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POP-UP CITY, was shortlisted in the top 50 out of 440 projects for an open ideas competition entitled "Pandemic Architecture," curated by the Design Ambassador for ARCHISEARCH.gr, which invited the creative community to open up a dialogue and create a think tank, looking for ideas from the architectural and design community about the future of the living, the workspace, the public space and the tourism industry after the outbreak of Covid-19.
THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC HIT HARDEST IN URBAN CENTERS. The street life, shared transit, the entertainment, the crowded bars and restaurants that defined the urban condition - that “vibe” that city dwellers hold so dear - was at once the city’s undoing. As people travelled across their cities, the virus followed, spreading throughout the urban fabric. When urban dwellers sought refuge in their homes from the virus, the newfound normal quarantine state naturally prompted a reassessment of density. Suburban sprawl was starting to look appealing again.
But, let’s not give up on density, rather we must reexamine the way people live in cities during these extreme circumstances. Our solution aims to treat the territory of the city as a whole, composed of temporary urban residential localities at the scale of roughly 10,000 people. These localities regulate density and limit population movement, preventing the spread of the virus to other parts of the city. Architecturally, these localities are delineated by a light armature to the city block made of construction scaffolding. These three-dimensionalized lines provide within their structure, the space for pop up deliveries of essential goods and services or medical testing and treatment ensuring that no one need move through the city during the pandemic.
By inverting the model in which consumers travel to shops and restaurants, we speculate a condition in which these goods and services have a mobile counterpart, evenly distributed by our deployable network.
MONUMENTS ARE USEFUL. People identify heavily with them. They remind us of history, of beliefs, and give us a sense of place. We wanted something big. We wanted an architectural manifestation of the new community that shows bright in the city night. We wanted to extrude the lines on the map that created this locality to create something that could act as a symbol.
In proposing these monumental lines, we knew how essential restricting movement would be, but we aimed not to build a fence lest this proposal reek of a new hunger-games-like reality. We wanted a temporary, dotted line rather than a solid. We thought of the colonnade--the 3D projection of the dotted line in space. This temporary monument would be built of scaffolding columns that signal its temporality and leave open the arches for people to pass in times of necessity, yet always acting as a visual reminder that we should stay home within our area to prevent the spread of disease.
THE POP UP CITY IS AN ALTERNATIVE to the traditional model of brick and mortar storefronts. We propose the creation of a new temporary interface for the public to reach necessary goods and services.
The scaffolding structure has two interfaces - with the street and sidewalk, respectively. On the street, areas throughout the structure are designated for parking ambulances, delivery vehicles, food trucks, and local business owners who are setting up their pop-up on that block. We envision a corresponding business model where these plug-in, mobile services move throughout the structure during different parts of the day or week, providing for areas where resources are running low. On the sidewalk, pedestrians can browse the different vendors and look for areas not too populated to enjoy some fresh air. The scaffolding provides public space raised above the ground in well-circulated, mesh-enclosed spaces for people to get out of their apartments while staying local.
This project was completed with Jake Rosenwald