A City Machine/Design Studio

A City Machine Design Studio Cycle

A City Machine:

• …Having to do with domicile… {domestic and nomadic} topologies.
• …Having to do with real space… {or Euclidean surface boundaries}.
• …Having to do with the public…

spaces of {production, exchange and consumption}.

The exercise was constructed as a single, loosely formed sequence of ideas, focusing on the complex, ‘organic’ multiplicities that constitute South Asian Urbanity. We were focussed, on the one hand, on historical processes constantly informing the shaping of the city, and on the other, on the ‘moment’. The city was seen as a quasi-industrial system, which worked in order to re-produce itself; and design was influenced by ideas borrowed from the disciplines of production engineering and industrial engineering.

The city was seen as a mechanical assemblage, producing ever new formations within itself, constantly transforming and finding new identities. We thought in a single determinate mobilisation. Wherein we analysed Urban systems as constituted of various topologies, a consequence of force diagrammes which might be stated as: a City - Machine.

A city - Machine and its sub-systems are modelled as 3d diagrammes, which are treated as 'sites' by assuming that Architecture inhabits a synthetic City - Machine rather than a space plotting divisions and classification, representing the ownership of property. Or the Relation of Immanence of the Eater and the Eaten.

The Phenomena under Study

Bataille once wrote of the cathedral of Reims, it’s beauty and its stability, its architecture. And a garden of emotion...until the war, and one day the shells arrived.

The writing in a sense encapsulates the history of 20th century architecture, and the city : a city of processes at once formative and destructive...the processes of production, the production of production relations, and the production of destruction.

The Object under Study

The urban artefact is an objectile, a word to be placed in the same category as tactile, or projectile—a shell. Bound to and mobilised by its own trajectory. And not much besides.

The twentieth century saw a transformation in the way we understand the urban artefact, freed at last from the confines of physicality, of the Surface. We nowwork without the orthographic and the optical in the production of cities. The urban artefact was seen outside of the empirically experienceable as our understanding of space [and of our own bodies] transformed. We now know space and our bodies with senses other then the bodily.

By its trajectories, the objectile forms a vast force field, a mathematical space, on the one hand, a space of diagrammes...of the 'decomposition of bending moments or of flexicons...where numerical division is only the condition of morphogenetic movements...' and on the other hand, the formation of an organism...'increasingly probable and natural when an infinity of intermediate states is given'.

Objective

To enter the diagramme composed, to enter the field and to inspect conditions possible by which the Urban Formation comes into becoming.

This studio sets out to learn to map, draw and compose the codes within which societies live, and cities come into existence. If the city is not understood as composed of “membranes and limits”, then the interior and exterior milieus come together as codings.

The agent of representation will need to compose and construct the appropriate membranes, but these will always need to arise from the processes of the milieu. With this in mind, the programme for the studio elaborates the stages of study, the aspects of study and methods of inquiry.

See also, Fragments from the Students' Log-Books:

• Andreas Fluck: /Monads of a City Machine
• Atul Sharma: /untitled
• Jan Margen: /Speed-Exchange

/processmap

[Design Studio] + [Thinking Heterotopia]