Ci-dessous deux images extraites du très stimulant DE/MOTOWN - A Retroactive arcology for Detroit, projet lauréat du concours d'idées Urban Borders.
Ces deux types d'images n'ont a priori rien à voir entre elles, si ce n'est de nous obliger à nous interroger sur les nouveaux rapports entre l'urbain et le végétal et les nouvelles circulations que cela pourrait nous offrir au coeur des villes.
Voilà, à ce propos, les explications données par Jesse Honsa et Gregory Mahoney, les deux auteurs de la réflexion sur Detroit.
"In the old Central Business District, circulation between structures was limited to the street level, reinforcing corporate isolation and preventing interaction across lofted spaces. The oppressive, inefficient, and energy-intensive elevator is now replaced by a sloping viaduct that connects seamlessly to types of ground transport (rail, pedestrian, bicycle), and that makes movement between elevated levels possible. Suspended off the existing elevator cores of the skyscrapers, this extension of the street coils around the CBD, crossing itself several times to form a lattice-work of external movement.
A coiling metro line runs in a continuous, self-intersecting loop. Station stops are named by altitude. The new topography opens up the office towers to new programmatic possibilities. As the viaduct punctures each tower, it disrupts and redefines previously homogenous commercial space. Lateral communication at multiple levels brings an urbanity to the former-stratified, isolated spaces. Vertical mechanical conduits, once limiting the floor-plans of each tower to a repeating type, can now be re-routed laterally, allowing for a greater diversity of spaces and programs.
Notions of center and periphery are applied in section: civic, commercial, and educational facilities stand about the grand viaduct, the ‘piano nobile’ of the city. Apartments, offices and studios take advantage of the light above. Traditionally peripheral programs, agriculture, industry and energy, are located on the opposite extremes of the section. Industries form a band of continuous activity below the coil; hydroponic farms proliferate the highest strata; and the town’s energy is supplied by wind at the peaks and geothermal energy in the caissons of the skyscrapers. (...)
(...) By considering Detroit as an urban found-object, we propose the utilization of the existent city as natural resource that can be exploited to reshape the landscape and reinvent the ways in which humans settle their environment. We see this approach to Detroit as the forerunner to a dramatic change in the structure of the post-industrial American city."
Sur ce sujet, voir les récents "Hot Wheels in Detroit" et "Street level ... tomorrow ... somewhere"