50 Urban Blocks 2
a+t research group
a+t, December 202055 cards | 3 x 5 inches | English/Spanish | ISBN: 978-8409253555 | 22€
PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION:
Citadels, Patios, Archipelagos, Amoebas, Snakes, Barcodes, Clusters, Labyrinths, Dice and Chunks are the ideas that inspire this deck of cards.
These urban forms breathe through their openings, through the relationships among volumes, through the participation of emptiness in the composition and through fragmentation. They connect with the environment through unexpected visuals. They avoid individualism and encourage community interaction.
50 Urban Blocks 2 combines Form, Floor Area Ratio and Density in 50 examples that organize a given block, propose housing units and add space for other uses that boost urban life. This third deck of cards is part of the collection created by a+t research group aimed at facilitating the design of a balanced and affordable city.
dDAB COMMENTARY:
Aurora Fernández Per, Javier Mozas, and the rest of the so-called "a+t research group" are infatuated with density. Since at least 2002, and the start of the four-part Density magazine series, the Spanish publisher has explored density through contemporary projects — mainly collecting housing — that are extensively documented with photographs, drawings, and their own helpful diagrams. Books followed, including the hefty D BOOK: Density, Data, Diagrams, Dwellings, but recently a+t has ventured into cards that explore housing density as the primary factor among some other concerns, including mixed uses, open space, and privacy. So far a+t has produced three sets of cards: 50 Urban Blocks + 50 Urban Blocks 2 + 50 Housing Floor Plans. So what are the cards, and how are they used?
Well, first of all, the cards — at least 50 Urban Blocks 2, as I haven't seen the others — are not like the books: they do not present projects by contemporary architects. You won't find an actual MVRDV project, for instance, on one of the cards. But you will find a scheme whose organization is based on one of their projects, as well as schemes following from projects by other contemporary architects. The projects are reimagined and formatted to fit the standard square blocks that comprise each card, displayed with a floor plan on one side, an axonometric on the other, with unit footprints, and bits of data.
One way to think of the cards is like the zoning diagrams that, in NYC at least, illustrate the maximum buildable volume based on a property's FAR (floor area ratio), setbacks, height restrictions, and other factors, as determined by a zoning analysis. Whereas typical zoning diagrams give a sense of what can be accomplished within legal parameters, their purpose is removed from architectural form-making and other realms of creativity. They are the opposite of the a+t research group, which is all about educating and inspiring architects.
To emphasize the creative potential of designing projects that meet certain FARs, the 50 urban blocks are organized into ten families: Citadel, Patio, Archipelago, Amoeba, Snake, Barcode, Cluster, Labyrinth, Dice, and Chunk. Clearly these are formal families that capture the way contemporary architects shape open spaces and organize building volumes. Although it's rare for an architect to be given a perfectly square site — much less given a full urban block — the use of a consistent square block allows simple comparisons of the 50 schemes.
Many of the precedents for the cards are housing projects found in Zurich and other parts of Switzerland; even the single MVRDV precedent is a project in Emmen. This didn't surprise me; even before seeing the project names, some of the diagrams made me immediately think of the Zurich social and middle-class housing projects I visited many years ago, most of them with well-defined open spaces between multiple buildings across large sites. A+t has focused on some of the more distinctive ones of this genre: a Chunk Block by Schneider Studer Primas, an Archipelago Block by BS+EMI, and an Amoeba Block by EMI, among many others. There's a lot to be learned from recent Swiss collective housing. Likewise, I can imagine practicing architects learning quite a few things when "playing" with this deck of cards.
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