This was my slide from Friday's group presentation to the rest of the year. The aim was to briefly outline your chosen area of study and to show how it fits into a coherent theme running through the whole group. The diagram at the top of the page illustrates the area being investigated by each group member and places them relative to each other in terms of scale and context. My subject area is the City (highlighted).
The images below are the Nollie plan of Rome (left) and a photograph of OMA's model of their masterplan for Melun-Sénart. The Nollie plan demonstrates how in Rome there is a clear connection between prominent civic buildings and useable public space. This creates a series of strong urban artefacts (focal points which give a sense of order to the city) surrounded by a mass of solid, unremarkable private and residential space(which can be thought of as filler).
In their masterplan for Melun-Sénart OMA acknowledge this relationship between urban artefacts and filler by giving absolute priority to the former. Key roads, parks, public spaces and civic buildings are mapped out as a series of voids, land which is reserved. Everything else is given over to filler (which they refer to as flotsam). In the model the flotsam is unarticulated, merely represented by card stuffed into the areas surrounding the voids.
This understanding of the relationship between urban artefacts and the rest of the city is where I proposed to begin my investigations for the year.
