03.03.24

I've done some additional reading since last week in the book, The Infrastructural City, a book primarily concerned with the study of real and found phenomena in the city of Los Angeles. 

I've also been thinking about the capstone, Cut and Paste, that I've been studying and how the author, Daniel Barker, had used case study in order to understand the nuances and intricacies of Mies van der Rohe's own collages.

The book chapter I read discussed how the Alameda Corridor, a 50 foot wide, 30 foot deep, 10 mile long trench is a vessel for one of the most important train lines in the country. It transports so much of America's imported and exported products for sale from ocean to city or vice versa.

It's interesting how the author of this chapter makes this corridor feel elusive. Almost as if it's not there, despite the glaring reality that this trench is primarily visible when driving next to it and  when looking down into the trench from buildings. This naturally made me think about what I've written about in my last blog post, about the way we could consider the use of buildings to be infrastructure, and what the implications are for making that infrastructure expressed or not expressed in these building's designs. Or maybe, buildings act as a literal frame work for infrastructure themselves, roads, plumbing, electricity generation (which is already a thing), which could be more of a fantastical idea than anything. 

Regardless, I'm feeling like I may be getting off track from my original idea, or maybe I'm considering a new way to figure out how to move people in a different way that is still productive in the means of car related infrastructure, human scale infrastructure, and a spaces to do many other kinds of things all at once. That is, when considering my idea that there's a market in NWA for intercity travel, but in non-conventional ways that create uniform identity across the region like the greenway.

However, it does sound like I'm just describing the original London Bridge, that was a bridge that also accommodated for mixed uses like housing and commercial spaces. What hasn't been done before?! 

But thinking to what Gabriel said in our last class, maybe I could find new information with an old technique, by making my project place specific. 

Anyway, back to my capstone precedent study, Daniel Barker used collage to learn something new about something that has been established. What If I too used something that had been established to learn something new and build upon it. A new typology maybe could be theorized? Mixed-use infrastructure? Someone please let me know if that exists already.

This would require more research into this topic, but finding things that are along this line of thinking, studying them, creating a taxonomy for space usage, combining things, I don't know how long the list goes on for.

But could be interesting as an idea. Maybe feasible?

It's funny I kind of had a similar idea back last semester when thinking about Dallas and it's overwhelming amount of parking lots in downtown. I came up in my head with an idea that essentially was a large bridge system that accommodated different mixed-use spaces. While this bridge didn't account for car traffic, what if it did? Or not.