City Design (MA)
Konstantinos Retsinas
Konstantinos is an architectural researcher and practitioner of urban design. Being part of the new generation of City Design at the RCA he challenged existing models of city design practice. After having completed a 5 year Bachelor Degree in Architecture at the National Technical University of Athens, Greece, his diploma thesis was nominated for the Young Talent Architecture Award 2018 by Mies Van der Rohe Institute. Then, he gained academic experience as a teaching assistant in Architectural and Urban Design Studio 9, at the NTUA.
He took on several design jobs to gain further experience in practice, while his work has been exhibited in Athens, Eleusina, Nicosia and London. The formats of his work include architectural models, installations, photo-essays, poster presentations and recently platform presentations. Amongst many distinctions, as a Eugenides Foundation Scholar, Konstantinos was able to complete an MA degree at the RCA.
Sponsors
Eugenides Foundation
My anticipation of certain architectures is a future of collapse and decay that renders them ‘unproductive’. Then, why, after having been liberated from human occupation and completely abandoned do they still remain standing? As if by protest, they object to being exhausted by human and programmatic use, they do not give up on existence. To think of an afterlife for these buildings, firstly requires one to view them in a way which would render them completely abandoned. Secondly one should find the appropriate agency through which to intervene by doing very little, with the purpose of allowing the building the possibility of continuous transformations. If a depository of buildings is what we are left with, their remains can be perceived like the undead; paradoxically refusing to die. This collapse, decay and underutilisation of these forms should not be construed as a negative aspect of their existence, but rather as their life renewed.
In my research, I looked into architectures of a ‘mega’ scale by developing a speculative and critical ethos towards them. My scope wasn’t only to exaggerate the several problems that the built environment undergoes including underutilisation, failure, decay and collapse of different kinds, but also to challenge one’s thinking on how to apply optimism and growth to the failure of ‘mega’ architectures that lie within their decline.
GROWTH by DECLINE — Acknowledging the right for ever-changing transformation for these buildings means more to let them be, rather than to tame their existence and natural course of life. Rendering parts of a megaform completely useless would allow space in between to emerge as equally important and as fully functional as the rest of its spaces.
GROWTH by DECLINE — The argument constructed within this research began from the exploration of certain typologies through a critical lens. Almost like a protest, corpses of human and programmatic use, buildings with megaformic characteristics underwent strong criticism. In order to start thinking of an afterlife for these buildings, it is required of one to trace the history of mega-theories in architecture and megaforms in particular just so as to point out how megaform is more than a matter of size. From a mat-building approach to a landform understanding, a redefined theory of megaform emerged as an alternative response to its architectural characteristics, one that made it possible to be understood as an artificial landscape.
meta-MEGA SECTION — Sky City is not constrained within a contained boundary. Instead, it can be seen as a landscape of multiple layers, along with their inherent sectional variation. The collective intelligence of the proposal derives from the mat-organisational logic and extends beyond it, while its circulation diagram points to its interior rather than its periphery. Nature appears to devour interior spaces inside while at the same time several elements are organised on the basis of a regular grid.
meta-MEGA INTERIOR — One of the variables to be taken for granted when thinking of the afterlife of the structures of this spectrum is that their structural skeleton happens to be the most heavily grounded part of a megaform’s establishment. Its structure imposes a systemic grid that is to be interpreted as an ‘ever-extending’ supporting system, the basis for its various loose and open organisations.
POST APOCALYPTIC LANDSCAPE — In this scenario, spare elements of automobile patterns, fragmented architectural elements, and various dispersed mechanistic parts organise the vocabulary for this post-apocalyptic landscape. The drawing is experimental both in terms of representation and speculation. Its transparency and fragmentation allow one to visualise and conceptually experience the buildings’ collapse and decay. As the elements become autonomous they are able to reassemble anew.
Within a scenario of collapse for these buildings’ – wherever their catastrophe may derive from and head towards – the polemics of this research stood strongly against the overexploitation of their form by a monocultural framework dictated by the needs that retail, office, or any such sector might dictate. The resiliency and adaptability that these built forms could possibly demonstrate are still to emerge. Their formal and functional latent capacities are powerful enough for one to postulate and create a life anew for these buildings.
For example, the typology of the car park and patterns of automobiles that these buildings are connected with are becoming obsolete in the same way that shopping has become almost obsolete. However, they are still very much present. At the same time, these environments undergo some kind of recycling of commodities and service industries - promoted within the capitalist framework - that ultimately blocks any possibility for a land settlement that could function as a thrust towards the production of a coherent civic space, an aspect that this project aimed towards the critical reassessment of. Amongst the many objectives, which this project highlights, the tendencies, and capacities of these mega buildings are strong enough to signify a life beyond their primary configured occupation.
01 — Humans are free to act nomadically and re-organise themselves. They should be able to move quite easily and make extensive use of the urban structures presented to them.
02 — One may see robotic platforms, shelves, and storage areas to pop up as part of the megaform’s finish that add on its complexity resulting from the assemblages attached to it.
PLAN as A PIECE OF LANDSCAPE
WHAT SKELETAL STRUCTURE?
WHAT FRONTAGE?
SECTIONAL INTERVENTION
Epic Data
Epic Architecture
Epic Street
We established new complexities and programmatic mixity by fighting against homogeneity, segregation as seen in monocultural, architectural programmes such as shopping cities that no longer provide a meaningful relationship; we thought of the city as an archipelago in which the island becomes its defining form and life is contained within it. Under the extreme circumstances at that time we tested ecologies where new relationships were to emerge allowing social, professional and domestic conflicts in the scale of the building block.