eVolo SkyScraper Competition '08 - URBAN BY-PASS

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eVolo SkyScraper Competition '08 - URBAN BY-PASS

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[URBAN BY-PASS, Bucharest, ro]URBAN BY-PASS*
CONCEPT
*Bypass (surgical)     -     a bypass generally means an alternate or
additional route for blood flow, which is created in bypass surgery, e.g.
coronary artery bypass surgery by moving blood vessels or implanting synthetic
tubing. Vessels frequently used for the bypass are large veins taken from the
patient's leg. When and where possible, however, an artery is cut from one
place and reconnected to another artery, which supplies a region that needs the
blood supply more than the original site. (www.wikipedia.org )
__ THE "GENETIC" PREDISPOSITION
The urban structure of
the city of Bucharest was never designed following a master plan... since its
creation drifting neighborhoods developing around religious centers have defined
its urban characteristics… this continuous migration as well as the poor
"circulatory irrigation" led to a city predisposed to suffer from
massive "urban --strokes" both in terms of functional disposition as
well as in the associated circulatory system.
__ THE STROKE
During the last years
of the communist regime, Ceausescu tried to forcedly impose his utopist,
totalitarian vision over Bucharest. His top-bottom approach did not manage to
change the urban structure of the city but merely cause a massive stroke in its
continuity. By the massive intervention that eradicated almost a quarter of the
old urban tissue in his attempt to "upgrade" the city, he only
created the premises for what was about to be known as...
__ THE URBAN NECROSIS
As it is often the
case after a major, near fatal stroke, the urban tissue of Bucharest was
severely affected by the urban stroke Ceausescu induced. The necrosis of the
"new urbanity" led to an increasing separation from the rest of the
city in terms of public appeal and commercial functions. As years passed by the
monumental urban intervention found itself isolated by the very city it was
meant to change. It became a huge scar, a necrotic tissue from true urban point
of view.
__ URBAN BY-PASS
Our proposal tries to
suggest a new type of radical intervention, to rise up to the utopist yet
realized totalitarian urban dream. We propose a vascular urban system that can
revitalize the affected tissue and, without any attempt to hide the scars,
provide a new start, a new lifestyle and a new building approach.
As Ceausescu literally
erased all the urban structures of a pseudo-rural city that Bucharest was
before him, we are now emphasizing on two major directions.
·
Restoring
the link between the old (traditional tissue) and the new (Communist and contemporary
interventions) by recreating a new urban system… overlapping the existing and
by-passing the flow of public interest to these dysfunctional spaces.
·
Creating
ecological hotspots that can provide a new and self-sufficient way of living,
acting and socializing... with shared resources as well as public spaces, with
continuous interlinks between the one and the many, the small pseudo-rural
traditional houses of Bucharest and the gigantic communist spatiality.
To answer these two
directions, new type of by-passing and density augmenting solutions are
proposed:
·
The
Bio-Towers network-acting as the vascular system for the new by-pass
[Ecological
catalysts, recycling and empowering a new environment of development]
·
The
migratory-foldable urban cocoons- as a way of providing the needed urban
functions at the right moments and places they are needed to ensure a
successful by-passing operation.
·
[used as
trigger points, urban igniters of public life, public hotspots they contain a
every evolving mix of the missing elements of an atrophic tissue, a mix needed for
turning it into a true newly reborn urbanity]
The two vertical
systems combine to provide a second urban earth-line, a new GROUND ZERO above
the "foundations" of a challenged city.

Aims of the project:
“Inject” the area with
new public functions.
Provide space for
public activities.
Reconnect the historic
tissue.
Repopulate the area in
social, cultural, commercial aims.
Provide
self-sustainability for the area.
Increase green-spaces
inside the area. Prevent pollution.
Create new nodes of
activities which will encourage investments and economic development.
Connect the House of
the people to the urban activities and the urban tissue.
Create variety while
defining a new area identity.
Taking benefits from
the House of the People’s visibility.