Civic Friche is a Taubman College of Architecture + Urban Planning interdisciplinary course and research project.
12
Dec 09
Urban Prairie
In 2010, Jardin Chaumont, a domaine in the Loire Valley of France, called for landscape installation proposals to grapple with the theme of “body and spirit”. The annual festival draws close to half a million visitors a season, and posits itself as an avant-guarde laboratory for gardening and temporary installation. The Urban Prairie proposal, a collaboration between Steven Christensen (architect), Michael Appel (landscape architect) and James Griffioen (photographer), drew inspiration from the radical landscape of Detroit. The project was shortlisted.
12
Dec 08
Jardin Metis
Rather than positioning plant life as a bucolic backdrop beaten into horticultural submission, Sous-Jacent, a competition entry for Jardin Metis, situates vegetation as the protagonist of a celebratory event. To participate, one is persuaded to relinquish all preconceived notions of the garden typology, and to assume the perspective and scale of a plant. Precise incisions into the landscape guide the visitor into a hyper-saturated, subsurface multimedia sensorium, where visual, aural and olfactory stimuli challenge the subjectivity of the participant.
14
Jun 07
Pampas De San Bartolo
The task of planning a new district for Lima in the Pampas de San Bartolo is complicated by a number of predicaments: a completely arid climate with limited water resources, multiple overlapping land tenures, the onset of invasion or unchecked squatting, the constraints of humble economic means, and finally the idiosyncrasies of a population deeply attached to the notion of private land ownership. That is, the site is entirely averse to standard densification through vertical living buffered by zones of green so often prescribed as a global antidote to housing shortages. The object then, is to harness the ostensibly difficult aspects of the site in order to produce dynamism, heterogeneity, urbanity and inhabitability while avoiding the pitfalls of prescriptively totalizing, top-down design.
12
Sep 06
Providence Waterfront
In 2006 Providence held its first public competition for the design of an eight acre park on the site to be vacated by the projected relocation of I-195. The Urbanscape proposal, a collaborative work with Steven Christensen and Christian Stayner, won second place. The project was displayed for public view and comment at the Roger Williams Park Casino.
