Edges, exchanges and events; as strategic reinvigoration of city

Liverpool is both physically born from the edge and retains an edgy disposition with all of its connotations. It’s a port city that was seriously affected by containerization and political prejudice from the late 50s until the Millennium when the city’s fortunes changed through a series of fortunate events associated with the City’s edgy disposition. The unique and cyclical orchestration of events left a physical and psychological legacy that invigorated urban voids. These series of fortunate events were not all led by city representatives but by local personalities, groups and companies. The paper is an explanation of some of these events and their legacies catalysed through the city’s edge phenomena. Even though the world may be considered holistic, as Heidegger postulates we comprehend it through difference. This separation to distinguish can be described as ‘an intent of perception’ that subconsciously knows they are related “By disengaging two things from the undisturbed state of nature, in order to designate them ‘separate’, we have already related them to each other in our awareness” [07] Perception actively forms edges and perceptually we prefer a level of complexity in our visual field. “Humans prefer ambiguous, complex patterns in their visual field and that this seems a fundamental perceptual preference”. [18] The city as a spatial and cultural maelstrom of unfolding and interpretive ‘edge conditions’ constitutes our perceptually desirable landscape embracing and enabling its milieu to delve into its thickness. The edge is where happenings intensify, it is the co-location of phenomena in place that catalyses events. “All human action takes and makes place. The past is the set of places made by human action. History is a map of these places”[08] Topographic locations with dynamic edge-mental conditions tend to develop into serial places as city. The friction generated by the density of a city’s edge conditions generating overlap to gathered processes enabling an intensity of events. City is event-mental reflecting an underlying structured edge condition system associated with our activities and expectancies as preferences of perception. These perceptual preferences appear to be in a “aufhebung” [26] state. Figure 1. Reconstructing the city through unique and cyclical events Keywords; City, Reinvigoration, Edges, Exchanges, Event

A Species of Edges as Metropolis

The paper investigates the phenomena of edges as a differentiation that both divides and conjoins space and process. Edge conditions as a species of edges are responsible for the founding and development of our cities and they continue to influence the metropolis through a membranous separation - communication. . These edge conditions in process and spatial things can be explained through the analogy of a step. Step covers both meanings, the action of taking a step and the interval which is a step, consequently it describes the process and the spatiality or the time and space of step as an edge condition. A step links ‘instants’ of process and spatiality. A step is both end and bridge as an edge is both an end and an intersection. Its perhaps not incidental that mechanical time relies on serial steps in the form of a set of interlinked rotating cogs operating step by step to generate motion. This clockwork action becomes increasingly complex three dimensionally using the edges of serial cams and the stepping action of ‘cam followers’ between cams to develop complex programmed motion. This programmed motion through a series of edges and steps was used to create breathtaking imitations of nature such as ‘The Writer’ by Pierre Jaquet Droz and ‘The Swan’ by John Joseph Merlin. Today’s cities can be conceived of emerging as a reflective pattern of the programmatic activities and expectancies of their milieus where edge conditions form the basis of this reflective control. The edge is where happenings intensify it’s the meeting of phenomena and consequently both barrier and bridge to other spaces containing the ‘novel’ as in Simmel’s strangers. “All human action takes and makes place. The past is the set of places made by human action. History is a map of these places”. (Ethington, P. J: 2007) Ethington P. J; ‘Groundwork’ for a Spatial Theory of History; Rethinking History, Volume 11, Number 4, December 2007

Edges, Events and Excess

Though the world may be considered holistic as Heidegger postulates we comprehend it through difference. This separation to distinguish can be described as ‘an intent of perception’ that subconsciously knows they are related “By disengaging two things from the undisturbed state of nature, in order to designate them ‘separate’, we have already related them to each other in our awareness” (Simmel G, 1994-09) Perception actively forms edges and perceptually we prefer a level of complexity in our visual field. “Humans prefer ambiguous, complex patterns in their visual field and that this seems a fundamental perceptual preference”. (Rapoport A & Kantor; R E 1967) The city as a spatial and cultural maelstrom of unfolding and interpretive ‘edge conditions’ constitutes our perceptually desirable landscape embracing and enabling its milieu to delve into its thickness. The edge is where happenings intensify it is the co-location of phenomena in place that catalyses events. “All human action takes and makes place. The past is the set of places made by human action. History is a map of these places”. (Edington P J; 2007) Topographic locations with dynamic edge-mental conditions tend to develop into serial places as city. The friction generated by the density of a city’s edge conditions generating overlap to gathered processes enabling an intensity of events. City is event-mental reflecting an underlying structured edge condition system associated with our activities and expectancies as preferences of perception. These perceptual preferences ap pear t o be in a aufhebung (Grier. J 1902 ) state

