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Folding the urbanscape

Part 2 Project 2008
JuliáN LóPez Gallardo
Chia Mei Chen
 University of Palermo Buenos Aires | Argentina
As characterized by the fact that verticality often prevails over horizontality, many contemporary cities are seemingly heading towards a common and unavoidable destiny with increasing numbers of towers beyond questioning the pertinency and the inexorable impacts of such trend. The project attempts to trace the existing urbanscape and to discover the implicit landscape of the city, it aims to combine the horizontality with new complex of topologies generated with foldings on the ground, in order to transform the urban tectonics.

The ground is undoubtedly an topographical operative system, and as the skin of the city, is transcendentally folded from the abstraction of the skyline's irregularities of a city in growth. The entropy as the energy of the city, needs to be diversified, every pair of the opposite tensions, such as gravity and lightness, stability and dynamism, reality and virtuality, also need to be balanced.

These folds attempt to explore the infinite expansion and multiplication with inclined planes, creating a city characterized by flexible, dynamic and continuous surfaces to provide alternative circulations, movements, visual and spatial variety towards the surroundings to the inhabitants.


Many questions came up while working with the students, during the process we were trying to understand this site through bifurcations, chaos, fractals, global, local, and folds. Folds that provide a sense of affinity between matters, life and organisms. These organisms are defined by endogenous folds, while inorganic matter has exogenous folds.

According to Gilles Deleuze, living matter exceeds mechanical processes because the organism is infinitely machined, a machine whose every part or piece is a machine…

Is Buenos Aires a machine? ...or is Buenos Aires an organism?
For Deleuze, the Baroque is an operative function endlessly producing folds, on two levels, pleats of matter and folds of the soul. What is the connection between these two? This exercise deals with this dilemma.


Tutor(s)
2008
Folding the ground from the undiscovered urbanscape to generate a new topography on the site.
Conceptual diagrams generated after studying the skyline's unevennesses of the surroundings.
Life is a journey full of surprises and uncertainties, and thus it would have to be the city, which is conceived like place of the movement, the energy and the experiments.
The ground floor as the main public space which is shaped with inclined planes, proposes a combination of different textures to diversify the activities of its inhabitants.
Folding prototypes. Catalogue of basic and advanced foldings.
General plan and floor plans.
Sector views. The diversity and the complexity of the site are reflected in the new topography.
Natural and artificial components. Each layer provides the conditions to the existence of the others and interacts with them.
Perspective view and elevations.
Perspective view and section.
Perspective views.
As the verticality coexists with the horizontality, the dynamics balances the statics.
Exterior view.
Underground views.
The ground extends to the infinity, with bifurcations leading upwards and down, without predetermined destiny...
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