11th EAEA Envisioning Architecture: Design, Evaluation, Communication Conference in 2013

Track 3 | Conceptual Representation | Exploring the layout of the built environment

Notational systems / Transforming infrastructures

Genevieve Baudoin

Keywords: site analysis; notation; water

ABSTRACT

Maps are inherently reductive, abstract representations of our environment. They create invisible boundaries, de-limiting zones for cultural action. This is also their power – maps reveal the hidden agendas of their authors, but they also seek to make legible and communicate a mentally abstract notion of the environment. Focusing specifically on cities, architects have a history of invading the geographer’s turf, seeking to undermine (and capitalize on) the map with innovative representational and notational systems to characterize the city’s complexities. These become the basis for future architectural action, effectively merging the translation process of site analysis with the design itself. This lineage of investigation into the city, breaking down and re-coding elements and spaces, extends from Debord’s Guide Psychogeographique de Paris and Rowe and Koetter’s Collage City, through Venturi, Scott-Brown and Izenour’s Learning from Las Vegas, to Kuroda and Kaijima’s Made in Tokyo. The project outlined in this paper seeks to build on this lineage by using systems of notational and analytical representation, examining infrastructure to reveal an invisible evolution of change, outlining the traces left by the mapmaker’s hand and in the city itself.
Water, as a piece of infrastructure in the city, is almost always the spur of development. People are willing to live in swamps, drain land, control floods and pretty much risk their lives in order to have access to this resource. However, maps of water systems are fundamentally fragmented, illustrating pieces of what is essentially invisibly linked and sensitively dependent on our culturally embedded use at a local level.
Albuquerque, New Mexico, began as an agricultural community building on a hybrid of local and imported cultural traditions of irrigation from Moorish Spain to the local Pueblos, shaping the way land was distributed along the river. The city grew from Pueblo to Spanish fort town to outpost of the Wild West to tuberculosis retreat to POW camp and nuclear weapons development facility to the city it is today. Albuquerque is also a desert town: water is not a simple life-giving resource - flash flooding created dramatic shifts in the urban landscape, periodically eradicating whole sections of the city. By analyzing and remapping the historical shifts, growth, and remnants of the infrastructure of water as the city transformed through history, this paper explores alternate representational systems to suggest strategies that might capitalize on this infrastructure.

PDF

AUTHOR

Genevieve Baudoin

Department of Architecture, College of Architecture, Planning and Design, Kansas State University, Manhattan, USA

Genevieve Baudoin is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at Kansas State University and a Registered Architect in New Mexico. She received her BA from Oberlin College and her MArch from the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. She has worked professionally with both Foster + Partners and Antoine Predock Architect. She has taught previously at the University of New Mexico and the University of Kansas, before taking her position at K-State. Her research interests are in the changing tectonic relationship of site and structure in architecture, and in developing representational tools and strategies to understand and promote these complexities.

index  |   11th conference website  |  EAEA website