CONCOURSE

+[Combinatory Urbanism Plug-In] Eugene _ 2020

SCI_Arc EDGE+The NOW Institute, Design of Cities Studio 2 

Program Coordinator: Thom Mayne

Instructor: Thom Mayne + Eui-Sung Yi + Daniel Pruske

Program Faculty: Karen Lohrmann

The “Concourse” evolves into an urban linkage, a public vessel to activate the urban life of Eugene city by redefining the river edge. The project pushes the boundaries of normative urban forms through an abstract subjective and intuitive process within a methodology that uses parametric tools and techniques. Operational strategies are implemented in an abstract notion to bring innovative new conditions and ideas that are transferable to other languages. By using operational strategies such as additive and subtractive, simple primitives (points, lines, surfaces, volumes) transform into complex relationships. The system uses simplicity for organizing complexity to explore coherent urban and architectural topologies and typologies. The outcome is not singular, it's an open-ended system of iterations. Applying the system along with a larger pragmatic notion of the site ordered an organizational system within a site condition that uses its progression and evolution as a technique towards design. Immediate urban conditions around the site and the multiple forces of the city of Eugene as a typical American Jeffersonian grid plus excessive natural layers as an extraordinary potential that a threshold site can have, rationalize the system. The landscape expansion and keeping the flow of the existing natural layer alongside the river was a broader urban idea and an attitude towards the edge condition within the objectives of the project. Considering the given land as a connector/a link, as an infrastructure, locally and regionally, was a broader urban idea that could give a notion to other projects to work collectively on an urban scale.