolis is and how individual pieces of architecture operate within it is a much more complicated task than I ever imagined. 

When Le Corbusier made his journey to the East, he kept journals of highly personal impressions and sketches to record his observations. Despite my love of drawing, I sketched very little during my two months of travels. Instead, innumerable photographic observations were made of each city, area, and building visited, with quick accompanying notes and ideas recorded in a travel journal. One could argue that the difference between the two modes of observation arises from the rapid speed and chaotic nature of the delirious metropolis of today. But just like for Le Corbusier, the journey to the East was a voyage of discoveries, self-reflections, and an almost overwhelming source of inspiration that will last a lifetime.

This comparative matrix is looking at the visited metropolitan areas in a more objective way, in order to better understand their geography, size, formal organization, and structure of the urban fabric. Naturally, the more stable features - topography and infrastructure networks - provide the overall physical structure, the spatial skeleton. However, while travelling it became apparent that the boundaries of these metropolises are ambiguous, and clear distinctions between urban and rural do not exist. Additionally, they do not have a center, but multiple areas acting as central nodes, and the typical notion of inside and outside, or the almost archaic dichotomy of public and private, do not exist, which poses new challenges for visualizing them. Especially in Japan and China, cities have become complex, three-dimensional spatial networks with unprecedented scale and speed of development, where buildings or even whole areas come and go literally over night.

The bottom portion of the board attempts to portray this complexity of space and time:

Unlike the more objective matrix of the metropolises (above), the following board represents subjective snapshots of my journey to the East.

In this display, rather than portraying each metropolis separately, the idea is to look at the photographs collectively, cross-referencing topics that defy an already arbitrary boundaries.

A book - photo journal of sorts - will come in a couple of days! I'll post some sample photos once it's done.

day 70_Istanbul

Just like the mosques in the old parts of the city, the new high-rise towers are clearly identifiable figures within the city fabric, redefining Istanbul's skyline.

day 68_Istanbul_the Bazaar

"The Bazaar! The worst horrors are to be found in there... It is a labyrinth, a maze of arcades, without a glimpse of sky for several kilometers. It is closed in, suffocating, and secluded. Here and there tiny windows pierce the low barrel vault, and yet it is well lit. It is deserted at night and frenzied during the day.One does not enter a shop, one is sucked and shoved in; once inside the great machine, the ‘hustle’ begins. The verbiage is insane, shouted by five or six who have almost dismembered you alive. There are several others who scream dreadfully. Of course they know what you want even before you do." Le Corbusier in Journey to the East

day 68_Istanbul_geometry

boolean operations:

geometric surface networks: