Reclaim the Street

Student archive of research, mapping, and design. 

[marknicholsonsf]

Once a year, a call is made, word gets out, a location is chosen, and the clock starts ticking. The Bay Area Motorcycle scene may not be as visible as the techie invasion or Sunday brunch lines, but its heart has been beating for decades. The “Dirtbag Challenge” is one venue that embraces this dirty subculture and gives them a place to be creative, party, and strengthen.

The low-budget chopper build off only gives a 1000 dollar budget and months notice to garage builders, tinkerers, and hobbyists all around SF and the surrounding bay areas. After a month of crunch time, the bikes all show up at a location in Hunters Point for the motorcycle show. Gang flags are left at home and people show up for the love. Bands unearth to echo punk and hardcore music off the walls of the Bayview Industrial Plaza while the parking lot swells with greasers, wrench monkeys, and even interested families. I was fortunate enough to work on a bike for this year with a friend, Onder Keskin. This experience shows how a small common idea can be a magnet for many people within an urban context to get together and turn their passion into something good and creative. 

Making use of an abandoned parking lot is something that I always did through my life as a skateboarder. I have always been a part of “Renegade Urbanism” from creating skate parks under bridges to pouring concrete to aid skateboarders. There is something about this lawless urbanism that has always been attractive to me and I am looking forward to participating with my own complete build next year. 

[marknicholsonsf]

URBANISM FROM WITHIN

SPUR hosted an exhibition of student work done by my classmates on density in San Francisco and its role in the housing crisis. The premise of the project was to explore ways in which the illegal living units within the city could be embraced and re-imagined into something positive (and perhaps necessary) for the city. Some of the ideas present in the student work was redesigning these in-law units to get the necessary light and air. Others came up with user-specific designs for people that are already living in such places. 

It was interesting to see how different each project was. I was also blown away at the consistency of representation. The body of work read as a consistent exploration of many ideas. This also was very close to my experience in the city as I was a victim of eviction and infringement on renters rights. I lived in one of these units for years and know first hand the need for better, cheaper units within the city. I also lived in a house where the garage was converted into three separate studio apartments, two of which had three person families living there in terrible conditions. 

Student Work: Shawn Komlos

Student Work: Christopher Baile

Student Work: Blake Stevenson

Student Work: Bianca Koch

Exhibition Model: Bianca Koch

Seminar led by Neeraj Bhatia, CCA faculty and urban designer

[marknicholsonsf]

Project 2: CHAIR-A-PLEGIC Final Critique

The final installation consisted of two site-specific pieces of furniture. We invited the class to interact with the piece both as pieces of art and functional objects. We also showed documentation of how the project had been used during previous installations. 

[marknicholsonsf]

Project 2: CHAIR-A-PLEGIC

Iteration 2 exploded axon

After the first installation of CHAIR-A-PLEGIC, we chose to adapt our design to make a more versatile and dynamic chair. This second iteration uses the measurement of the perimeter stair around the UN plaza fountain. Because this measurement is so prominent in the area, it can be deployed in many more ways.

[marknicholsonsf]

Project 2: CHAIR-A-PLEGIC

The first installment of our site-specific furniture project for market street consisted of a steel tube chair which has one shortened leg that corresponds to one of the granite blocks in San Francisco’s UN plaza. The concept of the project is to create a mobile piece of urban furniture that is secure and interactive. The fact that the chair cannot be used elsewhere may be a method of theft prevention. Additionally, its layout lines communicate its intended site for urban participants that do choose to interact with the street furniture. 

[marknicholsonsf]

Market Street Prototyping Festival

I was lucky enough to be in the design / build studio that designed, fabricated, and staffed CCA’s Mobil Craft Modules. Our project was one of the anchor projects for the Market Street Prototyping Festival (MSPF) which was a festival put on by the SF Planning Department along with the Knight Foundation. The festival included various projects that imagined the use of public urban space in a playful or meaningful way. This was the first of many festivals that hope to inform future development of cities like San Francisco. 

Our project served as a mobile classroom / exhibition space whose configuration changed as the three day festival progressed. The modules were heavily programmed for the entire festival and nested together to lock up overnight. I would say that the project was a complete success and there was a lot of constructive and meaningful conversations about the pieces. 

Other projects were specifically based on play in the urban environment, but I believe that the projects such as the CCA anchor project and the Studio for Urban Project’s Outpost that had a more careful programming and sequence were more successful as archetypes for future urban development. Although play is important, adaptable designs seem to have more resonance in the complex programmatic realities that unfolds in urban centers. 

