Mixed use program is a suggestion for city blocks and city people. It is defining the % occupancy and these interactions in a clear cut fashion. Through prototype making and doing new ways of thinking about what urbanism can be investigated. Many prototype iterations can be generated but the same program vernacular remains the same. The investigations show how to look at the block type not the building type. Viewing the city at big and small scales addressing the form, shape, and function of the block as a vital part of Houston's layers. Strategies, theories, and mapping exercises are generative for understanding and designing in Houston. The city of Houston has no hierarchy it consists of single grain, double grain, above and below layers. In reading the city through these explorations you can determine what is there and what could be. "Once time lines are seen to coincide and overlap, they begin to curl and twist" and these lines or stems create points of stimulation that in turn identify the cityscapes' extended skin.
Design the section ribbon model:
What are the pieces?
What are the parts?
What are the rules?
diachronic drifts- Capturing the city through surface and flow each of the sites will have their own chapter and may create their own strategies for formatting information. My path through Houston guided the location of my section cut capturing the city through surface and flow. The cut extended in order to engaged in highways, historic structures, use, ethnicity, and other significant areas itself.
"what the map cuts up, the story cuts across..." m.de certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life
The notion of cutting diagonally instead of along wheeler gives one a new perspective on the city scope. The different colors formed as a result of this diagonal cut reveal new images. These new images form different yet new layers that then overlap one another creating a dense city fabric. The diagonal cut creates images that could not be seen externally and so new spaces are revealed.
"Variations in saturation and tone as well as hue evoke an elusive yet almost palpable reality of shallow space. Color, structure, and space combine to create a unique presence.
color and structure are inseparable: the forms themselves consist of color alone, and their translucency establishes a layered depth that compliments and vastly enriches the vertical architecture of the composition." This is the ideas and principles that Mark Rothko went about creating his paintings. The pieces are created come from a process of strokes, various colors, and even alternating the direction of the canvas while painting. layers after layers of different strokes in different directions overlap each other to ultimately form the dense composition of his artwork. Similarly using transparent colored planes to actively conceal and reveal spaces. the skin of the elements reveal spacial illusions both concealing and revealing vertical horizontal, angle linear elements enclose blocks and fluctuate in depth. The skin and these elements are colored and transparent to conceal and reveal spacial image views within the city fabric.
At certain points along the ribbon like section colors coincided with one another blending to form a new color. This new color revealed new spaces and new images within the city fabric.
. Through model making and water coloring exercises ideas of space in perspective develop through surface, flow, and transparencies. Occupation is considered and the seam is better defined; such as what's inside and out, public and private, building and land, earth and sky, fast and slow, care and pedestrian, hard and soft, above and below, etc. The diagram of the blocks track the program types and relate it all within the perimeter of your building block. The diagrams are a tool used to understand your block, while simultaneously reflecting and projecting both horizontal and vertical orientations where occupation can exist below and above the zero scope
MIXED USE: contain is to hold, exchange is the relationship between people, music, and goods, movement is the movement happening along the site, open is the lack of mass/stuff or the void within a building the return of public space within a site, and delay is the time yet to come or the things that remain in question.
From house to housing the residential program is considered in parts. One single unit is defined and then transformed and reoriented to make 'housing'. The diagrams are a means to understand the block and plan for residential and exhibition space within one city block. In figure one the residential unit is broken apart to show the bathroom below and can be placed above the main living unit area. In figure two the parts are put together to show the module for a residential living unit. Figure three shows how the units are located in respect to one another in plan. In the fourth figure it shows how the units are oriented in response to one another to create the residential living module made up of two units each made of two parts etc.
The seam is once again defined between the space of exhibition, the movement within the block form one program to another, how light enters your programs and the residential unit to form units or housing units together emphasizing the public terrain as it engages the site.
Minimalism is the phenomenological basis of the viewers experience, how he or she perceives the internal relationships among the parts of the work and the parts to the whole. The repetition of forms serves to emphasize the subtle differences in the perception of these forms in space and time as the spectators viewpoint shifts in time and space. There is a negative and positive space formed through different materials, colors, repetition of these and result in a relationship between the site and the viewer. For instance, artists using similar techniques, such as, Dan Flavin, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Barnett Newman all invade other areas beyond the flat surface and had an acute awareness of rooms, corners, barriers, and corridors. For example Agnes Martin compositions are non-hierarchical, unity entities and not single units. In order to give you no clue of the order or even disorder within a composition the vertical and horizontal lines interlocking and from a certain point are perceived as blurred. Therefore this gives the viewer no inclination of the program or order within the composition and one can only assume.
Another great example is Frank Ghery's house shows how one may reveal buildings as layers, breaking out and tilting away from the original composition or form. It's about how one system collides with another; being a form maker and a space generator. Robert Rauschenberg collages is also an example of this. -Mixed Use