Siteless Cities

Building from Nowhere

Cathy Wu
MArch II 2023
Tim Tamulonis
MArch II 2023
Yizhou Zhao
MAUD 2022
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1 Closer view on a siteless city build based on an image from Rajaji National Park, India

How we read city space as it is could be very abstract - a site surface as the SPACE, with a invisible but defined edge of inside & outside; built pieces as the OBJECT, taking over permanent areas and weight on the surface; and city traffic, often represented as light trails in long exposure photography, as transient vectors going on U-V directions of the city, reflected in the nature of the objects(buildings) that inhabit it, and thus form a secondary layer of SPACE, indicating the human living activities within the urban area.

Inspired by beautiful cityscapes, the group start to think of the purity of the abstract reading of the city. The fabric and the sense of a city can be built wherever we want, regardless of the site itself. In this case, trying to build from nowhere - a landscape that has never been occupied by urban activities could be the best testimony of the project. Inputs are selected from photos of natural scenes, which generates the site for the city. With creating objects as an imitation of the built environment for the city fabric and vectors calculated carefully as the human trajectory, corresponding to both the site as well as the objects, create an urban space with static + transient images.

Project video
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2 How a city and its human trajectory would be look like in the mountainous Rajaji National Park 4
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3 Plan view
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4 Red trajectory telling the ease of movement responding
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5 Immersive renders of living in Rajaji City