I also worked on the project above for Atlas LAB while working at Kreysler & Associates. It is a stylized and abstracted depiction of San Francisco’s iconic topography, specifically in its downtown area. This was CNC routed EPS foam that was treated with rubber that is used for playgrounds. The installation was used by many different types of people, mostly children that enjoyed climbing its odd shape. 

[marknicholsonsf]

Tactical Urbanism

Using Tape to Expose or Accentuate Unseen Uses of Urban Surfaces

[marknicholsonsf]

Reading Response 5

Michel de Certeau, “Walking in the City”

In his essay from The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau analyzes the multiple experiences of the city that result from a voluntary alienation from its ongoing flows. The result of this removal is a shift in perspective to that of a voyeuristic viewer. The overbuilt nature of our cities creates a spacial disconnect between the surface below to its tallest architectural feats. Much like Corbusier’s experience in South America through his plane window, this grand scale of observation provides a new perception of the city. “it allows one to read it, to be a solar Eye, looking down like god.”

There is a scientific impulse from observers in this panoptic role to try to make sense of the city below. The human need for classification and documentation thrives in a role of omniscience. The layout of cities such as New York and Chicago are rational strategies of organization after all. The scientific observer is in a role of understanding (or attempting to) while the role of the walker is strictly that of participation. The city becomes an experiment through which a deeper understanding or more justified description of its happenings are sought out. 

Certeau doesn’t offer or preach, hoever, a quantitative description of the city. It seems like he actually warns against it. Compiling trajectories of walkers and drivers within a city is to document a void, a collection of what has happened. This is interesting to contrast with the show at SPUR on urban cartography. Certain pieces that were shown, i would argue, were extremely telling of how spaces in a city are used and were by themselves extremely dynamic. I think it was additional layers of information (besides trajectories) that made the maps more significant than what Certeau describes as “a void of intent”

The more poetic, qualitative metaphor that Michel Certeau uses to describe the city is that of language. He sees the walkers as an  “an innumerable collection of singularities,” that all have unique inputs, intentions, sequence, and realizations. From what I understand, Certeau is describing the way people use the city as the same way that people use language. The city offers a common urban system that one must participate in (this is the language) and it is the individuality of it’s multiple and specific users that the system is undermined by unique derives (this is the word choice, each language having unlimited combinations of thoughts expressed as speech acts.) I think this way of looking at the city is beautiful, but I am not sure what claims are to be made or if this is a daydream of the removed voyeuristic mind that has given up on scientific, quantitative description of the chaos happening on the surface so far from him.  The last line suggests that there is a quantitative and scientific intent to cities and urban spaces but the force of free human will undermines that intent completely: “a great city built according to all the rules of architecture and then suddenly shaken by a force that defies all calculation.” 

Kandinsky  

Jennifer Wolch, “Zoopolis” from Animal Geographies: Place, Politics, and Identity in the Nature-Culture Borderlands

Urban Planning, and the concept of urbanization itself, has never been conscious of the environment. From Hilberseimer to the megastructures of the late 1960s, it seems to be about control, efficiency, or hyper-rational organization. In her writing, “Zoopolis,” Jennifer Wolch makes a claim that urbanization and industrialization have had huge effects on the ecosystems that were present. It is interesting to read this after hearing about how some urban spaces have actually created ecosystems, such as market street. It was also interesting to see the Hyphae installation on market street as it aligns itself with this more inclusive, environmentally conscious approach to urban development. There is honesty to designs like Hyphae’s installation that do not degrade the environment while being emphatic to all potential users (race, demographic, etc.) There is a desire to green cities going on in the discipline and “sustainable design” has become a huge buzzword, but to be truly conscious and decisive about design intent and the effect that it has on the environment can be much more significant than energy savings or net zero ambitions. 

[marknicholsonsf]

Reading Response #4: Biophilic Cities

Beatley, Tim. “Biophilic Cities: What Are They?” Integrating Nature into Urban Design and Planning

Tim Beatley’s article proposes an adaptation on “green urbanism” that is more centered around the physical inclusion of nature. Unlike its predecessor, Biophilic Urbanism deals directly with increasing the amount of accessible nature to the urban resident rather than optimization of built systems (both construction and infrastructural) justified by lesser impacts on the city.

