Begin

My area of interest begins with a film that Brian Nilsson and I made spring semester 2004 for Urban Design Theory class. This film is entitled The Temporal City, and is about a particular experience that is created in the parking lots of concert venues when tens of thousands of people come from all over the United States and Canada to see a band called Phish. As a long time follower of the band, I have seen this city constructed, deconstructed, moved and reconstructed in a new location many times.

There is a community that exists within this city that supports itself and brings diversity to the cities it temporarily settles in. With a range of encounters and exchanges, this city grows and mutates as it continues its journey. It is that mutation, that promise of a unique experience everytime that I find so addictive.

Inspiration

Film: The Temporal City

The Temporal City is one of the most meaningful projects I have done at Woodbury. It has allowed me to examine an ongoing experience that evolved over the 12 years of my life. It has also provided me with some insight into what is important to me. Through the documentation of this nomadic city, I have been further inspired to seek out examples of nomadic architecture.

Design Studio 4B: Urbanism

Another project that has had great significance for me is from the Urban Studio 4B. For this class I created a bi-national airport that straddled the border between San Diego, California and Tijuana, Baja California. This project was particularly meaningful to me because I feel I successfully blurred the border by creating a bi-national zone surrounding the airport that was to be a destination, not only for the airport, but also for the urbanity created within its infrastructure.

My design solution was to lift the airport above the city and integrate maquiladoras and industrial warehousing into its infrastructure. Doing this allowed for an easier distribution of goods from the San Diego / Tijuana area and created a bi-national zone with all the amenities of an international city where people from both sides of the border could come and freely mingle. This bi-national zone could be entered unchecked by people from both nations, it would be on the way out that they would have to go through a checkpoint.

By allowing people from Tijuana and San Diego to come together easily, cultural exchanges can happen more regularly and a stronger relationship between the two cities could be further developed. This project is significant to me because it was a break through point where I feel I began to really understand the layers that exist within the fabric of the city.

Design Studio 3B: Charette - Baldwin Hills Skate Park

One other of the more meaningful projects that I have done is the skateboard park I designed in my Studio 3B charette. The site we were given was in the Baldwin Hills of Los Angeles, California. My solution was to cover part of the mountain with a skateboard park and have pathways with sidewalls that transitioned from the horizontal to the vertical, like half-pipe ramps. The sidewalls varied in height as one went along, being low in some places while wrapping up overhead in others. This project was meaningful to me not only because of the impact that skateboarding has had on my life, but also because this was where I was first able to fully imagine the movement through the space of a design that only existed in my mind.

These three projects are similar in the respect that they are all breakthrough points of my educational process. They are also similar in that they all represent an urban condition in some way. Even the skateboard park in the Baldwin Hills of L.A. can be seen as urban not only because it is in the middle of Los Angeles, but also because skateboarding is inherently an inner city activity.

These projects differ in the obvious ways, one being a film about Phish fans who create a city in the parking lots of venues where the band plays, one was a bi-national airport city on the San Diego / Tijuana border, and the last is a skate park in Los Angeles. But it goes deeper than that in the sense that each one represents a different kind of breakthrough for both myself personally and my educational process. Each project has taught me something different about myself and where I am going in school, career, and life.

Returning to The Temporal City, the making of this movie inspired me to seek out other forms of nomadic architecture. This led me to ancient as well as modern civilizations that live nomadic lifestyles. A nomadic community creates both a specific type of architecture that is collapsible and mobile and a culture that is unique and highly adaptable. The people of these mobile communities feel a bond between each other through the shared experience of nomadic life. What is interesting is that there are a wide variety of conditions that provide an avenue for nomadic communities to thrive. It is this study that has provoked questions like, can a condition be stimulated in order to attract a nomadic culture to any given location? If nodes were situated in locations that have a diverse array of short-term opportunities and have spaces that encourage temporal inhabitation, would more people want to live a nomadic lifestyle?