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Rodolfo Machado Professor in Practice Department of Urban Planning and Design |
Publications
Residential Waterfront, Borneo Sporenberg, Amsterdam "The Harvard University Graduate School of Design was pleased to make the seventh award of the Veronica Rudge Green Prize in Urban Design to Adriaan Geuze and his Rotterdam-based firm, West 8 urban design & landscape architecture. We honored the firm's Borneo Sporenburg project for its innovative approach to providing high-density, low-rise housing on twin peninsulas in Amsterdam-or in the words of jury chair Rodolfo Machado, for work of "incomparable urban beauty shimmering in Amsterdam's harbor." — excerpt from Preface, by Peter Rowe
The Favela-Bairro Project
The favelas of Rio de Janeiro are shantytowns that lack even the most basic infrastructure and services. The Favela-Bairro Project, featuring the work of Jorge Mario Jáuregui Architects, seeks to turn these blighted areas into functioning neighborhoods, or bairros. Jáuregui's design initiatives include the construction of community centers offering recreational activities and job training, daycare facilities, communal kitchens, and new streets and pedestrian walkways. These projects facilitate movement within the favelas, create links to the city center, address health and environmental concerns, and taken collectively, improve the sociological and economic status of the favelas. Jáuregui has used architecture as a powerful tool for social reform and a means of integrating these informal communities within the rest of the city.
Singapores Marina Bay: Urban Conditions Recreated
This year, the studio was particularly engaging as the project is a current high-profile and challenging URA study. The wealth of ideas flowing from the GSD student's proposals have had immediate effects as they served not only to enhance URA's own planning strategy for the area, at the same time, they brought URA planners to task with a new outlook of a 21st century Singapore. URA is now moving the project towards implementation.
New Urbanity: The Entertainment District in Singapore
The project was the second studio we have sponsored at Harvard and was undertaken during the 1997 spring term (January-May 1997) as a studio option under Professor Machado. The challenge offered to the GSD students this year was a unique and exciting one. It called for the formulation of urban design strategies and ideas for Singapore's new Entertainment District. Students were requested to develop planning and urban design strategies that would transform an existing mixed-use area into a vibrant activity hub based around arts and entertainment uses. They were required to build upon the existing infrastructure and character of the surrounding districts to realize the vision of a multi-faceted, activity-oriented destination area. Students were also requested to study how large neon advertisements signages could contribute to the character of the area. The new 42nd Street development in New York and London's West End were used as benchmarks for the overall study.
New Urbanity: The Kallang Basin Redevelopment in Singapore
This studio, kindly sponsored by the Urban Redevelopment Authority of Singapore, undertook the redevelopment of the Kallang Basin area. Located on the fringe of Singapore's Central Area, at the water's edge, the site is traversed by two rivers and shows the results of the various land reclamation projects effected since 1930. The site includes the old Kallang Airport, the national and the indoor stadia as well as remarkable public housing buildings from the 1950s and 60s. The program called for, essentially, 25,000 units of housing of various types and sizes, 88,000 square meters of commercial and recreational development plus those programmatic elements the students deemed essential for the production of an appropriate Singaporean urbanity. The following points were of particular interest to the studio: first, the relationship between the notions of high density and normative urbanism; second, the relationship among "tropical architecture," interior architecture, and public space; and, third, the relationship between various "types" of democracy, cultural specificity, or the lack of it, and the built world.
Monolithic Architecture
A number of recent architectural works have converged on features and issues that merit investigation. Some of these works already acquired notoriety, due primarily to their strong physical presence in important urban settings. Most are still under construction or were never actually implemented in built form. These buildings, at first glance, seem to have little in common; in fact their blatant differences in shape, material, scale, and program could hardly warrant any claim to aesthetic coherence. Indeed, any attempt to identify common formal or stylistic traits across the emphatic individuality of these buildings is at best a contrived artifice and, more probably, a coercive imposition of conformity upon highly individuated expressions. Yet, these buildings coincide in their extreme economy and simplicity of overall form and consistency of external appearance; also common is their capacity to deliver tremendous eloquence with very limited formal means. Some adopt straightforward, elementary configurations, while others limit more gestural impulses to a clear and single utterance. Sometimes, they construct their clarity with one or two spaces; more characteristically, they contain considerable planimetric and sectional complexities within strict volumetric restraint. All have a monolithic character that ostensibly defies current preoccupations with arbitrariness, shapelessness, fragmentation, and heterogeneity.
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