Panoramic alpine urbanism

What would a truly 3-dimensional city look like? How can one design a city that engages with an extremely dynamic topography? We will populate an unsettled valley in the heart of the Swiss Alps with an agglomeration of 100.000 people. How can we devise design strategies for a vertical master-plan. How will the architecture of such a city look? How can we conquer the timber line?

This city cannot be organized exclusively through a bird’s-eye view, but through the perspective of the inhabitants. Our focus will be the infrastructure (tunnels, lifts, escalators, serpentines, bridges), the scenic drives, the vistas and panoramas.

The computer will help us explore unconventional design methods and to face the challenges of climate and topography of the complex environment. We will code our concepts, design rules, define relations, compose networks, and generate, simulate, and visualize our visions for an alpine urban structure in processing.

Task

Focus on the view, population, overall density, distribution of density, function.Create the street-network, the infrastructure and adapt the geography.Create the network of parcels and streets.Distribute the program.We will work in groups of 3 people in order to develop 5 distinct scenarios of an urban live in the mountains, all of them labeled with a specific slogan. We will have two intermediate critics and in addition individual discussions.

Keywords

Valley, 100.000 people, Panorama, Bellevue, Alpine, Urban, Alm,Topography, Landscape, Neighborhood, Networks, Lifts, Tunnels, Path, Bridges, Waterfalls, Snow, Rocks, Shadow, Avalanche, High altitude, Density, View,  Population, Function, Density, Composition

Output

Drive-through animation in high resolutionPanoramic views in high resolutionModel of the citymax. 2 minute movie toexplain your city with diagrams and renderings

Schedule

Friday, 30.11.12, 11am

Introduction to the assignment

Thursday, 6.12.12 11am

Intermediate review

Wednesday, 12.12.12 12.12pm

Intermediate review

Thursday, 20.12.12. 11am

Final presentation

Module 2: Alpine Urbanism

Joel Letkemann, Jessica In, Maria Smigielska:
Our city’s organization relies on the dispersed intelligence of an object oriented approach to planning. Each node in our city know’s it’s own character and suitability. The subjective, scenic view of our city is illuminated by a car’s-eye perspective.

Nicolás Miranda, Nan Jiang, Akihiko Tanigaito:
MorphoCity – Description coming soon….

Yuko Ishizu, Mark Baldwin: Parametric City