Urban Parks - the brief

A couple of years back, I had the opportunity to write a brief for the ANDC trophy ( The Annual NASA Design Competition). The brief involved issues that have gained in relevance, these past few years:

The brief

Society of the hybrid

Contemporary lifestyles create a society of hybridities, of convergence. Mobile phones are no longer just phones, but cameras/ mp3 players/ personal organizers bundled into one. We see hybridities in all aspects of our schizoid post-modern lifestyles – the gadgets we use, our cultural and sexual identities, the way business and pleasure get blurred (so as to even prompt the finance ministry to have a fringe benefit tax!), and increasingly, even the spaces we inhabit are hyper functional.

Architecture has engaged with hybridity in one way or another for the past century. Whereas modern architecture of the early twentieth century tried to simplify modern society by techniques of stratification and separation (the factory from the house, the pedestrian from the automobile, the figure from the ground…), the last few decades have celebrated the impure - the hybrid, whether formally as in post modern architecture of the sixties and the deconstruction of the eighties, or programmatically as in the last two decades or so.

Contemporary works such as those of Rem Koolhaas, Bernard Tschumi, Ben van Berkel etc. irrigate territories with potentialities of new and schizoid programs. The word ‘typology’, a modernist creation, is no longer a stable construct. Typologies are destabilized, deconstructed and mutated to form new possibilities of inhabiting space and unfolding contemporary life.

The Seattle Library anticipates new ways of archiving information, and also becomes a lounge for the entire city; the Prada store in New York gets converted into a place for concerts every once in a while; and any atrium in a shopping mall constantly reconfigures to accommodate functions ranging from VJ hunts to Polio drives.

Just Park

In this world where even the typology of the house is in a state of flux (the loft, the SoHo…), we invite you to re-think a typology, which has largely resisted architectural innovation – the car park.

The ubiquitous feature of any urban agglomeration, the car park (whether as a multistoried mega structure or just asphalted ground) has remained fairly mono functional in the way it is conceived.

“Parking” as an architectural function is always relegated to the back in the designers mind, a boring space which no building or urban space can do without, but in itself lacks any feature. The architecture of parking is increasingly an architecture of statistics ( habitable space /X m2 of office space/ housing space etc. = no of parking bays…) to the point that parking spaces in their blandness stand in contrast to other public spaces within a building.

Urbanistically, in the west, the car park has become a site for exploration only in the last decade or so. In one of the more famous projects, Rem Koolhaas uses the car park in Yokohama city to unfold a range of time based programs on a largely inert parking space. Many other architects such as the dutch studio, NL architects, generate a complex web of programmes intertwined with a multi storied parking for the city of Amsterdam. But these explorations still remain very few compared to architectural thought in other urban spaces.

If the twentieth century was defined by new ways of mobility, the twenty first is about the infrastructures and the redundancies that mobility generates. Spaces such as railway stations, airports, traffic interchanges etc. coexist with and sometimes even replace traditional notions of urban space such as courts and streets.

Rethinking the mundane

We invite you to rethink the typology of parking precisely because it is so boring. The site for architectural innovation is not only in generating new and unimagined forms, but also in rethinking inherited notions of functions and generating unimagined mixity of program. Creativity lies in the skill to generate the interesting out of the mundane.

In India the issue of parking has started pitching our everyday life. Nearly all cities in India are compensating the lack of urban planning by thinking of ad hoc solutions for parking and traffic management. In cities all across India, we see streets being taken over by the automobile, and when that is insufficient, ugly multistoried car parks mushroom with scant regard for context. It is imperative that such junk spaces of our society become sites for architectural creativity.

Another aspect, which bears exploration in the design, is the architectonic quality of a space designed primarily for the automobile. When an automobile is intended to infiltrate architectural (and therefore primarily human) space, it generates its own logic of turning radii, column free access etc, which conflict with traditional ways of generating space.

Architecture then has to resolve this tension between the needs of the automobile and the inhabitants. For an early example, one has to look at the ground floor plan of Villa Savoye to understand how the path of the car reconfigures the access to the first floor and the primary grid of the plan.

In this brief, innovation lies at two levels. The basic monofunctional typology of the car park is to be metamorphed into a space which reflects todays schizoid and simultaneous lifestyles, and secondly, drastically rethinking the architectonic quality of a space which primarily caters not to man but to the machine.

Scale

The project should accommodate parking for approximately 500 cars and also have parallel programs introduced to hybridise the typology of monofuntional parking. The project could take the form of a multistoried intervention or an underground solution or even combine both, but should not be confined only to the ground plane.

The programs which are inserted in addition to parking could be accommodated within the space generated by the parking or could be accommodated in highly specialized spaces which in themselves are mono functional (for e.g., a street market could be introduced within the space of the parking itself, whereas a cinema theater would require a dedicated space…)

The hybrid programs introduced should sufficiently destabilize the notion of the car park as we know it, but at the same time should not consume more than 10% of the parking capacity generated by the project during the peak hours. In this way the programs should be symbiotic rather than parasitic.

Site

The site could be located in any urban agglomeration, which justifies the amount of parking space generated. (This could be the down town commercial hub of a metropolis or even the congested by lanes of a small temple town).
A part of the design lies also in choosing an interesting urban situation and mining the context for programmatic mixity.

Careful analysis of the site through different techniques such as photographic and image based, diagrammatic, statistical, and even through computer animations modeling time and other parameters, should support the selection and subsequent design of the site.

Name

The design should be such that simplistic terms such as “Car Park” should no longer be able to describe the design. A part of the design also lies in synthesizing a name that adequately describes the project.

Temporal fields

Adequate analysis of the existing context should be carried out to establish temporal uses of the site and the surroundings. Teams have to be creative and sensitive in designing the temporal aspect of the program. The project should be programmed in a manner such that it acts passively during peak hours (it absorbs parking congestion contributing very less to the existing demand) and is active as an urban stimulator during other times. New innovative ways of choreographing space through time is anticipated as a part of the design.

Architectonics.

Just as the design anticipates new and exciting ways of imagining the mundane, the architectonic / structural solution also should be liberated from traditional notions of structure and space. New juxtapositions in functions should result in new ways or at least hybrid ways of generating space.

Design

The design should address the issues stated above, and go further in anticipating issues, which may not even be a part of this brief. The design should be as multivalent in its approach as the brief imagines the space of an hybridized parking lot to be.

The scope of the design, in spite of being architectural, ranges from the interior to the urban.