Mauro Baracco_WS 01 EVERYTHING NATURE

Ex-scalo Farini: urban/architectural/landscape strategies for a resilient Milano

“There are things that I do not like in this world, I could be ironic, but I am very careful no to be”

[Guido Guidi]

ARCHITECTURAL THINKING AND CLIMATE CHANGE/URBAN RESILIENCE
This design workshop encourages a role for architects as operative strategic figures aiming to integrate complex systems, competing needs and seemingly polarized aims, therefore leading to innovative and provocative combinations of program, siting, and built form where outcomes can be far reaching, addressing issues beyond the traditional domain of the building and/or individual object. How and where people live, work, produce their food, share community activities, participate into the world from their specific places and how these solutions interact with the natural environment must be re-thought to combine sustainable social and environmental solutions. These issues land at the feet of traditional concerns of architecture: land use and urbanization, big and small systems and relationships. What role can architecture play?
THE WORKSHOP
This workshop will place architectural design in a leading position to develop design-based solutions to climate change and urban resilience by considering the traditional concerns of land use and urbanization anew. It will investigate the role and effects of ‘urban renewal’ applied to urban environments that are currently in highly sensitive situations regarding urban, architectural and ecological degradation. The Farini ex-railway transport hub will be explored as an area with the potential to maintain the richness natural ecosystem that is currently informing the whole site, and yet also at the same time as a place for various activities to be undertaken in integration with the existing natural vegetation. This workshop aims to produce an alternative approach to current planning that fills open space, or generally designs in isolation so that these open areas are for the most part leftover and disconnected from natural systems and the amenity of the landscape. In opposition to conventional development approaches that set up a clear distinction between built space and vegetated space, favouring the built space in any figure ground, the approach encouraged through the workshop supports the current urgency to restore our natural systems in order to preserve water supply, wetlands and biodiversity conservation as essential remedies of carbon sequestration.

The Farini area is a symptomatic example of an area that has been severed from its context by infrastructure and vacated by industrial and infrastructural activities. This area has been suffering of environmental degradation (notwithstanding the ‘spontaneous’ presence of some natural ecosystem), and is at risk to the impacts of climate change. The studio will aim to rehabilitate this area through minimal and yet effective transformations based on ‘performative landscapes’ that can contribute to make this area a resilient environment, in its turn with the potential to infuse further levels of urban resilience throughout the whole urban context of Milan and its surrounding territory.

“Resilience is the amount of change or disruption an ecosystem can absorb and, following these change events, return to a recognizable steady state in which the system retains most of its structures, functions and feedback…sustainability typically means the dynamic balance between social-cultural, economic and ecological domains of human behavior necessary for humankind’s long-term surviving and thriving”.
[Nina-Marie Lister, ‘Resilience – Designing the New Sustainability’, Topos, no. 90, 2015, pp. 14-21]

The workshop will also address biological and technological systems, designing and arranging these into vibrant and livable urban habitats, supporting theoretical positions according to which no new land should be cleared and degraded land should be rehabilitated. It sustains the scientific fact that urban ‘bush’ contributes to ecological conservation and biodiversity. It aims to carefully consider the role of architecture and its inevitable land use on a small and large scale – from this point of view, the Green River vision by Stefano Boeri Architetti as a continuous linear system of parks, gardens, orchards and sport/leisure infrastructures for Milan is a relevant reference to the works that will be explored through the workshop. In parallel with these concerns, the workshop will also encourage projects and interventions for cross-programs, so as to also envisage economic sustainability in the form of functional and economic flexibility.

In particular, the aim of the workshop is to focus on urban visions and related architectural and landscape interventions that include the following integrated outcomes:

  • urban forest and green infrastructures
  • nature-based productive activities
  • renewable energies
  • education and professional development activities related to environmental and climate change awareness
  • productive veggie gardens
  • sport, fitness and leisure activities
  • alternative ‘un-formed/in-formal’ spaces for residential and work activities
  • spatial continuity with immediately surrounding areas, including: Cimitero Monumentale, Parco Sempione, Bovisa and Isola areas
  • spatial continuity and large scale connections with extensive rural park systems around Milan

Through this workshop projects will be undertaken at many different scales, from territorial to urban and architectural, testing ideas through the simultaneous application of these scales. They will be undertaken through different and yet closely correlated approaches, exploring interventions that are at the same time architectural, infrastructural and landscape in character, as well as aiming to solutions as responses to the ecological significance and links to natural systems that are provided by existing open spaces. These projects will also engage with the notions of distributed and networked systems, opportunistically taking advantage of spatial, cultural, geographical and urban conditions existing in both the Farini site area and its immediate and larger scale surroundings. Projects will aim to relate particular smaller scales interventions with larger scale territorial visions (and viceversa) – this may involve the relocation of inappropriately located buildings; the reconfiguration and reuse of existing abandoned buildings and infrastructures; the transformation, in use and experience, of existing open space; the questioning of the need to produce new built footprints; and other similar strategies in order to find meaningful end effective relationships between the natural and the built environments.

GROUP WORK AND DESIGN APPROACH

Group Work
Students will work in groups – larger groups in the first 2, 3 days of the design workshop; smaller groups in the last few days, also working in consolidating design ideas into strategic representations for the final exhibition.

