1. Accumulated image of Liverpool based on Kevin Lynch,s definitions of a city.
2. Discovering order within the existing city image, based on the location of existing nodes.
3. Extending the order intothe interstitial layer as a nodal skeleton around which new identifiable fabric can generate.
4. The new geometric order in the context of the identifiable fabric and the interstitial layer.
Interstitial Layers
Interstitial layers is a programme of urban analysis set up for semester one of the third year at the Centre for Architecture, John Moores University. It forms part of a two step pattern, now established in Liverpool, of using a Semester of analytical and creative urban design in order to build a platform of knowledge and experience as a context from which individual 'comprehensive building designs' could be launched. The specific aim of the first semester programme was to create a means whereby existing cities ( using Liverpool as the laboratory ) could be interpreted as a set of information patterns which would accurately represent the facilities of the city. The holistic set of these information patterns as an artifice could then be utilised as a context primer for exploring and assessing future scenarios of development for the cities.
(Pages 1 2 3 & 4 deal with the process page 5 holds two fly through examples of the computer phase of the programme ).
The approach was driven by the idea that pattern recognition and pattern creation are inherent to our comprehension and manipulation of the environment we inhabit. Pattern recognition is taken as the ability to group individual entities and events of empirical data under abstracted themes thus forming categories and philosophies of association. These groupings are capricious due to the dynamic nature of the environment and the specifics of the environmental application upon which we test and reciprocally assess and amend the themes and philosophies of association. This ability to abstract has enabled us to project and intervene successfully in the environmental patterns to our benefit. There is however a world of difference between the reciprocal pattern language resulting from 'inhabiting the landscape' and 'inhabitation as landscape'. The complexities of nature prevail in 'inhabiting the landscape', whilst in 'inhabitation as landscape', the complexities of 'our own nature' prevail. Today's cities are artifices; reflective of our actions and social strategies, but they do not evolve relatively to the dynamics of our own nature. Past patterns, in their majority retain an influence on our nature, whilst natural patterns are generative and their constituents recyclable. Our patterns fail to evolve and are deserted rather than recycled. They become patterns in the dust.
The premise for the project was that existing cities already contain innumerable diverse and complex patterns from the past, some of which restrain the city's re-facilitation whilst others are essential as existential footholds ( they constitute the image of the city and hence give us identity, context and meaning). This sets up a conflict between the city matrix as facility and identity which can also be viewed as a relationship between transient facilities and more permanent image as meaning or spirituality. In redesigning our cities we need a methodology of approach that reveals these city patterns, accepting the prevalence of the past, and growing in a way that re-facilitates and reinterprets our cities advantageously with patterns that offer both appropriate facility and spirituality. In effect a method that enables us to comprehend the complexity of existing patterns and then to successfully project and intervene in the environment for our future benefit. Inhabited landscape somehow needs a means of starting from simplicity and building into the most complex of systems. A series of base blocks that formulate patterns which are contextually evolutionary where the context as an evolutionary dynamic in itself is the sum of 'our own nature' within nature.
© Liverpool John Moores University, 1997
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