Critics: David Ruy

Studio Title: The 21st Century Urban Park

Program: Understand the influence for synthetic landscapes versus the natural and propose a new image for a 21st century park.

Computer program used: Rhino + Mudbox

Designation: Team Leader 

Project Description: Focuses attention on new principles of urban Deisgn emerging out of the latent landscape practices of the 20th century. Park; as an Urban design problem, with its strange divide between city and nature. If 21st cetury is indeed to be marked by the ecological problem, the positioning of nature as an object within the city will inevitably be a critical area of concern.

A New Datum_ imagines a scenario responding to a radical (but seemingly inevitable) rise in water level across Miami. Miami is one of the youngest landmasses to be fromed on Earth and is currently a peninsula surrounded by the Atlantic ocean. Thus the sea level rise is going to affect Miami in the near future, and the people of Miami will have to try and define ‘a new normal’. The urbanism emerging from this catastrophe is understood as a new normal, and has to be dealt with. To the eyes of the present, this speculative urbanism may seem to be an uncomfortable cohabitation with pervasive technologies constituting alternative modes of human survival. The scenario about disappearance of the stable ground is explored by asserting the idea that a new datum emerging along with new aesthetic judgements about what it means to live in a city. The paranoia about the water rise disappears and the project aims at the world being almost the same but trying to define and adapt to the water, which is a new datum.