THE MASSING COMPLEX - DAVIDCLOVERS

THE MASSING COMPLEX V2.0

OBJECTIVES

Master planning is a much contested and debated issue in architectural discourse. Asia has seen its fair share of criticism about 2D planning, about the revival of homogeneous tabula rasa-like proposals and about the potential of computational tools for “The Master Plan.” While many new cities in Asia continue to develop large-scale master plans that are fairly customary in scale and scope, there are a number of middle-sized planning projects emerging in more mature cities like Taipei and the city-states of Hong Kong and Singapore. These are the contemporary “Complex” and are awkward both in scope and makeup. Larger than a conventional super block and smaller than a conventional master plan, they fall into a disciplinary blind spot between Architecture, Urban Design and Planning.
Located within the existing urban fabric, complexes are integrated into the city but are also autonomous. They are prototypes for the future of the city while also serving as fixes for its obsolete infrastructures. The Complex is both a disciplinary challenge and a promise for 21st Century architects, planners, conservationists, preservationists, landscape architects and urban designers alike. A Complex in the architectural type, the site is often also complex in socio-political nature. By financial necessity a complex is mixed use. By physical necessity they are often a combination of new construction, adaptive re-use and historic conservation/preservation. There are different stakeholders and desires competing for the site’s usage and this requires a plurality of design disciplines and design approaches. The twenty first century Complex is increasingly a more common species of project, but one that both city governments and architects/planners are unclear (if not entirely naïve) about how to tackle. There are no models for how to get something of this nature to “cohere” architecturally, as a plan, as an infrastructure or as a landscape.
Building upon research developed in Spring 2013 at HKU, jointly with the University of Kentucky, National Chiao Tung University (NCTU) and the Taipei City Government, The Massing Complex Version 2.0 will propose prototypes for a 16.5 hectare cultural complex in the heart of Taipei at the historical Taipei Train Depot. Central to our study will be the production of an urban-scale effervescence. Projects will seek out strategies for integrating “bubbles” of unlike program (similar to pockets of air) into the fluid landscape of the site. Our goal will be to perforate the complex and maximize heterogeneity. Implicitly this upends our conventional understanding of typologies at the two book ends of the complex’s scale; the master plan and the superblock. We will perforate the superblock, densify and make more contiguous the master plan. To this extent, we will effervesce the master plan by developing.

SITE

The Taiwan Train Depot (TTD or Tai Rail Workshop) is a prime site in Taipei. It is part of a network of obsolete or soon to be obsolete rail sites (of a total of roughly 12) along the east-west axis of the city and will be decommissioned in 2015. The site has a strong presence in the collective and physical memory of the city. It is opened only once a year and its development is much anticipated by the public, by Tai Rail and by numerous other stakeholders including the Taipei City Government.
The site is well situated in relation to infrastructure. There are MTR Stations to the north and south (each about a 10 minute walk) and the site is reasonably close to, and could be connected with, a greenway bike loop. There are a mix of residential, commercial and educational programs surrounding the site. These include the Tobacco Factory, the Egg Sports Stadium and a high school to the south, overpasses to the west and a big block shopping mall to the North, which cuts it off from the surrounding neighborhood.
One of the biggest assets of the site is the Japanese prefabricated, concrete buildings within it. Four of these must be preserved, three others may be adapted and the rest are up for grabs. Located in the center of the site, these buildings are both assets and obstructions. Their scale, while vast, is also challenging to reconcile in relation to the new construction which will inevitably have to surround them. The landscape between them is linear and fragmented, formed largely by existing rail lines. This combination of attributes will require innovative conceptual and physical strategies for thinking about landscape and structure in a manner that foregrounds and conserves the presence of the historic buildings.
Taiwan Rail is interested in maximizing the GFA and financial value of the site while the Taipei City Government would like see its cultural capital maximized. Broader ambitions include developing TTD as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, tying it into Taipei’s appointment as the 2016 World Design Capital, and using it to buttress Taipei’s bid to be one of the 100 Resilient Cities network; a Rockefeller Foundation initiative. There are also local groups who simply want to use TTD as a park, a train museum or an infrastructural history museum. These struggles between the stakeholders have resulted in a live debate about whether the property should be divided into three parcels or maintain its current footprint as a single site, about whether the site is important enough to be a civic and national prototype for 21st century urbanity or merely a public space to facilitate the surrounding areas and local interest groups. Moving forward, the challenge for the studio is how to maximize GFA while simultaneously conserving or preserving the original buildings on the site.
Based on the joint studio’s research last year and our continued involvement with the various stakeholders, conceiving of the site as a singular complex seems the most promising way forward. At stake, is largely an issue of identity; breaking down the site into smaller parts diminishes its identity at a municipal, regional and international level. The potential of using the site to represent Taiwan’s investment in creative culture and Taiwan’s attitude about how to develop 21st century cities are both too great to limit the vision of the site to circumstantial necessity. In order to both draw in a robust mixture of investors and to activate the site culturally it must be conceived as a unique zone, with its own cohesive identity. The work of the studio will be to explore how to generate prototypes for the site that imbue it with a degree of semi-autonomy such that it is neither an autonomous super block within the city nor a diluted two dimensional master plan. Our goal will be to generate a resilient, three dimensional set of strategies that encapsulate the needs and desires of the local community, while giving the site an identity and character that makes it relevant to Taiwan’s international interests. The technique toward pursuing this will lie in our ability to activate voids and produce an effervescent urbanism.

DESIGN METHODOLOGY

A combination of formal, graphic and fabrication strategies will be explored in each team project. Students will use physical model-prototypes at three different scales combined with renderings, montages and animations to study and develop design strategies. In contrast to studios where these media are used toward the end of the design process, students will begin working within each of these media at the beginning of the semester. A series of rapid “design experiments” comparing massing models, structural models, façade models and renderings will allow students to understand the cultural and architectural potential of their designs in relation to the complex. Students will sketch out, repeat experiments and refine design strategies using each medium, a combination of high tech and low tech practices and manual and mechanic processes. Brainstorming and post rationalization – drawing upon the results of these early design experiments – will be crucial in forming the conceptual, technical and cultural underpinnings of each design proposal.
The semester is broken into two halves, the first is focused on the development of prototypes and the second on applying and testing those prototypes on the site. The studio will culminate in a single proposal for the site.
The first half of the semester will be intensively skill-building as well as serving to enhance each student’s understanding of the site. Students will begin with analyzing existing proposals for the site through modeling and visualization techniques at one scale. They will then focus on one of four prototypes for development and work together to study and test select regions of the site. This phase will involve working with physical models at two scales. See below for details.
In the second half of the semester the prototypes will be tested at the scale of the site. Other select regions will be explored, culminating in a final proposition. All research in this half of the semester will be one part model-based and one part based on visualization. Techniques for making a one minute “trailer” of the key assets of the proposal will also be developed throughout this half of the semester allowing students to test and experiment with a variety of mixed media techniques including rendering, montaging and modeling.