Verticalscapes/Chicago

What is a VERTICALSCAPE?: An hybrid entity which, due to inertia, we momentarily continue to call vertical construction or \”architecture\”. This vertical \”entity\” is an amalgam, a material at once natural and artificial, which seeks to construct a similar experience to what our modern masters called public space, modernizing its sinusoidal connection to this end. By so doing, generally folded around itself, it not only generates a different spatial modality that can be manipulated to construct hybrid architecture programmes for culture, leisure and production, it also generates self-sufficient entities, energy parks that use wind, water, light or the earth as active materials in construction, capable of generating and storing energy, and at the same time serving as public and economic resources. In the urban context, the verticalscape aims to be a catalyst that renders the historic or modern fabric contemporary, in both the formal and the social or cultural realms. The studio will focus on Chicago as a site of reference being home to one of the first modern skyscrapers – giving rise to a new city model that succeeded worldwide in the twentieth century metropolis. Our goal through the studio is to explore the urgency of a new way of understanding the high rise and its impact in the public realm, a \”prototipology\” that we call verticalscapes, applied to current American metropolis and the urban landscape defined by definitely multiracial human clusters that require new scenarios for new public life and new links with this world of objects and nature. The project hopes to correctly address a new proto-typological field that is seeing the crystallization of a series of ideas and technologies now emerging in our world, which have not yet been adequately problematized???that is, as the gestation of a new proto-typological strategy based on an up-to-the-moment technological conception and on the emerging values of society in the contemporary city. Through the course of the studio, the projects would establish the contribution technical culture today could make around high rise building and public space in a city like Chicago.Schedule:JAN18-21 (20 lottery)FEB1-315-17MAR1-322-24APR12-14MAY1-3