Spring 2012 GSAPP Studio: City of Mobile Services
This semester my studio was part of Audi’s Experiments in Motion project run by the co-directors of Studio-X NYC, Bldg Blog’s Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twiley. The brief for the studio is the following:
Our studio will invert the question of urban mobility, asking not how individuals can most efficiently navigate the static map of the built metropolis, but how the city’s various systems and services, from policing to entertainment, can instead come to them. Through a series of case studies, site visits, and design challenges, we will explore the city of mobile services, from the familiar—ice cream trucks, food carts, bike messengers, and tow trucks—to the often radically unexpected, such as California’s RV pot dispensaries or mobile lethal-injection facilities in China. Our ultimate goal is to add to the already rich landscape of urban mobile services through proposals of our own. What has yet to be mobilized, what would it look like if it was, and how might this de-anchoring reformulate the city?
Our Project (the Forefront) aimed to tackle the idea of a mobile exhibiting platform that could envision the Storefront for Art and Architecture as a client to help disseminate Storefront’s mission and message. The Storefront for Art an Architecture is a non-profit organization committed to the advancement of innovative positions in architecture, art and design. Since its inception it has lost its radical edge and become domesticated as a respected institution. The Forefront is an attempt to mobilize the Storefront for Art and Architecture as a guerrilla pop up exhibit facilitator, broadening the reach of Storefront and engaging new audiences outside the common design community. The challenge of the Forefront is creating a temporal space that hosts the same interesting spatial opportunities that make the current Storefront facade by Steven Holl and Vito Acconci special. The design solution was a modular system of prismatic collapsible units that can be projected on and rearranged to create urban furniture, enclosures or any other event instigation necessary in a parasitic and viral relationship with the city and other institutions of design.
Props to my amazing design partner George Dolidze.