The main idea of the article is that the quality of urban life is contingent upon the accessibility and inclusion of nature within the urban context. This is a responsibility of government policy, individual lifestyle, and design practices in our current world. All three tiers of impact (design, policy, and individual) are responsible for fostering a closer connection with nature, an idea that seems to have been lost with the industrialization and booming growth of urban centers. There is not only a necessity to protect the nature that currently exists, but restore regional ecosystems, repair threatened areas, and insert the natural world through small interventions anywhere that the city may host it.

What I found particularly interesting about this article was the agency that everyone in the city has in promoting this concept. Biophilic agendas can be spearheaded by governments in ratio requirements or large scale park projects, but smaller impacts can made through plant distribution drives or proposing incentives or bonuses for individuals incorporating nature into the urban environment in tactical ways. This has been done around the world through policy, passing laws that require fixed ratios of green space per block or population, but also by large scale greenbelt projects that introduce a natural thoroughfare through urban centers. The individual, according to Beatley, also has a responsibility in the BIophilic city to become more acquainted with the species, fauna, and natural history of a region. In addition to spending time in nature, the specific knowledge of its constituent parts is important to cultural identity and close connection with the nature around you. Lastly, the designer has a large role in developing materials or designs that have an embedded secondary function. We cover so much of the world with designed or engineered buildings, materials, and surfaces that so not have any secondary performance to benefit the environment. Biophilic Urbanism challenges designers to mimic the highly efficient and resilient ecosystems present in nature to help inform designs. Virtually every surface or structure has the potential to strengthen and feed back into the natural environment around it if the designer is aware and focused on doing so. 

It seems to me that we live in a city that is more “Biophilic” than others. The close proximity to San Francisco to wild, untamed nature is what drew me to this city after living in a very dense, overbuilt sprawl in Southern California. Any time for recreation that I have in this city is almost always accompanied by a voyage out of the urban center to one of many parks within the city or out of the city to protected national seashore. If recreational participation in nature is so important to us, I would agree that any possible inclusion of nature to our everyday lives (at any scale) would greatly improve the quality of life. I do, however, believe that a much larger responsibility falls on the shoulders of the local government to make big changes in surface design in the city to preform and accommodate nature into our streets. 

[marknicholsonsf]

Reading Response #3

Readings:

"When Dangerous Roads are Safer" Tom Vanderbilt

Traffic makes it hard for us to be human. 

-Tom Vanderbilt

In "When Dangerous Roads are Safer,"Tom Vanderbilt carefully analyzes the effect that signage has on traffic, drivers, and human psychology. He includes a variety of examples in which the effect of a street signage has been second to human intuition and common sense. More often than not, the omnipresence of signage creates a false sense of security and dulls the sensory response of drivers. Vanderbilt suggests the purpose of as being nothing more than a tool to "ward off lawsuits" acting like a placebo that ultimately doesn't have any positive effect. The article claims, on the contrary, human empathy as being a more valid form of urban coercion. This is achieved by blending the "traffic world" and the "social world" (to use the words of Hand Monderman). Bringing more human interaction into the streets rather than segregating the zone with misleading signage and deflection can cause a slow zone which is more conducive to self regulation. This self regulation is contingent on a feeling of discomfort. Rather than being a passive operator in a secure metal box and solely obeying the "rules of the road" which are no more than a dictation of priority, these human zones become an area of forced interaction wherein bikes, cars, pedestrians interact by watching each other and being hyper aware. In Scandinavian precedents, communication within these living streets has proved to be a less dangerous and physically slower alternative to signage.

This reading can be directly contrasted to our site on Market Street.  The flow of pedestrian traffic is literally severed by the arterial routes of 5th and 8th street as they funnel cars across the grid change. Decisions of life and death are assumed by an illuminated hand or rushed to fit within a numerical countdown. Right turns on red seem to find a sufficient gap between the pedestrian traffic in an unlawful acceleration of haste.

One similarity, however, are the shared lanes that have emerged in the last four years that laminate bus, bicycle, and vehicular traffic on the peripheries of the broad street. These flows seem like they are starting to self regulate and work efficiently superimposed. 

[marknicholsonsf]

Urban Eddies

Eighth and Market, a bookend to our site and arterial intersection across the centerfold of San Francisco. Market street hosts a lamination of virtually every transportation infrastructure in the city both above ground and below.

And Fifth St. the other book end to our site, situated above multiple subway entrances connecting the residents of San Francisco near and far across the greater Bay Area and beyond.

Outlets from the subterranean train system introduce residents to the broad parks of the civic plaza, street life on market and many ground transportation routes.

Inscriptions on the surfaces articulate intended use, although nearly every one host multiple and shared programs. Changes in material also introduce unintended use by the urban resident.

