Project: Combinatory Urbanism - Emerging Patterns of Spatial Production
Project Team: PORT
Completed: October 2004
Competition: Transit Spaces - The 3rd International Bauhaus Award
Competition Organizer/Host: The Bauhaus Foundation - Dessau, Germany
Award: 2nd Prize
This project is an investigation into the sometimes familiar, sometimes veiled organization, products, and influence of exurban spaces emerging from contemporary urban growth in the United States. The work explores a series of hyperbolic institutions and their constituent physical manifestations in order to triangulate broader trends of urban production from a set of seemingly disparate programs and forms including airports, NASCAR stadiums, mega-churches, truckstops, masterplanned communities, and just-in-time retail structures.
What links the spatial products explored here is a characteristic shift away from a singularly programmed building or structure towards the highly concentrated programmatic infiltration of unrelated structures or typologies by larger networks or ‘franchises.’ Though each typology and its primary programmatic intention may differ drastically, it should be understood that in every enclave explored, there is an accumulation of multiple combinants within a single perimeter or envelope. This in turn moves these developments towards a hermetically sealed, autonomous urban experience that becomes easily reproducible anywhere, at any time. In essence what we are describing is a new conception of the urban within its given constituent physical manifestations. The work explores not only the physical form of these spatial products, but also the political and social instrumentality embedded within each.
The formation and proliferation of these totalized environments is perpetuating one of the great myths of globalization – that only nonhierarchical, ubiquitous urban form is being produced. However, rather than a condition of sameness, what we believe the emergence of these enclaves represent is an urban form characterized by decentralization and horizontal extension, a form whose hierarchy is defined by multiple points of intensification and failure.
