bottom up design

ubiquitous urbanism studio zaha hadid

Our project explores principles of physical and visual connectivity as a method of evaluating and generating new spatial solutions for contemporary society. This idea derives from startup research of individual urban systems, where on the example of working environments, we have addressed problems, needs, and desires of corporative field.

Having analyzed existing precedents, we have met certain communicational constraints intrinsic to old spatial models, that still widely repeated even for new social processes. In order to overcome these limitations, we extract local rules that affect and regulate the spatial and communicative formation of the working environment – rules of physical and visual connectivity. Implementation of these rules allows us to achieve a certain set of variations and combinations, going from complete absence of visual and physical integration between the spaces, to visual integration only, and to the maximum physical and visual integration. Being tightly related to the proximity of spaces, these internal rules have certain potential in terms of building relationships not only on local but also on a global scale.

Our idea is to unfold these rules on an urban level and encourage the correlation of multiple systems by means of principles that would be shared by all systems.

That’s why, when we move from research of individual systems to the scale of a master plan, as a very first step, we embed principles of physical and visual integration in the urban field to guarantee desired levels of connectivity and only after that gradually introduce individual systems. Thus the influence of the mentioned principles propagates through any system build upon it and acts as a correlative mechanism.

After a layer of shared properties is established, we start to build an urban field with the dominance of one system. This field is gradually altered and updated by the information of the system newly introduced in the field. Each system acts in limits that had been already ascribed to it by other teams’ research, and cause particular changes when it influences the field.

This strategy allows us to correlate multiple systems, in the way, which excludes simple collage or imposition, and encourage the contributive coexistence of urban layers.

Daniel Bolojan

Daniel Zakharyan