FASLANYC has posted an excellent collection of landscape-related projects which readers of this blog will surely enjoy. Highlights include Tryptyque’s “Vegetable Machine”, which is a couple years old but always worth a second look; Camilo Restrepo Arquitectos’ “Interfacephyta Multicapacitaceae”, whose capable fusion of the technological and the ecological one suspects would equally delight the authors of Quiet Babylon and Pruned; and Santiago Cirugeda’s “Urban Prescriptions”, which are a set of directions (as well as sample projects executed by Cirugeda) on how one might go about productively circumventing and subverting the norms and bureaucratic rules governing cities. One of those “Urban Prescriptions”, “Scaffolding”, is pictured above; if I follow it correctly, “Scaffolding” uses the relatively loose rules governing the construction of scaffolding as an opportunity to build a small addition with much greater ease than if it were legally classified as “architecture”. This is exactly the sort of move — developing an architecture through what amount to assembly instructions rather than blueprints — which I referred to at the end of “future forests of the infrastructural city”, and so it will be no surprise that I agree with FASLANYC‘s effuse praise:
This idea of specific, free, “prescriptions” that allow for quick, agile participatory projects holds great promise for the future of our cities. Just as now one can search how install a new bottom bracket on your bicycle or pour a concrete foundation for your dog pen, a future of extensive wikis with specific directions on how to navigate bureaucracy and account for socio-economic and environmental factors could empower groups who seek to mobilize to an effect change in the built environment. Considering the amount of work to be done rebuilding our cities, we will need all types of intervention, and [“Urban Prescriptions”] offers a tantalizing glimpse of one new way forward.
