Mending the Periphery

December 3, 2016

Delaminating the Arrival City

Project team: Anna Longrigg, Jason McMillan

At the periphery of Rome, modern suburbs dissolve into agricultural landscapes with the staccato of ancient ruins rising from the landscape. The Parco degli Acquedotti is no exception, where the ancient aqueducts mark a path from the Alban hills into the city centre. However what this produces is a fragmented edge condition of the city, often disconnected from the historical centre. This, however, is where Rome is at its most open.

The Roman periphery has more recently become a site of arrival, one of the many sites across Europe where refugees and new migrants find space in the gaps of the city, but often away from the services and employment available in the centre.

Our proposal seeks to unpack the complex edge condition into a complex of public spaces, connected by a new urban edge on the park. We began by uncovering the ruins on the site to create a sequence of fora, each bordered on three sides by social housing and a monumental arcade of market and commercial space. The fourth side remains open to the landscape of the park, bounded by the ancient aqueduct the runs through the park.

The new arcade is operates like an extended porch, a public threshold between the established neighbourhood and the arrival city.

Left: Colonnade Views, Right: Housing Facade

Living on the Edge

September 15, 2016

The aqueducts were conceived and constructed at the scale of the city, and as the city has grown out to meet the aqueducts, their permanence has molded the urban fabric. The fragments of the Aquae Claudiastill exist at a monumental scale, however between the fragments, the city has incoherently expanded into the void. The scale of the graft is at the urban scale, at the scale of the city. The graft mends the Acquae Claudia and the periphery, giving coherent form to the spaces around it. In the voids of the Acquae Claudia is the marginal space of the city, where the marginalized have made their homes. These unplanned neighbourhoods have been left on the edge, without a plan and disconnected form the city. Mending the Acquae Claudia frames these neighbourhoods as being inside the formal city, not as slums at the edge.

This segment of the project formalizes the open space at the edge of the city, which is at present only bounded on three of its four sides. On the fourth, it melts back into the informal fabric of the neighbourhood. It is in the unformed, marginal space where we construct the ‘other’, the transient, the migrant, the destitute. The encounter is always washed with the idea of ‘the other’. ON THE EDGE, the space of encounter is not in the margin, but in the interstitial zone. The relationship of the resident stumbling into the transient is inverted, giving the transient a refuge from the public sphere. In section, a gradient of public visibility to private repose.

Bearing

April 15, 2016

Fuelling Outports exhibited in Bearing: Projects Review 2016 at Design at Riverside (April 18 - May 21, 2016)

Fuelling Outports II

December 10, 2015

Port Union Fishery Renewal

Project team: Anna Longrigg, Jason McMillan

The large scale boom and bust economies in Newfoundland (fish, oil and tourism) are hugely problematic for the semi-remote outport, communities. These small towns and villages find themselves subjected to the long-term instability of economic mono-cultures. All three resources which have defined the Newfoundland and Labrador economy are contingent on a finite resource and the trends of global markets.

Following the collapse of the cod fishery in 1992, the future of the outports have become precarious. Lack of economic opportunity has led a generation away from home, causing many towns to shrink and in some cases close down. The government moratorium on the fishery also left a stock of industrial scale processing plants that had served the fishing fleet. The generic character of these buildings present an opportunity: a series of simple structures and large spaces at the heart of the towns that can begin to build diverse economies and build resilience on the island.

We Our appropriation of the fishery will create a regional hub for food security and community life, subverting generalization while generating valuable bi-products and diversified micro-economies. The fishing plant is a megalith relative to the town, and our interventions preserve the industrial ghost while subverting and dividing its presence on the site.

The complex of buildings that comprise the plant are on another scale to anything else in the town. To address the size of the project, we developed a phasing strategy for the building that would tie the building project to the regional strategy. For example, the first phase would include the installation of the biogas power plant, which is the most capital intensive portion of the building, but also the spine of the project, connecting the site to waste and energy flows in the region.

The second portion of the project is to begin renovating the building envelope into greenhouse space, workshops, artists studios and community spaces. These spaces can be constructed as the building envelope is sequentially renovated. Resources in communities are often limited, and the project can be slowly expanded. Many current projects and initiatives we encountered on the island were dependent on grants and subsidies, and so expansions are always contingent on the needs for space and the means for construction become available. We propose constructing a work shop, which can serve ongoing renovation projects in the community, and be used to fit out the interior of the plant. The remaining spaces and outbuildings will can be incrementally renovated and re-used on the time scale of decades.

Perspective view of the fly and studio area.