Once here, now gone! The ephemeral porosity of streets over time is seen in many instances.

Vacant turn offs and parklets are used at the free will of the civic participant, others are subject to time of day or permitted programs. Certain structures have succombed to urban decay.

Other spaces are awkwardly sized, shaped, or partitioned by overlapping systems of intervention. Trees, Signage, hydrants, light posts, and advertisements dissect the broad sidewalk into smaller zones which have been systematically filled with various projects. Here’s a modern adaptation of shared bike racks, and an outdated newspaper dispensers.

All vertical objects seem to have a magnetic draw to the urban loiterer. Other blockages cause slow zones, both permanent and temporal.

A group of men hang out above the bart entrance, and a street congregation happens on the peripheries of the Civic Center Plaza where the homeless are given aid. Points of interest have been designed in the form of fountains and walkways.

Others such as the famous San Francisco the cable car draw crowds from far and wide. This is appealing to another blockage, the Urban Capitalist.

Urban Capitalists come from all walks of life and almost always have the agenda of earning money on the street. This causes a temporary eddie in the urban landscape usually directly next to the faster, dense foot traffic zones.

There is ample space for design intervention within these urban eddies using the existing framework of Market Street. Accommodating programs into these smaller, slow spaces would not inhibit the efficient flow of the urban inhabitant with an agenda. It would, however, offer more diverse programs to the infrastructural ecosystem that is Market Street

Sam Greene (the measure of all things)

[marknicholsonsf]

UrbanEddies

[marknicholsonsf]

Response #2: Urban Players

Texts:

Mike Lydon and Anthony Garcia, "The Next American City and the Rise of Tactical Urbanism"

Margaret Crawford, "Temporary Urbanisms"

Florian Haydn and Robert Temal, "Glossary" and "The Temporary in the City."

Lian Lefaivre and Doll, "Ground-up City, the Place of Play"

Florian Haydn's text offers a summary of most of the ideas explored in this week's readings. His glossary also exposes crucial differences in terminology used to describe a lot of the projects we have seen and will continue to be introduced to. In his piece, "The Temporary in the City," he articulates the validity of temporary interventions in the urban fabric. These ephemeral, or temporary, urban actions have a life beyond their built existence by projecting a new meaning onto a place that hadn't been seen before. They also prime future networks of action by giving the city inhabitants a glimpse of what is possible with ground-up DIY tactics. He calls this self-perpetuating phenomenon "enduring traces." It may also be important to note that the reactionary and specific nature of temporary urban interventions have a stronger identity, relation, and history than top-down projects that have been critiqued by Jane Jacobs in last weeks reading. One project that comes to mind is the 1893 Chicago Columbia Exposition which she accuses as "Not responsive to life. Just to historical architecture's false realities." Considering these two points, I would draw the conclusion that architecture that responds to current conditions rather than romantically cites has a deeper resonance through identity / history, and thus has a larger impact. 

The San Francisco Public Library has a second life as a skatepark.

Powell Street Bart Station contains a famous rail within its subculture.

The idea of reaction is also brought up in Lian Lefaivre's piece "Ground-up City, the Place of Play" as it relates to the adoption of play into the artistic (and architectural) impulse throughout history. LeFaivre traces the idea of play in the public realm to before the Situationist derive to the Dadaists and Surrealists. Such movements were reactions to the horrors of WWI and the extremely conservative mentality that it instilled in most of europe. Schiller's romantic definition of play, in this case, is extremely pertinent. Play is to "tame the savageness of life."

Lefaivre also notes that play, as a design concept, has mostly been adopted by artists. This underscores its legacy in Dada and Surrealism but also accuses the architectural profession of perhaps being too serious or too intertwined with the economic / profit driven aspect of building and design. There are some architectural projects, however, that seem to take on the idea of play. Most, at least within this text, are from the late sixties and remain unrealized. Such projects are Cedric Price's Fun Palace or Constants New Babylon. It is interesting to note that these projects are often classified with the hyper rational utopian mega structures of the same time. The problem may be that these projects were too large to be ground-up urbanism and too complex in their for the top-down means (political and economic) to get built. I do draw a connection, however, to Price's Fun Palace to Tschumi's Le Fresnoy school campus (below) as the physical manifestation of open-ness and playful programmatic blending.

Le Fresnoy, Tschumi Architects. 1997

The Fun Palace, Cedric Price. 1962

The exploration of playgrounds in Amsterdam tied both Lefaivre and Haydn's points together as they started as a community interventions on unused spaces (tactical urbanism) and through many mutations, resilience, trial and error, changed the city policy and gained city support and were architecturally designed. This is an example of the large impact tactical urbanism can have on politics and more formal design practices. 

