Abstract

ARCHITECTURE THESIS PROJECT_University of Toronto
01.11.08 - 04.25.08
advised by_Adrian Blackwell

Wireless Urbanism is an examination of mobile technology’s impact on public space practises and the generic conditions
of urban-ness. Its trajectory is one towards an interactive and open source infrastructure and architecture
through this wireless, ubiquitous technology, delivered by the mobile phone; one that establishes a new condition for
urbanism to be developed, and unfold, enabling the city to perform in dynamic ways. If we are able to browse the city
with our devices, how could a place based architecture or infrastructure interact with us?
What new infrastructure or interface could allow the needs and desires of a user to determine the make up of a given
site?
As urbanity today is neither structured in the centre or the periphery, I will look to fields configured in accordance with
fluctuation produced by attractors and networks, both social and professional. In other words, fields of occupational
intensities influenced by programme, and also ambience, day, night, and weather. The site becomes a microcosm for
what could potentially be an entirely new way to develop the city.
If Post-Fordist architects view programme as the engine of a project; the driving logic of form and organization, the
Googlist architect must rather see programme as flexible and indeterminate. Not in the typical sense of flexibility,
where it is more in line with slower processes, but rather immediate changes, such as local needs, light conditions, and
weather. If the typical modes of architecture deal in samenesses and regulation, what is being proposed here is one of
temporality and dynamism.



PRESENTATION INSTALLATION IMAGES
(more to come)











The installation consisted of five projection screens that defined the space the presentation took place within. Kiosks were set up with a wireless mouse on each, allowing the critics and viewers to control the images from the blog that populated the screens. After my own more formal presentation of the material on the blog, the audience and critics were left to formulate their own points and arguments by sifting through the information and images themselves.

Development

_The existing warehouse building functions as the enclosed space until more enclosure is required. Structures then emerge in areas of intensity that necessitate their construction.

Phase 1_interface

_The first phase of the project involves the deployment of an interface by which the space of the site is organised; a grid that is both virtual and actual. It performs as the new infrastructure that organises who uses the space, and eventually reveals how the site should be developed.

Another aspect of this interface is the act of browsing the site by way of the mobile phone. Events are displayed; their location, what they are, and how many people are involved.

Click To Play

Visualization

_From inside the pavilion next to the rec field one can find enclosure during wet days, shade during hot days, and light during the evenings

The Modular

Architecture / Infrastructure

_The programme and space allocation of the architecture becomes determined by the public's communication with it via text messaging. It's ambient qualities and conditions alter to suit the need of a particular group who have sent the necessary amount of texts to acquire the space.

GOOGLism?

image/jpeg
Sent from my BlackBerry device on the Rogers Wireless Network

Reaction 1

_Concept Collage of programme interminglings and spontonaiety

Related Ideas

Mark Sheppard's Sound Garden

_The project outlines the possibility for the sharing of music within the ambient of the city. Songs can be uploaded and downloaded upon reaching a particular proximity to the wireless sensors.

Philippe Rahm

Living in the interval of the double-glazing glass

The project modifies the existing configuration of the glazing system to create differentiated spaces based on light and temperature, which in turn rely on season and weather.


_To quote, Our works are developing in this physical realm where architecture, at the outset, is nothing other than a Nietzschean struggle between a human desire for energetic growth and structural maintenance, on the one hand, and the external environment which reduces, degrades and breaks up on the other. We are thus reassessing those factors of architecture represented by materials, structure, space and light, depending on their physical actions.

The Hormonorium

_To quote, The aim is to act in advance of form, at a subformal level, by modifying the very information that gives rise to form, to behavior, to thought. By exerting an influence outside the realm of the senses and the skin, the Hormonorium creates a synthesis of the organic, of mood and space, by establishing a continuity between architecture and human metabolism, between space, light and the endocrine and neurological systems.

The Hormonorium is an interior public space defined climatically by light, temperature, air quality, that involve the body but where certain functions remain indeterminate : resting, working out, breathing fresh air, meeting people, flirting, discussing, people-watching, collecting one's thoughts, washing, toning up, etc.

Mobile Blog

Sent from my BlackBerry device on the Rogers Wireless Network

Connection

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kuzWNOUqLmQ

Questions

1_How can we urbanize open-source?

2_What is the public domain of ambient informatics?

3_How can we redefine received ideas about parks, nature, and recreation, when everything is
urban?

4_What distribution grids and topological connections, that link systems and practices of
production with systems and practices of consumption, do mobile phone infrastructure
networks provide?

5_Can we differentiate landscape, built landscape, to promote a multiplicity of urban cells
designed to accomodate differentiated labour and capital?

6_How does the fact that immaterial labor immediately involves social interaction and
cooperation impact architecture and public space?

7_How does spatial form relate to the processes that flow through, manifest, and sustain it?

8_What opportunities lie beyond the architectural surface as confectionary spectacle or the
interior vestibule as glorified automatic door opener?

Sites

_site 2 Lightless and Lifeless

_site 1 The Fair

From left to right_1. Abandoned lot on the corner of Woodward and 8 Mile + Fair Grounds predicted to cost the city $1,000,000 to keep running_2. Unused park. "Farwell Field". Lightless and lifeless_3. Abandoned Go Kart track.


After visiting the city, sites along 8 Mile Rd. emerged as the ones rich with the most potential. Their organisation as a series of points along the border of the city create a line of interest that heretofore has been the divider of urban and suburban. This connection at the street scale seeks to form a rhizome that then connects to the rest of the city. In the Deleuzian sense, priviledging the multiplicities, forming lines and connections as opposed to points and positions. This is especially relevant to a strip of road that has acted as a striation in the city of Detroit; not just as a border, but also a regulator.

_Map displaying the racial & ethnic distribution in Detroit. The segregation between the suburbs and city proper is clearly visible.

_Map displaying amount of immigrants into Detroit and surrounding suburbs.

Potential Sites

_The potential sites/areas for the project look to the periphery of Detroit; derelict industrial and residential sites. They cluster around and within the cities proposed renewal zone, using it as a framework and a line of designation.

Some are situated along rail lines, others expressways, one even on an airport site. However, they all exemplify in some way the conditions indicative of post-industrial Detroit-abandonement, decay, nostalgia.