Thinking about Islais Creek area 500 years from now....
What if there was a major traffic jam in the entire world were cars would clog all the streets, bumper to bumper. The we simply crushed the cars and put more asphalt on top of the streets. The funny thing is that all the streets would now be raised 4 feet from the sidewalk.... Imagine lots of "soft shoulders"
What if we were all to move into tall twenty stories buildings and have the rest of the land to be reclaimed by nature. Let say we could have 700 people in each building, then we would need 1000 buildings in the city to fit everyone.
What if along Islais Creek becomes a Permanent Area Preservation. That means most of the creek might be daylit, and bike and walk paths are build.
What if the Big One comes and Glen Park becomes really wide, like the mission. People populate the new formed flat parts of areas making it unrecognizable.
OK then, which one? Or all? Or a hybrid of...
ReplyDeleteThe building on top of the last layer is a normal thing (sequence occupancy), but your proposal is that it is planned and happens for reasons of expediency (absurd) after a catastrophe and then the creation of an absurd and seemingly irrational landscape. What happens if this is done over and over again, in ways other than the cars and roads, how would the landscape change.
The Dutch have done this on a smaller scale. The typical tall thin houses of the cities (esp. Amsterdam) were built as the size of the parcel of land determined your taxes more than the size (sq feet, height) of the house. Land is a premium so build up. This is a also the modus operandi of urban farming - vertical space (e.g. hanging tomato plants). Also see MRDV’s Costa Iberica (I have brought this into class and can again if you remind me) as it shows this same scenario of human vertical density ad absurdum.
http://www.mvrdv.nl/#/projects/costaiberica