The Near Future City:
Urban Assemblages Encoded for Change
Spring 2020
In collaboration with Xin Feng and Jiani Zhang
Critic: Belinda Tato
Harvard Graduate School of Design
The
intense commercial and housing development pressures in South Boston present an
opportunity to rethink the production life cycle of the built environment and
reframe the performance of the city through new embedded energies and localized
material flows.
The construction and demolition process, both in service of new development booms as well regular infrastructure maintenance, produced nearly 900,000 tons of waste in 2018 alone. Much of South Boston is being renovated at 1:1 scale with old structures being demolished and replaced with the exact same form but with new materials. As the city transforms, we cannot keep replicating the same forms along a linear production and waste cycle.
The concrete industry serves as a case study of an abundant material in the neighborhood that acts as an interface between city infrastructure, environment and daily life. Through new material configurations of water collection systems, surface conditions, material processing and a shift from demolition to deconstruction the environmental and energy performance of the city is better suited to adapt to ongoing states of renewal. Existing urban voids in South Boston can be sites for incremental change through deconstruction, rather than demolition, and embed a new identity in the city in response to a localized material flow.
The construction and demolition process, both in service of new development booms as well regular infrastructure maintenance, produced nearly 900,000 tons of waste in 2018 alone. Much of South Boston is being renovated at 1:1 scale with old structures being demolished and replaced with the exact same form but with new materials. As the city transforms, we cannot keep replicating the same forms along a linear production and waste cycle.
The concrete industry serves as a case study of an abundant material in the neighborhood that acts as an interface between city infrastructure, environment and daily life. Through new material configurations of water collection systems, surface conditions, material processing and a shift from demolition to deconstruction the environmental and energy performance of the city is better suited to adapt to ongoing states of renewal. Existing urban voids in South Boston can be sites for incremental change through deconstruction, rather than demolition, and embed a new identity in the city in response to a localized material flow.
