#parametric architecture

“Resilience; Never Falls”

Bridge house, Karjat, India,

Masia Freixa, Sant Jordi Park, Terrassa, Barcelona,

Lluís Muncunill i Parellada Architect

Zaha Hadid Architects

Changsha Meixihu International Culture and Art Centre, China, 2019

"XIX Productive Structures" _ Review _ MArch 2021-22 _ Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff University _ Friday 22.10.2021 _ Visiting critic _ With Alexandros Kallegias and Nikoletta Karastathi _ Photographs by Spyros Kaprinis [22.10.2021].

"At the strategic core of an urban regeneration scheme lies the ideology of a mixed city. Yet a lot of cities around the world are less mixed than what we make them to be. The economy of production, fabrication and restoration are integral activities of our urban existence. For the contemporary city to be more resilient the aspect of productivity needs to be revisited. As each city is focusing on developing its own industry, the sensation of living in fragments becomes a growing issue. Having different modes of production will enable new opportunities for city growth. That will be through social interactions and sustainability. Hence the aim for encouraging production, making production more visible and connecting it to daily life and the city fabric becomes ever more crucial. And the architect is defining what is productive by looking at creative open- ended scenarios of urbanism.  The question also looks at the production itself; how do we define a productive city? Is the city focusing on agriculture, or on industrial products? Is it focusing on becoming more cultural or more conscious? A city’s production range varies. And it is the architect’s role to find an urban entry point that will enable rejuvenation and facilitate sustainability. We will ask ourselves how the people will inhabit our design proposals. What kind of productive interaction is going to take place between the edifice and the urban systems that it is a part of? These will be some of the questions that we will aim to respond. At the end of the year, the unit’s work will comprise a catalogue of design strategies depicting a series of urban regeneration proposals. The proposed site location for design proposals is the North Woolwich area on the south-east side of the Royal Group of Docks, specifically the strip of land by River Thames, located between the Royal Victoria Gardens and Thames Barrier Park. North Woolwich was formerly the site of several cable and ship-building industries. Since the docks closed down in 1980’s, there have been recurrent efforts in redeveloping the area with limited outcomes. The area has gained multiple infrastructure links nearby in the past decades, namely the London City Airport, an extension of Docklands Light Railway (DLR), Jubilee Line, and the proposed Cross rail extension which will begin to serve the area in the near future. Moreover, the redevelopment scheme has implemented the constructions of the University of East London (UEL) and the ExCeL Exhibition Centre, both of which are expected to increase the regeneration of the area. Projects will respond to the design problem of situating a structure in the void spaces of London’s Royal Docks."