Rotterdam field trip

After having gone to Rotterdam to meet some good friends also working on their master thesis. Some important questions have been raised about the scope of the thesis, as well as the output of it.

Hence to clarify this all, you will find hereunder a small text about the position of the thesis and the possible outcome of it. As of now, I wonder if it isn't too wide still and shouldn't be more defined. This text will also certainly undergo modifications, but it shall be my guideline during the research. I'll update it as my ideas clarify.

"Space is the expression of society"- Castells -

// POSTULATE //

The world today has made several steps in the direction of a new revolution : The Informational revolution. M. Castells defines the society living under this reign as the Network Society. Our world is becoming more and more connected every day, on a virtual scale and on a physical one. Travel time and costs are being reduced, and informationnal systems help us communicate with people we haven't ever met. This (r)evolution has a big impact on the notion of place and space, as the virtuality of it is becoming more and more a part of our reality, changing the way we live, move and communicate.

As architects and city planners we need to develop projectual techniques to accomodate those changes, and build an environment representative of today's society. An environment that allows us to combine the space of places to the "space of flows". -Castells-

// RESEARCH //

The constructivist movement was born in a place and time when it was crucial to develop new ideas to accomodate and help build the "new (socialist) society". The ideas they developed during their "short" existence, describe key processes that were to be put in place to "design" the new socialist city. However formal they may seem, they also deeply researched the social impacts of architecture and urbanism. Their movement is also often associated with the Modernism, while it is true both were seeing the city as a "machine", the constructivists (at least the O.S.A) were looking at it as a "social machine" where the moderns were seeing a "economic machine". As a place where humans were to be social instead of produce.

One of Constructivism's main goal was "to establish a scientific architectural and urban creation process, freed from all subjectives and irrational aspects caracterising, according to them, all the previous methods". A. Kopp. However some of them, the best example being Krassilinkov, foresaw the limits of the constructivist's methods and decided to push it further. He scientifically approached the architectural creation process in all its synthetic aspects. By doing so, he put together a "mathematico-graphical" -V. Krassilnikov- approach. This method is the first known architectural method using computation. However it could only be verified 40 years later with the advent of computers.

This project's approach is taken as a grounding point to build further computational methods adapted to today's networked society. Urban methods adapted to the space of flows.

The battlefield for the development of those tools shall be one of the mega-cities, as they are the crystallization of the place where flows "materialize" at their best.

Goal :

develop a computational tool for to help plan the mega-city, looking at methods and ideas developped by the constructivists and re-adapting them to today's issues and concerns. Tools should reflect possible scenarios and help at decision making.

Scale :

(Mega-?)Urban scale

Object of study :

Moscow - Because they represent the new form of city we are building. Therefore the best places to work on the places of flows. They are also the cities facing the biggest challenges, as their growing rate make the current city planning tools the most obsolete.

As for now one question remains to be sorted, what scale shall i restrain myself to?