Re-Cycled Urbanism

Cycling:

The process of life itself recycles architecture. Architecture can never be truly original as it feeds of the existent. Nothing is new. It is all reinterpretation. Yet the notion of recycling introduces the need to respond to now obsolete urban complexes. It conceives of new logics for operations which affect the habitat. Traditionally, urban recycling is executed through the operations of restructuring and the redefinition of existing spaces in order to foster new relationships; in essence, it is an intervention in our environment. To recycle a city is to create a new social cycle within the city. This comes with the recognition that the existing has reached the end of its life cycle in relation to its value to the inhabitant. On a more intimate and singular scale an existing architecture could be subverted in meaning to be re-introduced it into the cycle.
On a global scale, urbanism in its entirety must be reinterpreted and reinvented. A new cultural, physical, social, and economic cycle must be constructed upon an existing conditional base. For a cycle to be successful, it must have a fundamental basis in the history and culture of the place. Urban recycling will affect the city physically, and socially. It must improve the quality of life and environmental development. It should help the city to grow inwards; to contract while maintaining a sense of preservation about its inherent nature. The ultimate goal of urban recycling is to innovate while increasing the heritage of its particular site.
The cities have expanded to include an urban-territorial space where the periphery can not be conceived. Here, various conditions coexist, side by side. All of these conditions of the contemporary city allude to an anomalous and decidedly unfinished definition of the territory. The existing architecture responds to the outlived systems subservient to the principles of profit and expansion. The time for change has reached us.
The value in architecture can no longer be judged by the creation of space, but by the relationships fostered within it. Architecture is principally for the user. Its value lies in its direct enhancement of the inhabitant’s social and environmental interaction; its positive affect on development and the stimulation of the senses. It must heighten our awareness and reactions to our environment. It should provide diversity to appeal to functional requirements, aesthetics, and the unique reflection of the users. In this sense, it should also be adaptable, never to inhibit the user’s development or inhabitation of the space. No longer are the standardized boxes of corporations. The less prescriptive the form, the more reactionary the space, the more open the possibilities, the more potentially interactive. Architecture as a strategy has oriented itself towards the restructuring of the existing city, the territory and networks it encompasses, and to infiltrate this fabric with new relational spaces. It calls for reflection upon the entity and its re-cycle through innovation. The productive and social structures must be enhanced with an appropriate spatial organization that will cater to the diverse reality of the multifaceted and hybridized needs. It must allow for mutations and layers of interpretation; the more uncertain and undefined the programmatic nature the more successful the project. This functionally ambiguous and effectively hybrid space, is univocal and multiplicative in manifestation. It favors plurality and intrigue. The layered meanings and overlapped interpretation give birth to levels of relationship and association.

Stitching:

The city existing city is made up of a seemingly incoherent collection of individual fragments, whose continuity relies upon the networks that articulate them and the open spaces that envelope them. The contemporary open urban space is that of an irregular open body. These spaces of omission can often take on a more prominent role than the built spaces. The most direct response is to utilize these spaces for an architecture that is definitively open to describe the current fractured urban territorial structural language. It should be open in the sense of incompetence and incompleteness, to link it to the fundamental territorial conditions of exiting construction, open space, and arterial connective support. In this way these spaces can be recycled as interweavings between the spaces of development and absences.
Any attempt to impose order upon the existing condition of disarray will inevitably result in the heightened sense of greater disorder. Areas of chaos can be viewed as the potential for future definitive quality as the fragmented complexity that defines the city shall not be fought, but embraced. Urban recycling looks to reinterpret the existing, not to alienate or eradicate it.

Towards a Reality:

The ultimate objective is to create a new equilibrium that will underscore the sought quality of an interconnected whole. Recycling, therefore, can not only operate within the parameters of anomalous architecture, but is also able to take the two opposing systems of existing and new and reorganize them into a new condition. Effective sequences and connections between developments can give rise to dynamics of social adhesion.
The most obvious manifestation lies within a downtown rehabilitation. The addition of a community center of an architecture free of predetermined program and free of restriction would result in its elevation to a prescriptive measure for the urban environment. The rehabilitation will become an architecture that stitches the old and the new, redefining how the inhabitants interpret the spaces; being forced to explore the details of program and its responsive capabilities. It should be an architecture where the use is unforeseeable and undetermined until the inhabitants create them.

Manifestation in Areas:

This will require a program of multiple levels, each devoid of set programmatic requirements. Only the most basic biological needs of the inhabitants will be met; being that of light, air, water, sense of place, and security, etc. Lavatories may be included in the program only for the reason that they are a basic functional service requirement. The rest will be subject to the changing functional requirements of the user and based upon the site specific requirements.