Acknowledging that the city is nothing but the product of a myriad
network of interactions and emergent flows, re-organized and regulated
by a highly evolved system of pattern recognition, the project designed by Gijo Paul George from Studio Toggle aims to find urban solutions for the city of Cagliari in Sardinia, Italy.
Taking fields, nodes and agents as the building blocks of urbanity,
the relations and perturbations are mapped, giving rise to generative
patterns. Based on this logic, the project strives to find a balance
between adaptive non-programmed spaces and typological specificity. The
site, SantÉlia has the notoriety for being the badlands of Cagliari.
Often this image is exaggerated, contributing to the resident’s
hostility to the city and vice versa. This spectacular stretch of waterfront
land towards the southern tip of Cagliari happens to be disconnected
from the rest of Cagliari due to massive infrastructural figures, which
creates canyons in the urban fabric, also due to the negative ramifications arising from a dysfunctional social housing project, from 1970’s.
The project had specific goals including, reconnecting SantÉlia to
the rest of Cagliari by colliding the island grids, bringing the city
closer to the sea and thus developing the waterfront, revitalizing the
social housing and improve conditions and to develop strategic nodes
into multimodal urban ecologies. The focus was on de-canyonizing the
fabric and overlaying the terrain with a new urban organism, which
irrigates the territory and bridges the programmatic archipelago.
Rediscovering the spatial matrix of field conditions as described by
Stan Allen, and further elaborated by Keiichi Matsuda in his ‘Cities for
Cyborgs’, an emergent matrix
of potential (pheromonal) fields acts as the substrate on which an
agent-based system is populated. The constant material and information
feedback between the to systems gives rise to generative patterns and
densities which in turn mutate into inhabitable spaces and nested
typologies, there by creating the fabric.
The project in itself becomes a discourse in how the intuitive and
emergent processes can work together to produce an urban fabric, and
occupy it at the same time, not losing the balance between adaptable
emergent spaces, and the specific typologies which seed the territory.
Источник: http://www.evolo.us/architecture/new-masterplan-for-cagliari-italy-redefines-a-urban-waterfront/ | 