Students will be encouraged to conceive and represent spaces in states of integration between landscape, architectural, urban, infrastructural and interior scales/elements, through projects informed by interrelation levels between small, medium and large scales. The outcomes of this design workshop will reflect interest in contextual, potential, ‘generous’ (in character, not necessarily in scale) and ‘opportunistic’ projects, rather than in expressive, iconic, symbolic or metaphorical outputs. The projects will be inclined to establish critical relationships with their immediate and territorial contexts rather than to produce isolated and individual interventions.

Design Approach – some strategic techniques:

– Responding to existing physical, social, geographical, urban, landscape and infrastructural situations; not an application of formulaic processes
– (Un)learning from/reacting to the existing
– ‘Unfamiliar’ outcomes of ‘familiar’ elements
– Generosity and Opportunism
– Integration of built and open vegetated space as a strategy for resilient urban environments
– Flexibility and multi/cross-programming as a strategy to minimize built footprint
– No hierarchy between large and small scale
– Small as a consequence of large scale thinking – correlation between parts (often as acupuncture interventions) through consideration of space in-between
– The relevance of strategic representation – diagrams to evoke essential ideas and intentions…cross-programming and space sharing to be represented figuratively (through 3D images, not labels ad/or legend, to represent spaces and the envisaged programs/activities for their inhabitation: i.e.: Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Allegory of Good Government; OMA, isometric representations for Parc de la Villette competition entry; Raumlabor, drawings for public space and bathing culture in Frihamnen, Gothenburg, Sweden, 2014; others)
– Resistance to ‘objectification’… we are not in the world; we are the world…we are nature with nature (re: Heidegger’s state of ‘wondering’ as a way to accept and deal with original ‘Anguish’)
– Design in states of ‘potentiality’…resisting the seduction of the individual ‘architectural’ object…designing spaces/situations that can evolve and change through the input and engagement of users, as well as through further development/growing of natural landscape
– The irrelevance of outcomes as metaphors of ideas…resisting towards the simplistic and reassuring process that leads to final formalist outcomes as literal translations of: predetermined ideas, theoretical references, metaphorical concepts, symbolic images, linear processes

– Resisting landscape design approaches inclined to formalistically shape natural elements

POTENTIAL PROGRAMS/PROJECTS (some suggestions among others…)

  • Close integration between architecture/landscape/infrastructure
  • Dynamic, unstable, flexible, fragile, malleable, thus resilient architectural/landscape/infrastructural spaces
  • Interrelation/integration/crossing (between things/spaces/entities’)
  • Programs involved with notions such as: community, volunteerism, public, revised forms of economic enterprises, etc.

“The task is to create real capabilities for people to flourish in less materialistic ways…In particular we need to revitalize the notion of public goods. To renew our sense of public space, of public institutions, of common purpose. To invest money and time in shared goals, assets and infrastructures…Green space, parks, recreation centres, sports facilities, libraries, museums, public transportation, local markets, retreats and quite centres, festivals: these are some of the building blocks for a new vision of social participation…Manufacturing will need to pay more attention to durability and repairability. Construction must prioritize refurbishment of existing buildings and the design of new sustainable and repairable infrastructures. Agriculture will have to pay more attention to the integrity of land and the welfare of livestock…”

[Tim Jackson, Prosperity without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet, p. 193, p. 197]

  • Local economies, local resources, global connections (food-hubs, seeding/revegetation hubs, community programs-hubs, educational hubs; energy and material recycling, etc.)
  • Spaces able to positively engage with water (rain, flooding), snow, wind, hot and cold weather, earthquakes, all other weather and natural phenomena
  • Architectural/landscape/infrastructural systems and interventions for water filtration + low carbon emission and high carbon sequestration;
  • No/less cars – Yes/more bicycle-based infrastructures
  • Spatial, infrastructural and public/community sharing
  • Land care+maintenance+management
  • Towards states of permanent impermanence…living as camping…flying…moving…being nature with nature…nets, scaffolding, garden sheds, balloons, tarpaulins, curtains, tents, decks, rafts, trees…

“Is it not odd that ours, the most nomadic and migratory of cultures, should found its policy, its psychology, its ethics and even its poetics on the antithesis of movement: on the rhetoric of foundations, continuity, genealogy, stasis?”

[Paul Carter, The Lie of the Land, 1996]

 

TYPICAL ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES IN CURRENT URBAN ENVIRONMENTS

  • Water shortage and collection/discharge (engineering-based urban infrastructures)
  • Flood and flash flooding
  • Lack of general interest in alternative energy sources
  • Need of habitat corridors
  • The overwhelming presence of hard surfaces and the consequent result of heat-island effect due to lack of cooling
  • Existing planning processes in favor of occupation of space and production of built space in figure ground, rather than coexistence with existing natural environment
  • Deterioration of biological values due to the development of ‘lifestyle’ residential blocks and other amenities/programs
  • Rehabilitation of indigenous vegetation as a means to re-establish healthy levels of biodiversity, but also to provide cool habitats
  • ..

 

“I like to think (…) of a cybernetic meadow where mammals and computers live together in mutually programming harmony like pure water touching clear sky.

I like to think (…) of a cybernetic forest filled with pines and electronics where deer stroll peacefully past computers as if they were flowers with spinning blossoms.

I like to think (…) of a cybernetic ecology where we are free of our labors and joined back to nature, returned to our mammal brothers and sisters, and all watched over by machines of loving grace.”

[Richard Brautigan]

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