Speculative Urban Design
Spring 2023
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute | Final Project Design Studio
Drawing upon technological innovation in the transportation industry, specifically in terms of air travel, this proposal seeks to create a network of urban transportation hubs and marketplaces as a vast nodal transit system that brings together multiple mediums of circulation: air, sea, and land. In particular, the advent of VTOL (vertical take-off and landing) aircraft and its subsequent proliferation serves as a technological catalyst for the project. Utilizing the city of Bangkok as a test case, the design proposal seeks to upend traditional forms of separation between infrastructure and architecture, formal and informal development, and private and public space. In this way, the project engages established metropolitan actors traditionally in competition with one another over control of the city’s growth, but in such a way that new forms of urban and architectural innovation emerge.
Historically, the discipline of architecture can be understood to have an ongoing interest in speculating on the volatile and entropic future of the metropolis. Often informed by precedent related to the past, architecture can simultaneously engage the present as a means of speculating on the future. Such speculation often manifests through a consideration of architecture’s literal and figurative grounding; the former condition involves the constantly-evolving physical matter of the built environment, and the latter describes architecture’s relationship to other disciplines that serve as catalysts for such transformations. As one example, technological innovation in transportation related to various forms of industry enables architects to convert present-day challenges related to the built environment into new opportunities for design.