Comprehending and Projecting Complexities in Urban Matrixes

ABSTRACT The paper presents the methodologies and the outcomes associated with a series of educational programmes originated to introduce Architectural students to the complexities of designing in the urban domain in both America and Britain. The programmes were developed for use within existing 'materially distressed cities' using the cities as laboratories to test potentials for providing sustainable and flexible redevelopment proposals that integrated with the existing urban fabric and functions. The methods used were influenced by the biological sciences, specifically referencing complexity and adaptation. Hence introducing students at an initial stage to the ideal of the city as the organic reflective landscape of man's actions within a global natural and economic environment. The programmes initiated from an idea that pattern recognition and pattern creation is inherent to our comprehension and manipulation of the environment which we inhabit. This ability to recognise abstract and associate patterns of form and behaviour has enabled us to project and intervene successfully in the environmental patterns to our benefit. As existing cities already contain innumerable diverse and complex patterns from the past, some of which restrain the city's re-facilitation whilst others are essential as existential footholds (they constitute the image of the city and hence give us identity, context and meaning). This sets up a conflict between the city matrix as facility and identity which can also be viewed as a relationship between transient facilities and more permanent image as meaning or spirituality. In redesigning our cities we need a methodology of approach that can reveal these city patterns as a holistic organism, accepting the prevalence of the past, and growing in a way that re-facilitates and reinterprets our cities advantageously with patterns that offer both appropriate facility and spirituality. Inhabited landscape somehow needs a means of starting from simplicity and building into the most complex of systems. The aim therefore was to devise methods whereby these patterns were recognisable, to make the complex comprehensible and malleable, the patterns growing, reducing or mutating in an appropriate organic sense. Keywords; Education, Urban Architecture, Sustainability, Simplicity, Complexity

The Edge of Creation

Liverpool is on the edge, its born from the edge and retains a distinctive edgy disposition. Liverpool’s edge opens onto the Atlantic a characteristic which drove the city’s exponential growth in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as gateway to the New World. The city has a distinctively Northern “vitality, sheer staggering vitality” [01] a characteristic it shares with other Northern cities, such as Manchester, Sheffield and Hull. These cities are where the heavy industrialisation was concentrated and consequently all were adversely affected by the de-industrialisation of the United Kingdom. The docks were Liverpool’s economic ‘raison d'etre’ they were also integral to its cultural character providing an exchange of strangers and the strange as unique events in a folded ‘fecund’ of cultural creativity. This is a distinctive characteristic of edge territories; the edge holds in or out encouraging overlapping and subsequent interaction. The closure of the docks and the subsequent exodus of heavy industries in the 60s left seven linear miles of redundant docklands. Liverpool’s edge redundancy removed ‘event’ as that difference generated from repetition. The city needed to transform to adapt however the extent of the redundant dockland was vast and so inextricably linked to the cities existence that it constituted an inconceivable endeavour. The change required was so vast that the city went into a double decade transitional state that can best be explained as a ‘liminal defensive reaction’

Interstitial Layers

Interstitial Layers Interstitial layers is a programme of urban analysis set up for semes- ter one of the third year at the Centre for Architecture, John Moores University. It forms part of a two step pattern, now established in Liverpool, of using a Semester of analytical and creative urban de- sign in order to build a platform of knowledge and experience as a context from which individual 'comprehensive building designs' could be launched. The specific aim of the first semester programme was to create a means whereby existing cities (using Liverpool as the labora- tory) could be interpreted as a set of information patterns which would accurately represent the facilities of the city. The holistic set of these information patterns as an artifice could then be utilised as a context primer for exploring and assessing future scenarios of development for the cities. (Pages 1-4 deal with the process page 5 holds two fly through examples of the computer phase of the programme

Freedom & Transience of Space (Techno-nomads & Transformers)

The paper considers the continued reuse of our cities as ‘brownfield’ sites in response to our need for change in terms of facility space and fashion. It proposes examples of how space can be functionally transient, transformable, or ephemeral and remain psychologically an ‘existential foothold’. Contemporary- Temporary-- Our cities as artificial matrices are a polemic of permanence and transience, reflecting their milieus conflicting desire for change within permanence. Permanence as ‘existential foothold’ and constant change as novel entertainment, fashion. Transient tectonic solutions constructed in the folds of the cities are however increasing in incidence and dimension as the means to resolve the ever-changing demands of a technologically driven society. Within this context it is then hardly surprising that most architects and developers talk of a twenty-year cycle in terms of ‘a building’ associated with the particular function for which it was ‘intended’. “The division line between contemporary and temporary has become remarkably thin” (Korteknie, R. & Stuhlmocher, M. 1999) Techno-nomads-- This move towards transient tectonic solutions is not only driven by consumer culture but by a change in the emphasise of the technology market. The market has shifted from ‘social technology’ to individual technology. Technology is aimed at machine enhancements for the individuals of a mass culture, mobile machines through which individuals become techno-nomads (or cyborg’s) This techno-nomadic facilitation has had two profound effects, geographic distance is shortened consequently community has become tribal rather than local. Additionally architectural space has in some way lost its ‘specificity’. Space, in many cases does not have a particular programmatic facilitation. Facility space has in some way become a holistic flow where the differentiation between typologies reduces as does the difference between outside and inside. Integrated and interdependent with their machines techno-nomads become free from geographic and typological spacial boundaries. Technology has become less dependant on the specifics of tectonic space as a supporting infrastructure and with this architecture in some way becomes ‘free’ it now has the potential to become ‘experiential’ rather than function or facility driven. Architecture in a contemporary techno-nomadic culture has the potential to fulfil Tschumi’s description in becoming “useless but radically so” (Tschumi. B 1990) ‘facilitating experiential’ desires whilst enabling ‘nomadic technical facilitation’ to flow through its spaces. In a culture which has freed space from servitude, spatial experience should be created based on the stimulation of our body and mind more as a ‘verb’ than a ‘noun’ becoming a sensory interaction that includes, participation, interpretation and improvisation. Architecture can create space with layers of depth that unveil themselves over time and reciprocally ‘live’ within our temporal continuum, where space is a consumable experience and is reciprocally consumed by itself

