uRED Architecture

The winds of our time agitate the urban fabric. Even seemingly orderly cities like New York-- laid in rigid adherence to the grid-- in practice display a discrepancy between its rudimentary blueprint and the complexity of its three-dimensional layering. This complexity reflects both the 'pre-urban' past, the sweeping filling of the grid, and more recent re-layering. It is this last phase of the urban gestation that might be disturbed by the winds of today.

The principles of post-industrial city should be revived by a new urban conception. Cities today are no longer mere vessels for human activities, rather they are swept by a turbulent flow of invisible energy that encrypts a new knowledge of our world, and affects our lives in a new way. Indeed, due to our ability to communicate, we can function as citizens of the world entirely outside of the sheltering embrace of a city. The new role of architecture is thus to utilize the new experience of the electronic era to enrich our experience of urban space for the betterment of urban life. The new urban space should surpass the banality and flatness of the quintessential manifestation of the electronic medium: the image.

Swept by today’s winds, the fragments of urban fabric are in this proposal elevated from the ground plane. The basic natural/artificial dichotomy is evolving into a symbiotic relationship and dissolving the rigid urban hierarchy. Artifice becomes natural and natural becomes artifice. The flat, two-dimensional urban fabric becomes a palimpsest for transparent curtains stretching across Manhattan from the Hudson to the East River.

The curtains are membranes of light that house tamed fragments of natural landscape. The soil brings life to the organic world and its weight enables the kinetic elements of the structures to become static--if only for a brief time-- and habitable. The water protects the structure from the fire and feeds the floral ecology. The leaves are not the pixels of an image: as they change, they banish the fruitless obsession of architecture--the facade.