Urban Condenser
This project is a 21 st century response to the 20th-century broad cities. Metropolitan delineates a great illusion that absorbs people from anywhere. The non-stop in motion transforms the urban into a chaotic collection gradually.
Not only the numerous amount of population brings traffic congestion and environmental challenges that undermine the functionality of the city, but also the people who are trapped in the scenario become a part of this machine imperceptibly. Human behaviors are formed more like a sequential looping led by this machine. A human being should be able to re-enact incidents from their own experience. They should not accept passively whatever happens to them but wake to a critical awareness of reality.
For solving these issues, the project began with the retrospective consideration of past futures - modernism. It is then brought to the 21 st century and integrated with the new conditions to generate its potential possibilities. The proposed ideas of plasticity, mobility, metabolism, and cybernetics are iterated with new technological, social, and environmental factors.
In Anthony Vidler's article "Cities of Tomorrow", Critic Reyner Banham believed there is a tre- mendous difference around 1960. From his de- scription, 1909 to 1960 is the first machine age, the second machine age was enlightened after 1960. The way he named them is caused by the "cold hard fact" problem commonly existed in the first generation. The industrial evolution immigrated Avant-garde consciousness. But technology can only accomplish enclosure and service systems, while machines could not take neither aesthetics nor imaginations further. The second machine age is not restricted on major events, but there were many revolutions around 1960, such like the appearance of the Cybernetic sculptures on 1950, New Brutalism on 1953. Post modern on 1961, and the rising awareness of Ecology on 1971. Reyner Ban- ham believed that Brutalism might produce an "Other" architecture - an architecture Autre - that would somehow miraculously join an opposition- al aesthetic from the previous orders to techno- logical maturity on modern society.
New brutalism is an unfortunate appellation that is cobbled from art brut and beton brut. It takes the advance of unpolished frames and raw elements to compromise the opposition between traditions and industrial spirits. The glorious of the new generation was later mantled by the post-modern form - the eclectic compromise of motifs from the early disorientated movements.
Most Modern projects have the tendency of the "Great complex" such as the "Plugin city" by Peter Cook in 1963. It took the advantages of providing high density and exibility by envisioned new urban environments. "Clip-on" accessories also derived a trend that was visible in "The Fun Place" by Cedric Price. "City of the Future" by R. Buckminster Fuller, and so on at that period of time. The usage of vehicles was being ubiquitous.
One of the first groups of architects that indulged in vehicles belonged to Futurists. In "The New Plasticity" Written by Sanford Kwinter, said "New industrial culture is formed by machines. The manifesto follows, praising danger, movement, crowds, and speed. Speed is a new form of beauty, an elope to the mechanism and abstract energy of war and automobiles. "Dynamism" was the catchword for the entire movement." Futurists could not tolerate the compromise to the past ages. The outdated conventional ideas were chain and bondage to broken. Avant-garde art that cast aside traditions also had a non-negligible influence. "The New Plasticity" analyzed in physics "The Field" and in aesthetic "Plastic Dynamism". In the physics field, Einstein first presented his "Theory of Relativity" in 1905. It relates and transforms time and space coordinates from one inertial system to another, which means the coordinate system is not only formed by x,y, and z, but also the time (t).
For the plastic dynamism, space led to the autonomous aesthetic concept as indistinct from solid objects. Based on the plastic zones, dynamism, and consistency, Sanford Kwinter proposed three hypotheses:
1. Hypothesis of the undividedness of the object field.
2. The hypothesis of universal motion.
3. Time and space are full and have a plastic consistency.
Sanford winter believed that "Architecture should be a sign constellation that works outside the culture through code intermediaries, but a complete internal and inherited mechanism that is inseparable from the institutions of the world and operates internally.
"The New City" project that emerged by reassembling the institutions from the study for buildings, lighthouses, stations, and hangers with order is such a work by Antonio Sant'Elia, It is a remarkable masterpiece of futurism. Futurism produces the future, but it was not aimed as im- mortal works. Antonio's original intention was not meant to last. Each subsequent generation was expected to build their own city rather than inheriting the architecture from the past.
Cybernetics is concerned with information, feedback, identity, and purpose. It examined such issues as how human learns from their environments. In the project "The Fun Place" by Cedric Price. He mentioned that men and women were bored with their daily routine. In his fun place, people would be able to re-enact incidents from their own experience, they do not need to passively accept whatever happens to them, and they would wake to a critical awareness of reality. Cybernetic sculptures were also playing with the different situations of light, temperature, color, and sound to make an impact on people's behaviors.
With the developing usage of electricity. and computing phenomenon becomes more mature, ecology entered people's field of vision by using mathematical and other ways to minimize the waste or expose the problem. In 1998 MVRDV came up with the project "Data Town" The city has a series of sectors each containing important infrastructure for the survival of a complete autarkic city. And the waste is exposed and accumulated in the city's skyline. Ecology is basically the harmony between architecture and the environment.
Nowadays, projects such as the terraform one's Post Carbon city, re-ordered the hierarchy of problems happening today, and take the advance of modernism to utilize the technologies. It is a revival of modernism within the new state of the 21st century.