Autonomous Spatial Redistribution for Cities

The paper investigates an automated methodology for the appropriate redistribution of usable space in distressed areas of inner cities. Through categorising activity space and making these spaces morphologically mobile in relation to the topography within a representative artificial space achieve this. The educational module has been influenced by theories from the natural environment, which possesses patterns that have inherent evolutionary programmes in which the constituents are recyclable; Information is strategically related to the environment to produce forms of growth and behaviour. Artificial landscape patterns fail to evolve, the inhabited landscape needs a means of starting from simplicity and building into the most complex of systems that are capable of re-permutation over time. This paper describes the latest methodological development in terms of a shift from the use of the computer as a tool for data manipulation to embracing the computer as a design partner. The use of GDL and VRML in particular are investigated as facilitator’s for such generation within a global, vector environment. Keywords; Animated, Urban, Programme, Education. Visual Database

Artificial Patterned Landscapes and Reciprocal Learning

ABSTRACT The paper explains the organisational framework for creating three-dimensional patterns representing artificial urban landscapes as a design aid for architectural students to analyse, interpret, visualise and manipulate the complexities of the urban environment. The educational module is initially both a CAAD and an urban design teaching tool, and becomes, through these, a visualisation and realisation model and finally a design aid and platform for the manipulation of the urban landscape. The organisational framework to construct the representative three dimensional artifice utilises 14 different layers of interconnected, three dimensional patterns as an information base. The classification systems of the framework are intended as an educational tool for analysis, discussion and consequent comprehension of the real as it is formed into a representative artifice within the computer. The inherent facilities of the CAAD software programme (in this case Archi-CAD) are utilised with an adapted logic, specifically the software’s ability to create three dimensional library parts and place these items in various layers of the framework allowing variable permutable displays of the pattern items and consequently their interfaces. This categorised framework is a three-dimensional representative artifice enabling the ‘pregnant’ potential(s) of what the city can become to be anticipated as ‘nth potential’ scenarios or ‘mightlyhoods’ (1). These are applied to the artifice through the formulation of manifesto aims, producing innumerable potential future scenarios for the city, which can be reciprocally assessed through the inherent visual permutability of the layers within the software

Behavioural Programming of Self Locating Urban Interventions

The paper aims to show an automated methodology for the appropriate redistribution of usable space within urban morphological envelopes. The methodology has been incrementally developed over four years and has been implemented through annual student projects. The influence for the project was taken from the natural environment, which possesses evolutionary patterns that have a base code and inherent programmes (scripts). Natural patterns are generative, the constituents recyclable; artificial landscape patterns fail to evolve, they are deserted rather than recycled. They become patterns in the dust. Inhabited landscape needs a means of starting from simplicity and building into the most complex of systems that are capable of re-permutation over time. The base blocks within this programme are termed sprites: They constitute a small package of spatial information derived from a measured analysis of existing morphologies. This spatial information consisting of that indivisible formulation that generates the overall envelope of the building through its multiplication relative to the particular circumstances. In some cases this ‘minimum formulation’ is based on the singular human space necessary to carry out a specific task related to that use e.g. administration, in other cases it relates to a constructional format, e.g. production, or the size of a machine e.g. transportation. These sprites are then imbued with interrelated behavioural ‘accretive’ programmes associated with the parameters that tend to generate their envelope forms termed here ‘Megalope Patterns’. Behavioural programmes are interrelated, acting together to create a particular form at a particular location in the existing city. This paper thence describes the current development of the project’s methodologies in terms of a shift from use of the computer as a tool for data manipulation to embracing the computer as a design partner. The generative application of the software used in the project (Archi-CAD) is manipulated through its programming language (GDL) in order to create dynamic, self-locating ‘intelligent’ scripts which are programmable, in terms of their characteristics, by the students