Carto City

I still remember my experience of driving in Houston. It's such a highly symmetric layout of a city -- streets line horizontally and vertically, highways develop a shape of spiderweb and blocks after blocks stand there just like pixels on a computer screen. When I saw the tall buildings at downtown on the highway, I can't help saying "Oh, the CITY".

For driving, it's actually not bad to have a city mapped like this. But the more you have traveled in Houston, the more you are feeling that something is missing -- something that belongs to the long evolution of human civilization at one place. As my friend who lived at Houston said, "Houston is just a large collection of human residence. It is NOT like a city."

If you have played some city planning PC games you would have a better understanding of this. Whether it's to building a modern city in SimCity, or an ancient Roman one in Caesar, it's always a process of accumulation: make a small area of resident houses, build grocery store, market, etc. to support life, install theater, arena to enrich life, and so on.

If you don't have access to certain locations, you'd need to build roads to connect to them. But modern civilization has just gone too far. Highways make it no longer a problem if a place you need to visit often is several miles away. Thus, the layout of modern cities shows high degrees of function separation. Thus, we now have the word "downtown" (and "commute").

Project 2

A Broken Heart In The Lost World

Presentation

Andrea Zittel

Multiplicity - Border Matrix

The idea of funnels immediately attracts me. Funnels "gather and select different and dispersed flows", and "give them a direction". This concept makes me link with the I-card door access at Siebel Center. Different people have different levels of access to those rooms at the building. This results in the fact that some cool rooms with all kinds of amazing equipment will only allow a selective group of people to enter. So it'd be interesting to think about who else is able to come in when you are in a space with really few access permits granted (and especially when you have no idea who else has the access). There is also a group of people who have the skeleton key -- the key that can open every door at Siebel Center. It'd be also interesting to think about who belongs to such group of extreme authority and power. (I still remember one time I asked a guy from the tech group to help open a door using the skeleton key, and he told me that if he did not return the key in 5 minutes, he would be "killed". ;p)

At first glance, the idea of pipes seems similar to funnels. However after a second thought, I begin to realize that the idea of pipes is quite emphasizing on that the surface is surrounding a flow, making it impenetrable. This is more like The Channel Tunnel (also known as Chunnel or Eurotunnel) -- an exclusive way helping people get rid of all the sea creatures. Also it generally has to transport objects from point A to point B -- when you enter at one end, you can only exit at the other end. There is little, if any, possibility that you can stop and stay in between.

Thinking of sponges, my first impression is human beings' choices of resident places on earth. In ancient times, when agriculture was not so developed, populations are quite determined by geographic condition. People preferred living by sea rather than living inland, since the sea provided much more food there. And even along the coast line, there were difference. River mouth helped gather more population there, since it provided water adding to the sea food. Hence, along the continental border, those river mouths (New Orleans, Shanghai, etc.) are just like god made sponges on earth.