The idea of play is especially pertinent to the prototyping festival. One could even make the point that it is the main focus of the entire event. Market street will be transformed into a playground, but how many of these projects will be reactionary? I am interested in playful designs that are emergent from Market Street itself and not placed in the same way that so many cookie-cutter playgrounds are across the world. As designers, I believe it is important to have a specific, reactionary stance toward an interventions direct context or situation within a larger city. This way designs are not just heady entertainment, they may have an impact on city policy and life beyond their installation. 

[marknicholsonsf]

Reading Response #1

Texts:  Jan Gehl, "How to Study Public Life"

Jane Jacobs, "The Death and Life of Great American Cities"

Guy Dubord, "Theory of the Derive"

In his book "How to Study Public Life," Jan Gehl calls for a reorientation in the study of urban conditions from a top down, dominant urban planning stance toward a careful study of emergent life and interaction. This idea is most likely a reaction to the public spaces that high modernist architects and planners were designing. Such designs were often blank, banal swaths of paved surface that were, conceptually, public but didn't function in a way inclusive to city residents in any fashion. As Gehl puts it, public spaces had "lost touch with the concept of life on foot." This stance most likely affected the work William Whyte, an urbanist whose video observations we viewed in our first class.

A quantitative density study over time done by William Whyte, "The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces," 1980. 

The approach that Gehl proposes is that of the passive observer. From this removed vantage point, the study is most comprised of quantitative, tangible observations. When qualitative conditions seem to have an impact on the quantitative study at hand, an important aspect of urban environment emerges and possible design interventions appear. Further classification, he proposes,  is necessary to form decisive data. Such classifications range from demographics to velocity and necessity. One of the most interesting parts of Gehl's piece, in my opinion, was the idea of "Triangulation." This is a social phenomenon in which two strangers have an exchange due to an exterior influence. This interests me because it provides a basis to gauge what physical things in our environment have the most impact and what type of impact that is. This is particularly important in public spaces as their essence is to be inclusive to the eclectic reality of the city. Finding common loci within city commons has a resonance with market street and my own interests in design. 

Jean Jacobs shares (in a much more cynical way) Gehl's negative attitude of traditional urban planning. She deems it a pseudoscience, a practice completely unfounded in reality. This shunning is particularly toward urban scheemes that have a philosophy of blank slate modernism. Her idea of selective removal, however, seems to be the only thing she is positive about. This is reminiscent of the idea of tactical urbanism that we were introduced to through the interventionist's toolkit articles. Within her article, Ebenezer Howard's Garden city comes up as a utopian means of redistributing urban functions. It is hard to tell whether this would create a symbiotic urbanity or a highly segregated condition, but I am interested in this idea at a smaller scale which I believe relates to the prototyping festival quite a bit. Rather than having a large public space void of expression, (ie. market street sidewalk), the idea of redistributing functions that naturally happen in this spaces to nodes that are connected along its entirety may be a successful way to emulate what the Garden City was trying to achieve. Similar to the idea of triangulating loci, this plan expresses a strategy for redistributing based on loci (urban necessities and leisure alike) but does so a highly ordered field.

Ebeneser Howard's diagram of programmatic magnets for redistribution in his Utopian "Garden City" 1898.

Guy Dubord's theory of the "derive" seems to sit somewhere between 1960s Fluxist art, projection of psychological response to physical form, and human self-actualization as it relates to urbanity. This third one seems the closest to my understanding. In self actualization, humans realize at a young age that their experience is truly unique and their perceptions aren't necessarily those of others around them. The same phenomenon can be experienced in an urban context. The derive is a way to illustrate the actualization of self and individual experience within the city. Dubord even quotes Marx saying "“Men can see nothing around them that is not their own image; everything speaks to them of themselves. Their very landscape is alive.” By acknowledging this projection (or is it selective attention?) one can start to disorient their emotional perception of the world around them. Certain guided derives that Guy Dubord proposes are similar to the Happenings within the writing of Allan Kapprow or contemporaneous Fluxus art installations. I feel as though compiling different maps of market street from multiple people's derives may be a productive way to understand Market Street as less of a physical manifestation of civic infrastructure and more of an psychological landscape that is perceived in many ways. One way of reading contemporary derives is as simple as tracking trends in social media. 

David Fischer, geotagging of tourists (red) vs. Locals (blue)