infra eco logi urbanism

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infra eco logi urbanism

Firm

rvtr

Type

Cultural › Cultural Center Religious
Educational › Auditorium
Industrial › Laboratory Research Facility
Landscape + Planning › Urban Green Space Masterplan
Transport + Infrastructure › Marina and Ports Highway

STATUS

Concept

Photos

Adam Smith (2), Michel Brunelle (2), Geoffrey Thun (1)

Infra Eco Logi Urbanism posits an approach and a vision for architecture at the urban scale within the contemporary post-metropolitan condition. The exhibition assembles a multi-year project by the architectural practice RVTR that examines extant and emerging urban systems within the Great Lakes Megaregion and develops a design proposition to leverage regional infrastructures toward resilient urban and public ends, addressing questions of politics and urban society.

This is a project about thinking and working on urban questions at a time when notions of design related to cities, landscapes, infrastructures and environments are undergoing intense reconsideration. Cities today are increasingly de-centered, distributed across extensive geographies, and intertwined with their peripheral landscapes and hinterlands. The term “megaregion” refers to continuously developed urban territories composed of multiple city centers that share interdependent labor markets, transportation networks, infrastructures, industries, economies, ecologies, land use systems, and cultures. Megaregions challenge the status and authority of jurisdictional politics, local identities and resource sovereignty, and require new modes of cooperation and intervention to address their complexities. These questions become increasingly urgent relative to current crises regarding the environment, energy and inequality.

Of the emerging North American megaregions, the Great Lakes Megaregion (GLM) is the most populous and the most geographically vast. Since the middle of the 20th century, its highways have helped the cities of the GLM to spread horizontally into continuous low-density polycentric urban formations. These constructed territories interlace with the geological systems that prefigure, support, and disrupt the urban accretions of the GLM: the five Great Lakes and their watershed, mineral deposits, resource fields, and fertile agricultural lands.

The design proposition hypothesizes that, by working through ecological and systems-based approaches within the de-centered, infrastructure and logistics dominated hybrid urban territories, architecture can take a more active role in transforming the future of urbanism, settlement patterns, and metropolitan life.

The work is developed through three streams of research: (i) a regional analysis undertaken within the methodological framework of 'System’, ‘Structure’ and ‘Code’; (ii) a speculative design proposal developed through systematic infrastructural interventions and specific urban artifacts; and (iii) a historical investigation of urban utopias and megaforms. The exhibition assembles this content into a landscape: an immersive field of images, texts and artifacts that enable the apprehension of multiple scales of interrelation and connection.

The speculative design project proposes a point of leverage within the situation of the GLM: to harness the potential yield from near-future renewable energy resources, not for maximum private profit, but rather for the retooling of current infrastructures toward common ends. This scenario is explored through a speculative design project that proposes to direct the profits from renewable energy production towards a new public infrastructural network overlaid upon the current right-of-way of major highways, the meta-system which has produced the existing urbanism. The proposal begins with a restructuring of the highway’s physical DNA from a simple, single-purpose and single-access surface into an intelligent, renewable energy powered network, of bundled resources and mobility modes that provides multiple modes of access and conveyance. This viaduct is networked with other local and international systems of transit and transport, forming an open corridor that is interconnected with diverse populations.

At sites of highway interchange, new, large-scaled, multipurpose developments are strategically implemented. These interchange nodes operate as points of transfer, congregation, exchange, and also house new megaregional institutions. Although intensely networked with other urban systems, each interchange is rendered as a distinct urban artifact, producing architecturally legible constructed figures within the megaregion. Prototypical interchanges are developed typologically, while three specific sites - in Chicago, Detroit-Windsor and Toronto - are explored through detailed design proposals.

In aggregate, the project presents a position from which to apprehend urban questions, a vision, a design methodology that operates across scales from the regional to the specific, and an event around which to discuss regional systems and the role of design in figuring their futures.