Thursday, 15 October 2009
Wednesday, 14 October 2009
Serial Views 07/10/2009
Here are my serial views that i sketched, to help me get a better understanding of the section and heights of our group route. Sketching these views enabled me to get a better understanding of the depth and height of the architecture and spaces of our route.
Ryan
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An Urban History of Studio 1am's Route
Portsmouth by the early 18th Century was reaching a crisis point in its density, as an increase in activity at the dockyard had lead to an influx of workers all clamouring for accommodation. As a result by 1710 we find that the Dockyard craftsmen had begun to build houses on the west dock field known collectively as the common.
Portsea developed itself over the 18th Century around a central street, which provided the focus for the town and also incorporated schools, shops, pubs, small businesses and housing along its length providing a mixed and varied social atmosphere. Smaller grid streets then radiated off this core of activity and filtered into it. Portsea at this point can be read as a semi lattice city, a concept developed by the urban theorist Christopher Alexander which simply means the various functions of a city are represented as points interconnected in every possible combination thus creating a fully cohesive and interconnected society and urban fabric.
After an organic and gradual growth for over two centuries the cohesive built form and the social structures that inhabited Portsea were disrupted with the advent of the Second World War and the ensuing destruction it wrought over Portsmouth as a whole. Portsea lost the dense and merging built framework that bound it together socially, the activities that had lined its streets were parcelled off elsewhere in the city to form individual, detached islands focusing on specific functions.
The neat ordered terraces that encouraged a sense of ownership and community were mostly replaced with self contained blocks of flats, designed as machines for containing people; clinical, expressionless and practical. While these undoubtedly were an improvement in terms of organisation and sanitation people couldn’t ‘own’ or truly inhabit these spaces and this has led over time to the erosion of community and the remaining individual inhabitants becoming passive and uncaring towards their surroundings. Christopher Alexander would label this process as the creation of a tree city, an urban form that has the appearance of being a whole but in fact divides off into a mass of individual branches all unconnected to each other.
This social predicament is currently being further exaggerated with the construction of new apartment blocks targeted specifically at a professional section of society that is unwilling to engage with other sections of the general public. This is reflected in new buildings targeted towards specific user groups with gated entrances, blank ground floors, underground car parks and completely self contained parks and gardens; there is usually a prevailing sense of edge but this is not accompanied with any visible social or physical threshold to cross.
Portsea developed itself over the 18th Century around a central street, which provided the focus for the town and also incorporated schools, shops, pubs, small businesses and housing along its length providing a mixed and varied social atmosphere. Smaller grid streets then radiated off this core of activity and filtered into it. Portsea at this point can be read as a semi lattice city, a concept developed by the urban theorist Christopher Alexander which simply means the various functions of a city are represented as points interconnected in every possible combination thus creating a fully cohesive and interconnected society and urban fabric.
After an organic and gradual growth for over two centuries the cohesive built form and the social structures that inhabited Portsea were disrupted with the advent of the Second World War and the ensuing destruction it wrought over Portsmouth as a whole. Portsea lost the dense and merging built framework that bound it together socially, the activities that had lined its streets were parcelled off elsewhere in the city to form individual, detached islands focusing on specific functions.
The neat ordered terraces that encouraged a sense of ownership and community were mostly replaced with self contained blocks of flats, designed as machines for containing people; clinical, expressionless and practical. While these undoubtedly were an improvement in terms of organisation and sanitation people couldn’t ‘own’ or truly inhabit these spaces and this has led over time to the erosion of community and the remaining individual inhabitants becoming passive and uncaring towards their surroundings. Christopher Alexander would label this process as the creation of a tree city, an urban form that has the appearance of being a whole but in fact divides off into a mass of individual branches all unconnected to each other.
This social predicament is currently being further exaggerated with the construction of new apartment blocks targeted specifically at a professional section of society that is unwilling to engage with other sections of the general public. This is reflected in new buildings targeted towards specific user groups with gated entrances, blank ground floors, underground car parks and completely self contained parks and gardens; there is usually a prevailing sense of edge but this is not accompanied with any visible social or physical threshold to cross.
Urban Development of the Route
These figure ground diagrams convey the thinning of the urban build up. This shift in the built environment has then been represented in society with a thinning out of activity and function.
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