Course Description
Course: 4.182
Unit Credits: (3-0-9)
Meeting Time Monday (6-9PM)
Instructor: Paul Lukez
TA: Otto Choi
Premise: This workshop is based on the premise that cities and their artifacts represent dynamic systems undergoing constant change. Like a text that has been written upon and erased over time, often leaving traces of past writings and erasures, we will investigate the potential of transforming contemporary edge city conditions and their large-scale objects as part of an evolving palimpsest.
Object of Investigation: We will focus on investigating how the "Mall" and its adjacent sites and infrastructure can be transformed over time. The Mall has been selected as the object of our study not only because it has sustained the post-war suburban condition but because of its current tenuous role in the volatile retail market.
The accelerated development of e-commerce represents a considerable threat to conventional retail centers. Forrester Research of Cambridge predicts that e-commerce sales will more than quadruple by the year 2003 to $24 billion in sales. In a recent survey of 21 leaders of the shopping mall industry (see National Real Estate Investor), more than half warned that e-commerce represented the greatest threat to the "Mall" as we know it. Leasing agents predict that 25% of existing retail space will be vacant or underutilized within five years.
The Mall's current vulnerability offers an opportunity to promote new models for building communities, ones that can serve as catalysts in re-organizing the current dissipative suburban spatial and social model.
Process and Product: Our projections will be based in part on an investigation of several sets of precedents.
1) We will study the transformation patterns of large-scale objects in densely layered historical sites (roman amphitheaters, medieval walls, transformed infrastructure, etc.) These will be understood in terms of a language defining operations of "erasure" and "writing."
2) We will survey contemporary precedents exhibiting innovative approaches to re-combining different uses (see FARMAX, "Middle Landscape," Pedestrian Pockets, etc.)
Subsequently, through a series of sequential design exercises and simulations, we will project transformation patterns (using operations of erasure and writing) guided by students' programmatic intentions. The proposed projections will be recorded regularly, so that at the end of the semester we can create a temporally animated proposal for alternatives to the current Mall.
